Ottawa, ON – During last week’s announcement of the Build Canada Homes Act, the Minister of Housing said that ‘the best time to tackle the housing crisis was before it started.’ For a generation that has been priced out of homeownership, it certainly rings true, but the latest Housing Market Outlook confirms the Liberals have no plan to solve it.
After promising to deliver 500,000 new homes every year, Canada’s housing starts are projected to fall to as low as 212,000 per year by 2028. As construction declines 18.1 per cent to well below the 10-year historical average, Carney’s Housing Agency expects “many households will delay buying homes and choose to rent longer” as housing prices will continue to rise over the next three years.
That’s no surprise after Minister Robertson confirmed under the Liberals’ plan, ‘there aren’t top-line targets set for the number of homes to build,’ abandoning their promised housing starts. In fact, under their latest forecast, housing starts will be 55 per cent below the CMHC’s target necessary to restore housing affordability.
Instead of a plan to build homes, the Carney Liberals delivered a fourth housing bureaucracy. So far, the only thing Build Canada Homes has delivered is paycheques to bureaucrats, with zero dollars being spent on capital investment. Far from building at generational speeds, it took almost a year just to introduce legislation that still builds no homes.
It already takes the federal government nine years to dispose of its properties, but instead of a plan to speed up housing, the Liberals are considering acquiring private citizens’ land even as they can’t build on their own. Even when houses start getting built, the Parliamentary Budget Office found Build Canada Homes will add just 5,000 homes per year, 1 per cent of what the Liberals promised.
Canada finished last year failing to issue enough building permits to reach the CMHC’s target of 430,000 to 480,000 units per year, necessary to meet projected demand. With new home sales in free fall – falling 45 per cent in the Greater Toronto Area (the lowest level in 45 years), 56 per cent in Vancouver and 39 per cent in Calgary – builders can no longer afford to build.
After 10 years of Liberal plans, national strategies and new bureaucracies, the housing crisis is becoming a housing catastrophe. It must feel like a cruel joke to the thousands of young people who are giving up on ever owning a home. Conservatives have a real plan to restore the Canadian promise of homeownership by axing bureaucracy and taxes on homebuilding, requiring municipalities to issue more permits and letting builders build the homes we need.