Official Hansard
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.
