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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 318

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 27, 2024 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 318 - May/27/24
Ms. Bonita Zarrillo
  • May/27/24 11:25:38 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the firewall manifesto envisions that decision-making processes that affect people's lives and freedoms flow through premiers' offices. This is exactly what the leader of the Conservatives wants to do when he says he will use the notwithstanding clause to pass his laws. The NDP is here to stop him. This right-wing ideology of Conservatives imposing their will on women and all Canadians is dangerous and serves only the corporate class who have controlled federal governments since Confederation. This reality is so obviously true in housing. Governments at every level have overseen the financialization of housing. Instead of protecting our social housing stock for people, they have encouraged upzoning and gentrification in the name of density. Density dreams belong to developers, who have made millions and billions of dollars off the displacement of low- and middle-income Canadians. The financialization of housing is only working for the wealthy and leaving people behind. The well-being of persons with disabilities and seniors is sacrificed to millionaire CEOs. Liberal and Conservative governments have ensured that truly affordable social housing has been sacrificed to create an asset class for the wealthiest people and companies across the globe. Right now in my riding of Port Moody—Coquitlam, hundreds of affordable townhomes and apartments are being emptied and are sitting empty. There are entire blocks of homes boarded up, ready for redevelopment, and some of these homes have been empty for years. Developers choose not to fill them so they do not have to spend one cent on maintenance or pay tenants out when the time comes to begin their redevelopment. This is wrong. During this housing crisis, governments have allowed wealthy developers to hoard housing, allowing perfectly good homes to sit empty to protect the profits of corporations over the well-being of residents. High-end sales centres for luxury condos exist in every neighbourhood across this country, right beside where low- and middle-income Canadians have been displaced. These corporate density dreams are not focused on local buyers; they are marketing their luxury product overseas. When a traveller arrives in the international terminal of YVR, they are enticed by posters of luxury housing to attract international investment. The current housing crisis is a crisis of negligence in protecting precious housing supply that people call home. I hear the calls for supply in the community, but this is not what this bill is talking about. I need to clarify what that supply call needs to be: affordable housing supply. The federal government must put a laser focus on maintaining what is left of housing co-ops, purpose-built rentals and not-for-profit housing in the country. It has to put that before investment. The federal government needs to immediately reinvest in social housing, not in capital loans, which it so feebly continues to bring forward, but ongoing stable operating funds to get people housed now. The need to act cannot wait, and the solution is not Conservative gatekeeping. Conservative policies are the ones that caused this problem. We cannot have one more person lose their home because they have been displaced by corporate capitalism. Let me reiterate how Canadians got into a situation where homelessness is growing, rents are skyrocketing and property purchase is out of reach for an entire generation. Conservative and Liberal governments encouraged the financialization of housing instead of protecting our social housing stock. They encouraged upzoning and gentrification in the name of density and profits. Density dreams are for developers. The financialization of housing is only working for the wealthy, and the most impacted right now are renters. We are losing rental homes at a rate of 15:1. For every new unit the government prides itself on building, an unaffordable new unit, it has not protected 15 other renters, who now have to find themselves evicted or demovicted from their homes. The government must immediately act to end the financialization of housing before more Canadians lose their homes, before more children are displaced from their schools and their friends and before more seniors lose services as they are forced out of the community in which they live. I can guarantee that what the Conservatives have proposed in this bill would not do that. As a city councillor in Coquitlam, I saw how these types of policies played out, with the trading of density happening in the corner offices, while seniors, persons with disabilities and single moms were losing their homes. I am going to tell the story about 500 Foster, a redevelopment in the city of Coquitlam. I went to see those folks before a public hearing, only to find out they received a letter from the developer, even before upzoning, telling them to start moving out. There was a single mother with a child who has a disability and a senior over 70, begging me to find him what he called an “old person's home” to move into. This is going on in every community of this country. I will close by saying that New Democrats that know housing is a human right and that we will continue to stand up for people and block the harmful ideologies of the corporate Conservatives, who are attempting to roll back the clock so that the Leader of the Opposition can continue to act like a high school bully.
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