QUESTION PERIOD — Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
National Housing Strategy
September 20, 2023
Senator Gold, back in May, I raised with you the massive shortfall between the amount of housing the Trudeau government is promising and the amount Canada needs just to restore housing affordability by 2030. Earlier this month, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or CMHC, said our country needs about 3.5 million more houses over and above what is already projected. This is roughly the same amount CMHC said we needed in a report released last year. So more than a year later, we haven’t seen progress.
Leader, your government first promised the Housing Accelerator Fund in 2021, yet it didn’t accept applications until this past July and it hasn’t built a single house. Why did it take so long for the Trudeau government to get an accelerator fund up and running during a housing crisis?
Sounds like deceleration.
Thank you for your question. Indeed, the CMHC report underlines the critical and urgent need for the supply of new houses to be increased, and that’s why the government brought forth — as I reported in this chamber and I will not on elaborate further — a suite of new measures to tackle this crisis by putting Canada on track to double the number of construction of new homes over the next decade.
I will only say, in an echo to Senator Plett, prior to my political life, I was in business and was involved with real estate. Those of you who have experience in real estate know there are many factors that go into an entrepreneur’s decision whether to build or not to build, and those have to do with many factors that help explain, to some degree, why we are having a challenge in this country in building sufficient houses and homes to meet the increasing demands.
CMHC says the gap between the amount of housing needed to restore affordability and the amount projected to be built by 2030 has gotten worse over the last year in my province of British Columbia. Statistics Canada said that in July residential housing permits in B.C. fell over 30% year over year. On Tuesday, it reported that investment in residential building construction also fell in B.C. in July.
Leader, the Trudeau government has been too late in acknowledging the housing crisis they created, and nothing they have put forward will come close to fixing it. If the Prime Minister believes he’s not responsible for housing, how can he bring homes to Canadians that they can afford?
Respectfully, you mischaracterize both the statement that the Prime Minister made, which was a statement more about the jurisdictional issues than the government’s moral responsibility — which it is exercising — to take leadership with the provinces, the municipalities and the private sector to address this crisis. Nor is it correct to say that the housing crisis was something that the government created when anyone who has had any experience — as I have, and many here have had — in this sector, regardless of where you come from — whether it’s from the banking sector, the construction sector, the building materials sector or the labour market sector — knows how complex it is.
Anyone who has had the privilege, as I have, of living in your wonderful province, knows there are also issues of land availability and municipal zoning to say nothing of vested interests, dare I say, who have resisted to some degree some of the solutions that are clearly available to address at least some aspect of this crisis. It is a complicated crisis and problem. The government is exercising leadership in its areas of jurisdiction with the levers that it has, and it will continue to do so.
