QUESTION PERIOD — Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
Affordable Housing
March 22, 2023
Leader, it has been raised with you previously that the cost of housing has skyrocketed under the Trudeau government. For example, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, house prices in the interior of my province of British Columbia have gone up over 43% in the last five years. In the Statistics Canada survey released last month, 46% of British Columbians said they were very concerned about their ability to afford housing or rent. The Trudeau government’s Shared Equity Mortgage Providers Fund and First-Time Home Buyer Incentive have both been failures. The Tax-Free First Home Savings Account is still not in place.
So, leader, why should Canadians struggling to find housing or pay their rent believe your government will help them when what you have brought forward so far hasn’t worked?
Thank you for your question. Again, the issue of the affordability of housing is an important one. So thank you for raising this issue.
However, colleague, it is simply not the case that the federal government — any federal government, past, present or future — can be held exclusively or even mainly responsible for the increased housing prices, especially in a market such as the one you have described. Having lived in Vancouver myself for almost four very happy years, we know that the price of housing and the rise of prices is a function of many factors for which even provincial governments who have a responsibility for housing could or should not be held largely responsible.
That said, I also respectfully disagree with your characterization of the efforts the government has made, and will continue to make, to help Canadians become first-time home buyers, offset the costs of maintaining their homes or, indeed, finding rental homes. There are many more programs than you mentioned, and they have not been an unmitigated failure, though no program can ever claim 100% success.
The government will continue to assist Canadians as they meet the challenges of home prices. It is encouraging that inflation — at least generally, though not in the grocery store — is coming down continually, and we are hoping that the responsible fiscal measures the government has been taking to get us through the pandemic and out of the pandemic will bear fruit and that the housing market will become more accessible to more Canadians.
