Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to speak on behalf of the people of Saskatoon West. I would like to advise members that I will be splitting my time. Bill C-31 is the second budget implementation act from the 2025 budget. If members are paying attention, that was passed back in November, so it was seven months ago that we talked about this. The government still has not learned how to get stuff through the House, but here we are. This budget is huge, technical and packed. Between the two implementation bills, there are well over 500 pages. Clearly, it is an omnibus bill. Clearly, things like this need to be studied. Things like this need to go to committee. They should not be rushed, but I fear that will not happen here. This will be rushed through by the government. I am sure of that. The question I have to ask when I am looking at this is, does this make life better for residents of Saskatoon West? I think the answer, looking at this, is no. There is not enough here to lower grocery costs, reduce home prices or make our streets safer. On the subject of balancing the budget, this does not even come close. In fact, if we look at the deficits run by former prime minister Trudeau, this budget has more than double the deficits that were run by the Trudeau government, which is unbelievable considering that, supposedly, our Prime Minister is this economic genius. It is hard to believe. Of course, everybody understands that more borrowing means more inflation, and the subject of that is in interest costs. Even in this budget, the interest costs paid by the federal government are going to exceed the amount of money we provide for health care in our country, and that is just a very bad thing. This budget has massive spending increases, and Canadians are worse off. Bill C-31 would bring more bureaucracy, more CRA powers, more complicated tax rules and more Ottawa control, but there are no real fixes for what I hear when I knock on doors. This past week, I was out talking to folks in the riding, and the things I heard about at the doors were lower food prices, affordable homes, safer streets, lower taxes and a government that stops wasting money. These are things I heard about over and over again. The budget, and Bill C-31 before us, would not address any of these things. It would not help the issues of the people in Saskatoon West. I am going to focus a bit on housing affordability. People need homes they can afford, and Ottawa has numerous failed bureaucratic programs. Bill C-31 tinkers with housing a bit. There was the elimination of the GST for first-time buyers, but members need to keep in mind that they are only 10% of all buyers. It is a very small fraction of homebuyers who would be impacted by that reduction of tax. I do not know why the Liberals did not take our advice and reduce it for all homes under $1.5 million for everybody. That would have actually made a difference. On the subject of first-time buyers, here is a fun fact: 39% of first-time buyers are over the age of 35, and that component is rising right now. Close to half of first-time buyers are 35 years old. Back in the day, at 35, people already had their family, so this is a very big concern, and that group is growing. The other thing this budget would do is create a massive new bureaucracy, a $13-billion bureaucracy, for housing. It is the fourth bureaucracy we have in our country for housing, and in my view, it is completely unnecessary. Really, this whole thing misses the point. As the budget tinkers with housing, the real problem is that houses are too expensive to buy and ultimately too expensive to build, because every level of government adds more costs, more delays, more rules, added fees and red tape, and this needs to change. I was a home builder for 11 years. I believe I built more homes than the Liberals ever did. My customers wanted homes that were safe, durable, efficient and well built. That is what they wanted, and that is what I delivered. Many home builders across the country deliver that all the time. How does this come to be? Well, part of it is building codes. Building codes are part of what drives the way that houses are built. In our country, we have the National Research Council, which is a federally funded agency that develops building codes. Its employees do research and come up with the different ideas for new changes and things that should be put into the building codes. Then they are offered to the provinces to adopt, because building codes are a provincial issue, but the federal government, through the National Research Council, develops these building codes, and that sounds like a good thing. However, there is a big problem in this, which is the special interest groups that are able to get their pet projects onto the agenda. Often, those end up in the building codes that we see because there is a lack of cost consideration when these codes are developed. We can have a million good ideas, but every good idea adds cost. In this case, the Canadian Home Builders’ Association looked at the latest building codes, which are the 2025 building codes, did some math and tried to figure out the cost impact of these codes. It determined that the changes in the 2025 building codes were going to add $56,000 to the average house in Canada, and that is not all. It gets worse, because there are also energy upgrades that were specified. If we add those in, it adds another $60,000. The total of that is about $114,000 that it estimates. No province has yet adopted these building codes. In fact, the CHBA is suggesting to provinces that they do not adopt these building codes because there is so much confusion, frustration and added cost. The budget does nothing to address this core issue that is driving housing costs. Members can imagine adding $114,000 to the cost of an already expensive house in our country. It makes no sense. In my view, the problem is a lack of focus on costs in building codes. The government is good at putting what it calls a “lens” on things. Members may have heard the term “climate lens” or “gender lens”. What we are missing is a cost lens. We do not think about cost when we do things like this. Why not have clear cost-benefit information for the building codes, not to weaken building codes, block safety improvements, stop accessibility or tell technical experts how to do things but to simply tell builders to show their work and let the consumer decide? There is currently no explanation of what a change would cost, who would pay for it, what housing types would be affected, what benefits would be expected, what trade-offs there would be or what assumptions would be used. One small change may not seem like much, but many small changes stacked together is how we end up with $114,000 in changes from a building code. Of course, these costs get passed on to builders, but ultimately, they get passed on to and paid by the buyers and the renters, the people who use the housing. This matters in Saskatoon West. It matters whether it is downtown, in an older inner-city neighbourhood, in a rental-heavy area or in a newer subdivision. Housing challenges are different in each community because older areas face different problems. They might have aging infrastructure, irregular-sized lots, drainage, utilities, infill constraints, things like that. This budget missed the point on housing. What the budget tried to do was give people a little bit to help them deal with these very expensive costs of housing, but what it should have done is get to the source, the root of the problem, which is to lower housing costs and certainly to prevent these massive increases in costs from affecting the next houses that are built. That is what the budget should have done, and that is not what it did. I think the National Research Council needs to get serious about cost because every change it makes adds cost of one nature or another. How could we do this? We could have some sort of a housing cost and impact summary that, for every change, would explain what the proposal would do, what problem we are trying to solve, what housing types would be affected, the estimated cost for a typical house, who would be expected to bear that cost, what the benefits and drawbacks of this would be and what the implications would be on timelines of construction, complexity, administrative burden and things like that. Other information that would also be helpful would be a public registry of proposals showing who pushed for a particular change. It could include clear information about committee roles, members and affiliations, things that could be kept so that people could understand who was pushing this. Was this being pushed by a particular company? Did it have some kind of an agenda? That is very useful and helpful information. This is important because industry lobbyists and special interest groups push their products and desires onto Canadians through this system of building codes, and Canadians need to know that. We must keep in mind that the federal government does need to stay in its lane. This is a provincial jurisdiction area, so we have to make sure the federal government provides the information but allows the provinces to make those decisions. What did the government do? It tinkered with housing instead of actually solving the problem. It could have tackled the hidden costs and made better and more affordable homes. Bill C-31 is a missed opportunity for affordability. Conservatives will continue to put forward solutions so that homes can be affordable and built better. We do not necessarily have to add $114,000 of costs. We will continue to push hard for affordable housing in this country. Unfortunately, this budget and this bill missed the mark on that.
