Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is interesting. As we are here to discuss third reading of Bill C-20, the Build Canada Homes act, I have been sort of reflecting a bit. Of course, I have spoken on this issue a few times. I have spoken on housing many times in the House of Commons, in committee and certainly around the country. I guess it is no secret that I spent most of my adult life in local government, in municipal politics. I have sat in municipal council chambers and planning committee meetings, and I have also worked with a lot of local builders and understand the process they have to go through to get things approved. During my time as a mayor, I devoted an awful lot of time trying to speed up processes, and when things got stalled about 10 years ago, I was part of the charge at our district council to cut development charges by 50%. We were thinking ahead back then. Now, of course, here we are still talking about the development charges in this country. I guess if there is one thing I would regret from my time there, it is that I did not change the systems well enough. I worked within them to keep things moving, but after I left, things slowed down again a bit, I think. It would have been good if I had done things to change the process. If we fast-forward, we are now here in this place. I thought that, in a time of crisis, this place might work in such a way that we would see what the problems that created the crisis were and that we would work together to find a way to clear the bottlenecks that make it harder and more expensive to build homes. However, if we look at Bill C-20 today, I have to say I find my patience is a little worn. We are in the middle of a housing crisis that is actively compounding. It is getting worse every single month for young families and young professionals. Interestingly enough, I think it is also getting worse for seniors. We probably do not talk enough about seniors and how the housing crisis affects them. If people cannot afford to buy, that means they cannot afford to get into the market, which means the market is not healthy. This means, for the people who were planning to use the equity built up in their home to help fund their retirement, if they cannot afford to sell, they are kind of trapped there. We need movement in this system. This is something that affects all generations, not just young people, but that is mostly who we talk about. After all the debates and the discussion in this place, it is really frustrating that the government’s response to this crisis of bureaucracy, pace, process and fees is the creation of a brand new, multi-billion-dollar federal bureaucracy called the Build Canada Homes corporation. For the record, I just want to make sure all Canadians know that I am not talking about a new agency. I am talking about the fourth federal housing agency. We are all familiar with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the work it does. It was created right after the Second World War, and it did miraculous things by getting things out of the way and just getting things built. We solved that housing crisis then in about 10 years. We also have, of course, the Canada Lands Company, which was created and actually does development. It uses federal lands to develop. I hear the members opposite talking about how this Build Canada Homes agency is going to build on federal lands, even though there already is one doing that. We are at a point of real crisis in our country on the housing file. I think people maybe thought that, when they elected this new Prime Minister, there was going to be some kind of shift from the past. They were promised this technocratic competence, a sort of practical delivery. We were told that we were going to get this economic mastermind. He has been the governor of a couple of banks, such as the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. We thought we were going to get this leader who would move past the superficial politics of the past and bring this cold, hard managerial excellence to federal operations. Instead, though, it has actually been a bit of a disappointment, a bit of an illusion, I would say. What we see now is the style over substance that we had with the previous government. I can give examples. The first one would be that, like clockwork, on Monday mornings, the Prime Minister puts on a nice, new, clean hard hat, puts on a fancy, brand new, high-visibility vest, and he goes out into the suburbs of Ottawa and stands in front of a housing construction project for a nice photo op. I have to say that the Prime Minister looks like he is straight out of central casting. He looks really good in that get-up. It looks really exciting, because the image says that the Liberals are getting things done, that they are building. The staging is really immaculate. If members have not seen it, I encourage them to take a look. It is really good stuff. He holds these press conferences, but the interesting thing about press conferences, photo ops, talking points and bureaucracy is that they do not get homes built. They do not pour concrete. As it turns out, posing with a golden shovel does not get a roof over a family’s head. The hard truth is that, while the Prime Minister is out there modelling safety gear for his communications team, actual housing starts in this country, which we are studying at the human resources committee, are declining. They are declining at a time when the first federal housing Crown corporation, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which does more research than anybody else on housing in this country, has reported that Canada needs to build between 430,000 and 480,000 homes per year just to reach affordability for all homes. We cannot even build 250,000 homes a year, and starts are declining. It is getting worse. This is what I find so incredibly frustrating. I think Canadians find it incredibly frustrating as well. At committee we looked at the actual structural design of this bill and this agency. We asked housing experts to come and tell us what they thought, and they exposed the reality. Do not get me wrong. We brought in some of the sharpest minds on this. There were builders and experts. Dr. Mike Moffatt was mentioned, who is a well-known expert on this file. Of course, everyone is very polite at committee, because that is what we do. We are polite. However, when we strip away all the polite language and the niceties at committee, their collective verdict was actually kind of devastating. Maybe the Liberal members did not hear this, but I heard over and again that if it were up to them, they would never have created this fourth federal housing agency. As it turns out, Canada does not suffer from a shortage of housing agencies. We already have the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. We have the Canada Lands Company, which develops on federal land. At the very time that Canada needs less government bureaucracy, costs, processes and painful work to get permission to build a house in this country, the government has responded with more bureaucracy. We saw the limits of this approach even with the launch of this thing. Everyone remembers, I am sure, when the Liberals proudly announcing the first six projects that were going to be done under the Build Canada Homes banner on federal lands. It was very exciting. It was evidence that they were hitting the ground running. Even before they turned it into a Crown corporation, it was an agency of the government. There were six new projects. It was so exciting. There was great fanfare. As it turns out, there were really good photo ops and staging. I will tell members that they really looked good. However, the truth is that those six projects they announced were already well under way by the second federal Crown corporation called the Canada Lands Company. It already had the land. It had already done a lot of the planning. Some of the units had already been built on some of these sites. They were presented as this proof that Build Canada Homes was going to develop faster on federal lands. Build Canada Homes did none of those things. What it did was adopt projects that were already years in the making and already well under way. If the Liberals slap a new corporate logo on the side of a train that has left a station and is moving down the track and then claim they built the engine, that is ridiculous. It is rebranding. They have rebranded the Canada Lands Company projects and called them Build Canada Homes projects. We are supposed to celebrate that because apparently it is building more homes, when really all they have done is slapped a new logo on it. If the Prime Minister really wanted to accelerate federal land development, he could expand the existing mandate of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is an agency that has broad legislative authority. In 2017, it was handed the bulk of the government’s national housing strategy to deliver programs. It was not really used to delivering direct programs anymore, but it scaled up and got things going, and for years delivered on these various different programs. However, instead of expanding the mandate or giving new directions to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation or the Canada Lands Company, which is already actively doing development, the Prime Minister has created a whole new parallel executive suite with new corporate rules. It has been a year. The Liberal government has built no homes, yet here we are celebrating. Not only have we created a new agency, but now we are going to jam through a piece of legislation that turns that new agency into a federal Crown corporation, as I pointed out, the third federal Crown corporation. I still do not know why we are celebrating that. The truth is the failure goes even deeper than just the administrative burden of this new thing. Experts like Mike Moffatt told the HUMA committee that they would not have done this either. At the same time, one of the problems with what the government has created is that there is a staggering lack of any concrete targets, clear definitions or binding timelines. Everybody should think about this for a second. This is a brand new fourth federal housing agency, the third new federal Crown corporation for housing. It has been given $13 billion and there are zero targets for how many units it is supposed to get done. The government says it is going to focus on non-market housing. I asked CMHC about this just the other day. It is the leading researcher on housing. CMHC told us how many units we need to get built in this country. It pointed out that 95% of housing in this country is market housing and 5% is non-market housing. I asked CMHC about this. It is interesting. It does not seem to have any targets. I asked whether the government had had a conversation with CMHC or its research department about maybe what their targets should be. The president and CEO of CMHC said they had not had those discussions. I asked if CMHC had done any research to send the government some targets. I realize it has taken employees from CMHC, so now maybe CMHC does different things, but it still does research. Maybe it could advise on how many non-market housing units the country actually needs. It has not done that. Of course, I asked the minister here, just moments ago, whether he had talked to CMHC and its research department about whether it had done any analysis of just how many units needed to be built. Interestingly enough, the CEO of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation made a comment about how he did not know what their target would be, but that they had a certain amount of money. I said, “Wait a second, this is just based on how much money they have. Shouldn’t this be based on the need for non-market housing?” Colleagues may be surprised, but I did not really get an answer to that question because, of course, it is Build Canada Homes. It is the Prime Minister’s baby. Everyone is very excited about it and we do not ask too many questions, even though we have a situation today where a housing crisis has been getting worse. The government’s response is to create a fourth federal housing agency and give it $13 billion. The minister stood here and said the goal is to get as many homes built as possible. Well, I do not find that very promising for Canadians, who are desperately hoping that one day maybe they might own a house. I look at all these pages down here. They are nice, bright, young people who may want to own a house one day. I worry about that. All we get from the government is more platitudes and more billions of dollars, with no targets. How do we measure success if the government has no goals and sets no targets? It is classic. There is that vast research department there that has advised every agency, the industry, the banks and the government on housing data. The government does not want to talk to CMHC. It is not interested in that. It is not interested in setting targets. In fact, the minister referred to a target for the Build Canada Homes corporation. He said it was just a random number. He did not like that. We got nothing. Obviously, he does not respect the work of CMHC and the research it does. I was talking about using those experts, who have done more analysis on the housing market in Canada than anybody, to help them come up with a number. Right now, we have this new agency. We are rushing through this bill because it needs to be a Crown corporation, because somehow that is going to make it better. I have talked to private and non-profit builders across Canada who already have applications in to this Build Canada Homes apparatus. Interestingly enough, with CMHC, when they had this program, there was an apparatus where builders could follow their application online and see how they were doing. They could reach out to get information about the status of their application. Curiously, there is no such thing with Build Canada Homes, so builders are sitting there waiting and wondering what the status of their file is. They do not know, really, what criteria will be used to adjudicate their file. They do not really know when a decision will be made. There is no way to track the progress. I have to say, as a former mayor who has dealt with this on the front lines, that this uncertainty, this lack of transparency, is a killer. It is a killer of housing development. That investment requires some level of certainty. When a builder does not know where their application stands in the process, capital sits idle. Land loans accumulate interest, because one has to borrow money for the land. Subcontractors cannot be booked. By building an agency with no timelines, no targets and no tracking framework, the government has not just created yet another bureaucracy at a time when we need to reduce bureaucracy; it has actually fixed in place this paralysis by process. It has institutionalized the bureaucracy, and we just do not know when this process is going to be done. Homes are built by builders, not by boards and certainly not by prime ministers and photo ops. The housing experts who came to our HUMA committee made it very clear that they would not have built this agency. The tools were there. They existed, and yet here we are. We have wasted an entire year, as the crisis gets worse, adding a fourth federal layer of bureaucracy and administration. It does not solve a crisis that is rooted in regulatory delays. If we do not fix time, we do not fix costs. Bill C‑20 does not fix time. It simply creates an unaccountable gatekeeper and makes builders wait in the dark. I call it the illusion of competence. We do not need a government that acts like a public relations firm. We need a government that focuses on the quiet, very unglamorous work of clearing the path, eliminating regulatory friction and restoring basic administrative competence. We need to get out of the way of builders and stop subsidizing the bureaucracy. If we stopped subsidizing and creating new agencies and new bureaucracies with billions of dollars, maybe then we would have the resources left over to invest in those important social and supportive housing needs that exist in our country. Maybe if we spent some time talking to the researchers, to get real data on what is needed in this country in terms of the number of social, supportive and non-market housing units, we could create some targets. We could have given the CMHC the tools it needed to make sure that this was happening. Instead, we spent one year creating another bureaucracy, and here we are. The crisis is worse than ever, and the minister has the gall to stand in the House and say that the goal is to get as many built as possible. Liberals say not to worry and to just trust them, because it has only been 11 years and they have created strategies. They have another strategy they want to create for housing for young people specifically. Canadians cannot live on strategies and proclamations and photo ops alone. They need homes. They need governments to stop getting in the way and to reduce the bureaucracy, the cost, the fees and the taxes. This was an opportunity for the government. I thought that maybe this was a Prime Minister who understood the file and understood the issue, that we need to use federal dollars and leverage federal infrastructure investment to get results at the local level, working with provinces and working with cities to get the job done, and to get out of the way. There is absolutely none of that. All we have now is a fourth federal housing bureaucracy with $13 billion, and anyone’s guess is as good as mine as to how many units are going to get built. It is a huge disappointment. It is the illusion of action, and Canadians cannot afford it anymore.
