“The high-speed rail project already has 13 vice-presidents getting bonuses before any track is built. How many vice-presidents will this new housing agency have, and will they also get bonuses?”

“Mr. Speaker, we know that the Alto high‑speed rail project, which will be completed toward the end of the next decade, 2040, already has 13 vice‑presidents at that agency who are already receiving bonuses, with not an inch of track being laid. The hon. member described Build Canada Homes as an arm’s-length federal agency. How many vice‑presidents will there be, and are they going to be receiving bonuses already?”

“Housing has gotten less affordable over the last 11 years under the Liberals. Adult children in my riding cannot afford to move out of their parents' homes. The government is not building enough houses, and new home construction is projected to fall.”

“Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary mentioned that the affordability issue did not happen overnight. I actually agree with him, but the key thing is that the issue has expanded for the last 11 years. Yes, that is under the Trudeau Liberal government and now under the current Liberal government. In my riding, which I am proud to represent, London—Fanshawe, I have gone door to door, connecting with constituents. The key thing is that I have talked to parents whose adult children still live in their house. They get misty-eyed and choked up because they want their children to excel, but the dilemma is that their children cannot afford a house. The Liberals promised to deliver 500 new homes every year, but according to CMHC, Canada’s housing starts are projected to fall to as low as 212,000 by 2028. What do I tell the parents who love their children but want them to move out? What do I tell them, when they know there are not enough houses being built?”

“I oppose this bill. It creates a costly new agency that will not build the homes the government promised. Instead, we should cut sales tax on new homes, tie city funding to new housing permits, and lower fees and taxes on builders.”

“Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek. I am happy to stand today and represent the fine folks of Ponoka—Didsbury. I am happy to report that my leader does not yell at me in caucus meetings and that he listens to all my concerns when I bring them to his attention. I humbly rise to speak against this piece of government legislation, Bill C-20, the Build Canada Homes act. The Liberal Prime Minister and his government have been big on their promises over the last year, much like they are big on their bureaucracy, big on their spending and big on creating big-time failures. This piece of legislation is a fraction of the action off the back end of a big promise that guarantees big bureaucracy, big spending and an even bigger deficit. When elected to a minority government last year, the Prime Minister said he was going to “build, baby, build”, but, oh, baby, he has not built a thing. How did we get here? Well, it was through broken promises and the promotion of failure. Failing upwards is all we are seeing, it seems. The Prime Minister ran an election campaign on a promise to double our homebuilding construction to 500,000 homes a year and to move at speeds not seen in generations. They have not been seen because we cannot see anything moving when nothing is moving. There is nothing to see. Whom did the Prime Minister hand-pick to help him deliver on this promise to complete the most housing completions in Canadian history? He chose the member for Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby. Listen to this: When he was the mayor of Vancouver, the member raised development charges by 141%, increased the price of homes by 149%, watched the average rent jump by 50%, and saw homelessness increase by 38%. Wow, talk about failing upwards. Under his watch, Vancouver became one of the most expensive markets in North America. It is not just one of the most expensive markets in North America but one of the most expensive in the world. The member is whom the Liberal Prime Minister tasked with delivering on this housing crisis, the same minister who said on day one of the job that home prices in this country do not need to come down at all. It is no wonder homes are not being built in this country. Nothing is being built. There is a theme here: no homes, no pipelines, no energy projects and no infrastructure. The Prime Minister cannot get anything built. It has been more than a year since the PM’s grand promise to build half a million homes a year, and the result is in: fewer permits, fewer starts and a housing crisis that is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, one of the government’s four housing bureaucracies, has declared that Canada must build between 430,000 and 500,000 homes per year for up to a decade to restore 2019 levels of housing affordability. The Prime Minister promised he would build these half a million homes a year, and he said that a big proponent of this building would be the new Crown corporation, Build Canada Homes. However, the reports since that promise suggest that Build Canada Homes has the capacity to build only up to about 400,000 homes across six different Canadian cities. This is a mere 1% of the Liberals’ original homebuilding promise of 500,000 homes. Where will the other 496,000 come from, if not from this new $11.5-billion agency? Those six sites across the country are not even new announcements, I will remind everyone. Each and every project is an old project that the Canada Lands Company, one of the government’s other housing bureaucracies, was already working on. The government has taken these sites and reintroduced them under a new agency, and it is calling this progress. It is not progress; it is an abject failure. No new homes are being built. It is an expensive photo op, just like the fake construction site the Prime Minister spent $35,000 on last September when he announced this very Build Canada Homes project in Ottawa, a fake solution to a very real Liberal housing crisis. The CMHC says that housing starts in Canada are projected to drop from 270,000 this year to 212,000 by 2028. National housing starts will drop by 18.1% over the next two years as developers are facing skyrocketing building costs. This is an issue that is compounding. Every day it gets worse, and we simply do not have any more time to waste. A year after the promise of half a million homes a year, there is a catastrophic collapse in the market. Maybe the Prime Minister’s new Major Projects Office that has not approved a major project yet will take this lofty goal on. The problem is delivery. Deliverology is not working for the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister promised to build at speeds never seen before, at a generational speed, but here we are, a year into his term, and we are just now debating Bill C‑20, which has the capacity to build only 1% of the homes the government promised. The minister said a key component of Build Canada Homes is speeding up housing construction. He is not off to a very good start. It took him nearly a year just to bring legislation to the House, which is still not getting anything done. In recent years, the CMHC’s data, which is the government’s own data, shows that housing starts are falling in this country, and they will continue to fall nationally this year and next. The Canadian Real Estate Association says national home prices have increased 2.2% from this time last year. The average home price has increased in every province across Canada. The territories have seen a worse fate. The average home price in the Yukon has increased by over $80,000 from this time last year. The housing crisis is not getting better. It is spiralling out of control. What is the government’s solution? It is more bureaucracy, consultants, photo ops and broken promises. The job of His Majesty’s loyal opposition is to hold the government accountable, promote sound policy and correct the government when it needs correction. One would think the government’s job is to listen, but that has not been working. The role of the opposition is integral to the function of Parliament, and it plays an even more important role in the rightful minority Parliament that the Liberals were elected to last year. This job as opposition was given to us by over 8 million voters across the country. Our leader has been clear that we will oppose bad policies and support good ones. This policy is bad policy. It is expensive, it does not deliver any new homes, it pays bureaucrats and consultants and it duplicates the work that several other federal housing agencies already do. It is needless. When the housing minister took office as the mayor of Vancouver in 2008, the average price of a detached home in the city was $942,000. On his last day in office, that same home price had soared to $1.8 million. This is the same theme we are going to see nationally. Home prices have remained at unattainable values and costs, there are no buyers, sellers or new builds, and there is no market. The Liberals’ response is an $11.5‑billion housing agency that may have the potential to build up to 4,000 homes. My hon. colleague from Parry Sound—Muskoka has offered a substantive, good housing policy that will move the needle and get homes built across the country, but the housing minister will not listen. He is stuck in his ways. They are the same ways that saw Vancouver become the most unaffordable housing market in North America and one of the most expensive in the world. The Conservatives do not support adding more bureaucratic red tape to our already highly regulated housing sector. We support and have encouraged the government to do the following things. Cut the GST on all new homes under $1.3 million. In turn, this would save families up to $65,000 on the purchase of a new home and unleash new building in every market across the country. Tie federal infrastructure dollars to homebuilding to incentivize construction and new builds. Municipalities would have to permit at least 15% more homebuilding each year in order to receive federal infrastructure spending. Cut development charges by 50%. The Liberals promised this during the last election campaign, but refused to deliver. This would lift a massive fiscal anchor off the backs of Canadian builders and allow them to do what they do best, which is build houses. End the capital gains tax on reinvestments in new housing in Canada. This would unlock billions of dollars of investment in our country’s homebuilding sector. These are substantive, difference-making policy proposals for our housing sector, but they are met with crickets from the government benches. The GST tax cut on all new homes under $1.3 million, for example, is a policy proposal that building experts, both Liberal and Conservative, have been calling for for over a year now as a policy that would actually enact change. The housing minister is not listening. In fact, on a podcast last summer, the minister referred to our proposed GST tax cut as “a big, large sweeping change to make”. Under the government’s watch, Canada is facing a housing crisis we have not seen since the Second World War. Instead of rising to the occasion, the government has failed and has made things even worse. Maybe big, large, sweeping changes are exactly what we need to get Canadians into the houses they want.”

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“The previous Conservative government had better housing policies. We gave people tax credits to buy and fix homes, built two million houses, and kept up with population growth. The current government has failed to do that.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would love to revisit the Harper-era policies. Some of the main housing-related policies were the home renovation tax credit in 2009, which saw massive investments in Canadians to invest in their own home. It helped with expenses of over $1,000 and up to $10,000. There was $1,350 in tax relief for people to stay in their homes and keep those homes current. The first-time homebuyers’ tax credit in the 2009 budget was worth up to $750 at the time, helping offset the closing costs for the purchase of new homes. With the expansion of the homebuyers’ plan, the government increased the amount Canadians could withdraw from their RRSPs from $20,000 to $25,000. Economic action plan infrastructure spending invested in lots of community housing. We tightened mortgage rules. We made sure that we did not get into a fiscal crisis. We regulated the environment, rather than try to do everything for everybody else. We built two million homes while the population grew by only 3.2 million. We kept up with the increase in population, which is something these guys have failed to do, miserably.”

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“A real housing plan includes specific numbers. When I was in government in Saskatchewan, our plan set clear targets to build 4,690 homes in five years. Why does the government's bill have no targets for how many homes it will build or what kinds?”

“Mr. Speaker, here is what really confuses me about this. I was part of a government in Saskatchewan that had a housing plan. It actually had numbers in it. This plan in 2011 by the Saskatchewan government said head start on a home would build 1,000 homes, the affordable home ownership program would build 600 homes, the rental construction incentive would build 2,900 homes, with $35 million for rental housing, and Habitat for Humanity would build 30 homes. When someone actually has a plan, they put numbers in it. This plan promised to build 4,690 homes in five years. Why does the Liberal government not have the number of homes in its plan and the kinds of homes it would build?”

“The Liberals cause shortages, spend borrowed money to fix them, and enrich their friends. This heavy government spending does not work. It only increases the debt and makes problems like housing worse.”

“Mr. Speaker, I know my colleague knows the answer to this, but here is how the Liberals do it. They take whatever the global agenda happens to be. Financial markets and central bankers, like the current Prime Minister, create global scarcity for a certain product, drive up the demand for it by creating that scarcity and then come up with socialist-type deficit spending to solve the problem, which all of the insiders, their friends and their big corporate interests, then grift on. That is why we are in this mess. They can apply this to housing or any of the other aspect of our economy. Have members ever noticed that nothing ever gets done in this country unless the government spends a bunch of taxpayers’ dollars along with it? It does not seem to work, does it? All that happens is our deficit goes up and things get worse.”

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“My adult children cannot afford to buy a house, even though they earn good money. I blame the government and its policies for making housing unaffordable.”

“Mr. Speaker, I will tell everyone about an incident that happened in this House. It was the day the former prime minister announced the consumer carbon tax. The member opposite came and sat beside me, trying to pitch to me that my kids were going to love this new consumer carbon tax because it was the woke thing to do. Right now, my kids make great money and they are living in the basement in my house. They cannot afford a house because she has been a member of Parliament here for the last 11 years, making a total disaster of this country.”

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“I do not want this bill to pass. It creates another government agency instead of helping private builders build homes. Adding more rules and bureaucracy will only slow things down and make homes more expensive.”

“Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-20, an act that seeks to establish the Build Canada Homes bureaucracy, at third reading. As I mentioned during the debate at second reading, this bill is the latest attempt by the Liberals to solve a problem they created. Unfortunately, their solution is to create yet another Crown corporation, which they promise will deal with their housing issue. It is their third Crown corporation, no less. Over the last 10 years, our young people have watched rents and the prices of homes double. Inflation has soared and swallowed up their ability to save for the future, and the prospect of owning a home has slipped away. We all remember the promise the Prime Minister made during the last election to build at speeds not seen in a generation. This generation is losing out. He has invoked grand speeches since, reminding Canadians that for much of our history, our country was able to build vital projects and the housing it needed. I am deliberately saying “for much of our history”, because over the past 10 years under the Liberals, companies have been forced to downsize and lay off workers, businesses have had to shut their doors and our builders have been unable to build because of increasing costs and regulatory burdens. After promising to deliver 500,000 new homes every year, the PBO estimates that Canada’s housing completions will average only 222,000 per year, which is well below the number needed and the number promised. However, rather than delivering on their promise to build these homes, the Liberals are building yet another bureaucracy. This makes it their fourth attempt at using bureaucracy to try to fix the housing crisis they have created. While the Liberal government continues to tell young Canadians that solutions are on their way, it is going to deliver and all it needs is more time, our young people are waking up each morning with less hope of making a down payment on a home, landing a career that will meet their needs or starting a family. After 10 years of getting it wrong, just how much time do the Liberals need to get it right? Now we find out that their grand plan is to build yet another bureaucracy. It is completely out of touch to believe that doing the same thing over and again will somehow produce a different result. Rather than repeal overburdensome regulations or legislation, the Liberals’ plan is to create yet another massive, multi-billion dollar Crown corporation to do what the private sector already does, except it would move slower, cost more and require more red tape. The Liberals’ record of overseeing Crown corporations is not stellar either. Let us consider Canada Post. This Crown corporation became insolvent under the government and has received not one but two $1-billion loans that taxpayers are on the hook for. This is all because the Liberals failed to act and approve its strategic plan for five years. The Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is another Crown corporation, handed out a $1-billion loan to a Chinese shipbuilding company, instead of giving that work to capable, hard-working Canadians in B.C. As for the Canada Lands Company, its responsibility to develop federal properties and convert them into housing units will now become the responsibility of Build Canada Homes. The six projects that were announced, as my colleague pointed out earlier, had already been approved and development was well under way. Only 49% of federal land commitments from the Canada Lands Company will be built by 2028. According to the Auditor General, federal property disposals take six to eight years per property. These delays are not one-off incidents. They are slow, repeat failures that demonstrate a true lack of will to address the issue in a meaningful way. There is no reason to believe that by transferring these properties to the new bureaucracy, things will speed up or be any more effective. Reorganizing is not reform. Still, that does not seem to resonate. Believing that giving paycheques to policy advisers on bureaucratic boards will deliver results is a failure of imagination and a failure to recognize that a change in approach is needed. Getting back into the business of building cannot mean being in the business of hiring consultants or layering on more delays. A new board of directors would not fix the supply crisis the Liberals have created. What builders need is for the cost of building to come down, and that means bringing the cost of government down. It means recognizing that the cost of government is more than just the development charges and it is more than the cost of GST on the sale of a home. It is the cost hidden in the complex rules that present the first barrier to a shovel hitting the dirt. These rules drive away competition, slow progress and gradually increase cost. We do not catalyze an industry by competing with it, using $13 billion of its own tax dollars. We do not build homes by adding more process to the country’s system that already has far too much of it. For greater clarity, the OECD has identified restrictive zoning permitting and fragmented approval systems across levels of government as a principal constraint on housing supply in Canada. Build Canada Homes will not fix this, and there is a real human cost to all of this. Young Canadians are being forced to work longer in the hopes of entering the housing market later in life. We must also acknowledge the lost potential to our economy as construction workers are laid off and home builders stop building at a time when housing starts, job creation and affordability are needed the most. Building has become complex. The regulatory burden has become expansive. It is not Canadians who need to be reminded of a time when we used to build here in Canada. It is the government here in Ottawa that needs reminding that there was a time when it did not stand in the way of letting people build. If the Liberal government is serious about wanting to tackle the housing crisis our country is facing, it needs to stop blaming outside factors and rather look inward to determine a new approach, which is needed in our capital. A new approach would deliver the results Canadians need. The new is often uncomfortable. This would mean a departure from an “Ottawa knows best” mindset and a return to common sense, wherein young people are free to innovate, businesses are able to adapt and the market drives demand for growth. The government, as a customer, cannot drive demand forever, create the jobs we will need nor house every Canadian, and it should not want to. Canadians are the most capable people in the world, and the government needs to remember that. Young Canadians should not be asked to sacrifice more than they already have. They deserve a fair chance to work hard and build the homes, lives and families they choose. The 500,000 homes a year that are needed to solve this housing crisis will not be built by a fourth housing bureaucracy with red tape that prevents shovels from hitting the dirt. Boardrooms have never built homes. Builders and capable workers do. Canadians do not have to settle for a $13-billion project that will build just 5,000 homes a year. Better is possible, but it requires a change, not more of the same. The bill we are debating today is just more of the same.”

“The Auditor General reported that the government is not being honest about its housing numbers. The government hides details about the kinds of homes it builds and whether they help families.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would just suggest this: My hon. colleague does not need to take my word for it. She does not need to take the word of my colleagues on this side of the House. Maybe she should go back and look at the Auditor General’s report or the PBO’s report that was tabled last fall. In her report last year, the Auditor General found a clear lack of transparency in reporting numbers on the government’s housing initiatives, which further undermines the trust Canadians have in the government’s ability to address the housing crisis. Under its own definition of housing units, the government refuses to be transparent with the kinds of housing it is building and whether it will meet the needs of families. I would remind the member that she needs to also take a look at what others are saying about this crisis and how they are doing.”

“Rent and mortgages were much cheaper eleven years ago under a Conservative government. Today, government fees and taxes make up about a third of the cost to build a home. In Hamilton, it is 36 percent. This drives up housing costs and keeps young people from buying homes.”

“Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek for a strong grasp of the numbers and the facts. I would note that 11 years ago, the average monthly mortgage payment was $1,432. The average monthly rent payment was $973 a month after 10 years of Conservative government. Maybe the hon. member can reflect on the fact that now in Canada, a third of the cost of building a home is government taxes, fees, levies, delays and permits. In my community of Hamilton, Ontario it is actually 36%. This is driving up the cost of housing and it is preventing young people from entering the market.”