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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 333

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 17, 2024 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 333 - Jun/17/24
Mr. Scott Aitchison (Parry Sound—Muskoka, CPC)
  • Jun/17/24 8:57:58 p.m.
  • Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is always a treat to rise in the House. I will just share a few thoughts about this budget, particularly as it relates to the housing portfolio. I would note that the housing section of the budget this year was significant. Unlike other years, housing was at the very beginning of the budget. I find it interesting because the government has talked a lot about housing for some time. We certainly all recall the 2017 launch of the Liberals' national housing strategy. We saw lots of pictures and videos of the Prime Minister with some of his MP colleagues and workers in front of a big housing project. At the time, the Prime Minister announced $40 billion, and gradually the Liberals came up with new numbers that brought it up to $70 billion, not all of which was really new money. However, it was lots of fanfare and lots of talk. In fact, the Prime Minister, at the time, described the national housing strategy as being a life-changing, “transformational” national housing strategy. That was announced with lots of fanfare, and then the Liberals slowly rolled it out. We found out a few years later, from a report from the Auditor General on the specific piece of it that was about homelessness, that the department was not even tracking the spending. The government did not really know whether it was having any impact. As the Auditor General and maybe anybody else with any sense would know, if one is not tracking what they are doing, then they do not know if the money they are spending is actually having any impact or they are just throwing money out the window. The department was not really tracking it, which I guess probably does not come as a huge surprise with the government. The Liberals really are a lot better at the photo ops than they are at the follow-through, so they did not really know if that was working or not. However, Canadians know the truth of all that because, despite the fanfare and the announcements made in 2017, tent cities are not just in the large cities in this country. They are everywhere. They are in smaller towns all across the country. Homelessness is worse now than it has been since we started tracking homelessness. Then, as well, we also know the results of the national housing strategy and the transformational program. Since the government took office nine years ago, house prices and rents have doubled in this country. Thanks to the excessive borrowing, there were going to be little, wee deficits. We remember that it was a $10-billion deficit. Deficits were going to be very, very small. Former prime minister Harper warned us that maybe that that was not true and, sure enough, he was correct. The deficits have been massive. Of course, out-of-control spending and out-of-control borrowing lead to higher interest rates and higher inflation, and that is what we have seen with the government. We fast forward it to today, when we have the borrowing and the excessive spending and, on top of that, the extra taxes. We have talked a lot about the various different tax schemes these guys have come up with to fund their spending. Ottawa does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. Therefore, they came up with the carbon tax, which the Liberals have been insisting all this time is really good, that it is going to reduce carbon emissions and that it is good for people. The Liberals keep saying that eight out of 10 people get more more money back. Do they know what? The lid is finally off. We have finally seen the hidden reports of the Minister of Environment that, in fact, the carbon tax is going to cost the economy $25 billion to $30 billion. We know that it is a tax on a tax on a tax on a tax. I bring it back to housing. Carbon tax applies to every stage of building a home. Whether it is the materials that are produced to build the home or the truck that is used to deliver the materials to the site, the carbon tax adds on to that and, of course, there is tax on top of the carbon tax. Governments make more money on housing than anybody else does. In this country, the average cost of government on every single home is about 33%. That is more than the builders make on houses. However, it is not just the federal level or the provincial level. It is the local level. Of course, the Liberals finally caught on to the fact that housing was actually in a crisis. I asked the previous minister if he would call this situation a “crisis.” He was afraid to use that word and would not use that word. In the summer of 2023, he was booted out, and a new minister was put in who is very good at using the word “crisis”, who is quick on his feet, who is a great debater, who is really good with the YIMBY language and who is generally a nice guy, too. I really like him. However, at the same time, he has come up with even more programs. The one I find particularly bizarre is the housing accelerator fund. All the Liberals like to talk about it. They are really proud of the housing accelerator fund because it is designed to speed up the building permit process in cities. The idea is that they would go around, city to city, and they would have these agreements with the cities to speed up their processes to make it easier to build. I have asked to see those agreements. There are about 100 or so cities, and I cannot see them. For whatever reason, they are a secret. However, I have been able to dig into some of the municipal planning reports that have gone to their councils. I will use Toronto as an example, just because Toronto is where the crisis is almost as acute as anywhere in the country. Vancouver is the worst, and I would say Toronto is next. The City of Toronto, in its housing accelerator application, agreed to a couple of different things to try to speed up the process. It was all in the reports. We do not know, of course, if any of these things have actually been done, except for one. We know that one thing that the minister really pushed was the concept of permitting fourplexes, four units, without having to get any special permission on any residential zone. Whatever kind of homes people live in, in the city of Toronto, they could turn it into four units, without going for a special permit, a rezoning or any kind of public hearing. People could do that. The minister pushed that in almost all of these agreements. It is almost as though he thought it was some kind of a silver bullet to solve the problem. As it turns out, the City of Toronto has already permitted this for about a year. In that time, there have been 74 applications to transform buildings into fourplexes. We know it is really not a silver bullet, but it was one of the big pushes. At the same time as we have a housing supply crisis, we also have a housing affordability crisis. Again, it is because of not only the cost of materials but also the cost of local governments. Local governments charge so many fees. There are building permit fees, connection fees, permit fees and development charges. A lot of people do not understand these development charges. A cheque has to be cut just for the privilege of having that piece of property that someone might be able to one day build a house on. That is not to mention the long, painful delays to get approvals. It takes, on average, in Canada, 249 days to get a building permit. In the United States, it takes, on average, 80 days. It is insane. Time is money. We could ask any builder, and they would tell us that time is money. That makes it more expensive. We have this situation where the City of Toronto, one of the most expensive cities in the country to build in, got $471 million from the Liberal government. It is so proud of this money, yet in the same time it got that money, it increased its development charges by 20%. It is not $97,000 for the privilege of building on a new lot, it is $117,000 now. I just do not understand, in a housing affordability crisis, why the government is borrowing money. Keep in mind that this is $4 billion of borrowed money, when the deficit is $40 billion, that it is going to give to cities that then turn around and make it more expensive to build. I am sure the Speaker cannot believe it. The Speaker is smiling because he cannot believe it. It is insane. This is what former Liberal finance minister John Manley referred to as driving with one's foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. The Liberal government is giving money to cities, which makes it more expensive. The Liberals are proud of this and think it is going to be some kind of a magical solution to what is literally a crisis in this country. It is a shame. There are too many Canadians suffering with a photo-op government that does not deliver the results, and Canadians are paying the price.
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Context: House Hansard - 333 - Jun/17/24
Mr. Peter Julian (New Westminster—Burnaby, NDP)
  • Jun/17/24 9:10:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I certainly agree with the comments about the Liberal government; what we have seen is a doubling of housing prices under the Liberal government. There is no doubt. Up until now, until the NDP forced the Liberals to actually make investments in affordable housing, we saw very little action for affordable housing. The problem is, of course, that the Harper government did the same thing. It doubled housing prices and did not construct affordable housing. In fact, it was a disastrous decade for social housing, co-operative housing, and it was probably the worst period in our history. I wanted to ask my colleague why he thinks the Harper government failed, and why have Conservatives not apologized for their part in the housing affordability crisis?
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