The federal government has unveiled what it is calling their “plan to solve the housing crisis,” outlining both steps they intend to take, as well as issuing a callout to other levels of government and homebuilders to roll up their sleeves.
The 28-page plan includes billions of dollars in spending commitments and is divided into three pillars: building more homes, making it easier to own or rent a home, and helping Canadians who can’t afford a home.
“Today we are releasing the most comprehensive and ambitious housing plan ever seen in Canada. It builds on the sizeable investments we’ve made over the years and it goes a lot further,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday, backed by his lead ministers on the file and dozens of hard-hat-donning students and apprentices at the College of Carpenters and Allied Trades in Vaughan, Ont.
“It’s a plan to build housing, including for renters, on a scale not seen in generations. We’re talking about almost 3.9 million homes by 2031.”
Over the last few weeks the Liberals have been rolling out a series of new commitments aimed at younger Canadians who are having a hard time entering the housing market.
Those pledges are included in this new national housing plan, as are a series of new policy ideas.
Here’s what you need to know.
How do they plan to build this many new homes?
First, let’s break down Trudeau’s “3.9 million homes” pledge.
According to the documents, the real commitment is a minimum of two million net new homes, on top of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s forecast of 1.87 million being built by 2031.
One of the main ways the Liberals say they will build more homes is by bringing down the cost of homebuilding and making it easier for homebuilders to manufacture homes.
Related to this commitment, the plan includes a series of tax and policy reforms as well as loans —including the $15-billion Apartment Construction Loan Program — to incentivize builders to get more projects going. This initiative would, of course, build new housing units, not standalone homes.
They say they will expand the easing of Goods and Services Taxes on rental housing, to student housing builds, and offer billions to help build new housing-related infrastructure such as waste and water systems.
And, as part of a new “industrial strategy for homebuilding,” the federal government is going to change the national building code, introduce a standardized housing design catalogue, and launch a new fund to support innovative technology that makes it easier to build modular and prefabricated homes.
Another way the plan proposes to build more homes is by launching a “public lands for homes” strategy that will open up surplus and vacant federal government land across Canada to be used to construct new housing units or subdivisions.
Scaling up building to this degree will require more skilled workers. With this in mind, the federal government plans to roll out new efforts to attract and train more post-secondary graduates to enter the trades.
How do they plan to make it easier to own or rent?
There will be more homes, but until they are built, many Canadians will still be renting as they try to save up. What about them?
In this plan, the Liberals are vowing to launch a tenant protection fund for legal services and tenants’ advocacy groups “to better protect tenants against unfairly rising rent payments, renovictions, or bad landlords.” Relatedly, a new “Canadian Renters’ Bill of Rights” is in the works which will include a national standard lease agreement.
The federal government will be changing the rules to allow rental payment history to improve credit scores, helping those with a good rental record to qualify for a mortgage and extending the mortgage amortization rate to 30 years for new buyers buying new builds.
And, the existing “Home Buyers’ Plan” withdrawal limit will be increased by $25,000. That means the current $35,000 eligible buyers can withdraw tax-free from their RRSP to purchase their first home is being boosted to $60,000.
How do they plan to help those who can’t afford housing?
All of this considered — increasing supply to help improve affordability while offering new rule and savings aids — not all Canadians will be able to afford a home. What are the Liberals offering for them?
According to this new plan, the federal government also intends to take steps to create more affordable rental housing for students, seniors, and other communities, while vowing more work to tackle homelessness.
This includes the pre-pledged $1-billion “Affordable Housing Fund” to build more affordable housing and $1.5-billion Canada Rental Protection fund meant to preserve affordable rent prices by helping finance the purchase of affordable rental buildings that go up for sale.
“We can’t forget that we have a responsibility to help some of the most vulnerable in this country. We’re putting additional investments on the table to build out affordable housing, because the cause of homelessness is not a person’s family history. It’s not just mental health or addictions. It’s a lack of adequate affordable housing,” Housing Minister Sean Fraser said Friday.
What has the reaction been to the plan?
The Liberals aren’t the only national party proposing ways to tackle Canada’s housing crisis. For months, both Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh have been calling on Trudeau to do more, and offering their own plans as a pitch to prospective voters.
Reacting to the new plan, Conservative MP and housing critic Scott Aitchison said this national housing plan is coming eight years too late.
“Trudeau’s vanity announcements and billion-dollar photo ops don’t change the fact that his strategy has doubled housing costs over the last eight years,” he said in a statement.
NDP MP and housing critic Alexandre Boulerice said that Trudeau has contributed to the frustrations Canadians are feeling about housing affordability by “delaying measures to keep housing affordable.”
“Under the out-of-touch Liberals, rent doubled and for every affordable home built, we lose 11. A recent report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer revealed that Trudeau’s housing plan is expected to leave Canadians short 1.2 million homes by 2030. Canadians can’t trust the Liberals to fix the problem they created,” Boulerice said.
As for how the document is going over with stakeholders, some are welcoming the package of ideas as having the potential to materially impact the housing crisis, while others are offering a reality check on what it will take to turn the current housing situation around.
“I don’t know if it’s going to make it more affordable. I think it will make homeownership more achievable. There is a slight difference there,” GTA mortgage broker Mary Sialtsis said. “My concern is more that it’s being restricted to new construction homes, which sometimes can mean that they’re buying now and not taking possession for four or five years. Whereas you know, we have a chronic housing shortage that’s quite severe in major urban centres. People need homes now.”
Mike Moffatt, who the Liberals have directly consulted in recent months on their housing plans and was one of the authors of the 2023 National Housing Accord, said the steps proposed will make it more affordable to rent or buy a home, “in the coming years,” while noting there is more to be done.
“A lot of the stuff that you see in today’s plan is based on things that have worked in the past,” Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness president and CEO Tim Richter said in an interview on CTV News Channel Friday. “There’s nothing here in the short term that’s going to support Canadians that are struggling with their rent at this moment, but over time, this will go a long way.”
While he called it an important document with achievable commitments, he noted that the current housing landscape in Canada took decades to get to where it is now, and will take much more than government dollars to rectify.
“You need to find a way to get private investment … get the investors investing and the builders building,” Richter said. “I’m hopeful that the market is going to respond favourably to what they see today.”
How are the feds planning to get around the provinces?
You may have seen over the week or so of smaller teaser announcements leading up to this release, that many of the federal government’s housing commitments require provincial cooperation and some provinces are already indicating plans to not buy in.
So what happens then? Well, it’s possible Canadians in some provinces won’t see some of these measures as a result of this tension. Though, Trudeau has indicated in some cases Ottawa is more than happy to go around a resistant provincial government to offer funding directly to municipalities.
“We are there to work hand-in-hand, in full respect with those provinces who want to solve the problem and ask those provinces that don’t want to solve the problem, to just get out of the way,” Trudeau said.
“It seems like it was only a few months ago that I pointed out quite accurately, that the federal government doesn’t have a whole lot of direct carriage of housing… And over the following weeks and months we heard from a cavalcade of premiers saying ‘the federal government needs to step up more,'” Trudeau said. “So we are. Provinces should be careful what they wish for.”
As the document explicitly notes in its back pages, various housing responsibilities belong to different levels of government and so in order for this whole vision to become a reality, the Liberals are really pressing for a collective “team Canada” approach.
Fraser stated Friday that the Liberals want all levels of government to match their “ambition,” by playing their part. This would include adopting faster permitting processes, allowing more permissible zoning and legalizing more kinds of housing.
What national buy-in will be found, and how the political and economic landscape will shift over the nearly decade it’s being projected to take for this plan to become a reality, remains to be seen.
BATHURST, N.B. – RCMP in New Brunswick say a weekend ground search for evidence related to the disappearance of a teenage girl in 2021 didn’t reveal any new information.
In an emailed statement, the RCMP said 20 people participated in the search for evidence in the case of Madison Roy-Boudreau of Bathurst.
The release said the search occurred in the Middle River area, just south of the girl’s hometown.
Police have said the 14-year-old’s disappearance is being treated as a homicide investigation.
The RCMP said the search “did not reveal any new information regarding the circumstances of her disappearance.”
There are no plans for another search until police receive a tip or a lead pointing to a new search area.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
VICTORIA – A middle school in Victoria was forced into a lockdown after a man entered the building without permission, and police say they had to use a stun gun to make an arrest.
Victoria police say officers received multiple calls around noon on Monday of an unknown male entering Central Middle School, leading staff to set off emergency procedures that put the building under lockdown.
Police say its emergency response team arrived within minutes and found the suspect, who “appeared to be in a drug-induced state,” in the school’s library.
A statement from police says the suspect resisted arrest, and officers had to use a Taser to subdue the man.
He’s being held by police and has been assessed by emergency medical staff.
Police say the man was not armed and there were no continuing safety concerns for students and staff following the arrest.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
VANCOUVER – Former B.C. Green leader Andrew Weaver knows what it’s like to form a minority government with the NDP, but says such a deal to create the province’s next administration is less likely this time than seven years ago.
Weaver struck a power-sharing agreement that resulted in John Horgan’s NDP minority government in 2017, but said in an interview Monday there is now more animosity between the two parties.
Neither the NDP nor the B.C. Conservatives secured a majority in Saturday’s election, raising the prospect of a minority NDP government if Leader David Eby can get the support of two Green legislators.
Manual recounts in two ridings could also play an important role in the outcome, which will not be known for about a week.
Weaver, who is no longer a member of the Greens, endorsed a Conservative candidate in his home riding.
He said Eby would be in a better position to negotiate if Furstenau, who lost her seat, stepped aside as party leader.
“I think Mr. Eby would be able to have fresh discussions with fresh new faces around the table, (after) four years of political sniping … between Sonia and the NDP in the B.C. legislature,” he said.
He said Furstenau’s loss put the two elected Greens in an awkward position because parties “need the leader in the legislature.”
Furstenau could resign as leader or one of the elected Greens could step down and let her run in a byelection in their riding, he said.
“They need to resolve that issue sooner rather than later,” he said.
The Green victories went to Rob Botterell in Saanich North and the Islands and Jeremy Valeriote in West Vancouver-Sea to Sky.
Neither Botterell nor Valeriote have held seats in the legislature before, Weaver noted.
“It’s not like in 2017 when, you know, I had been in the (legislature) for four years already,” Weaver said, adding that “the learning curve is steep.”
Sanjay Jeram, chair of undergraduate studies in political science at Simon Fraser University, said he doesn’t think it’ll be an “easygoing relationship between (the NDP and Greens) this time around.”
“I don’t know if Eby and Furstenau have the same relationship — or the potential to have the same relationship — as Horgan and Weaver did,” he said. “I think their demands will be a little more strict and it’ll be a little more of a cold alliance than it was in 2017 if they do form an alliance.”
Horgan and Weaver shook hands on a confidence-and-supply agreement before attending a rugby match, where they were spotted sitting together before the deal became public knowledge.
Eby said in his election-night speech that he had already reached out to Furstenau and suggested common “progressive values” between their parties.
Furstenau said in her concession speech that her party was poised to play a “pivotal role” in the legislature.
Botterell said in an election-night interview that he was “totally supportive of Sonia” and he would “do everything I can to support her and the path forward that she chooses to take because that’s her decision.”
The Green Party of Canada issued a news release Monday, congratulating the candidates on their victories, noting Valeriote’s win is the first time that a Green MLA has been elected outside of Vancouver Island.
“Now, like all British Columbians we await the final seat count to know which party will have the best chance to form government. Let’s hope that the Green caucus has a pivotal role,” the release said, echoing Furstenau’s turn of phrase.
The final results of the election won’t be known until at least next week.
Elections BC says manual recounts will be held on Oct. 26 to 28 in two ridings where NDP candidates led B.C. Conservatives by fewer than 100 votes after the initial count ended on Sunday.
The outcomes in Surrey City Centre and Juan de Fuca-Malahat could determine who forms government.
The election’s initial results have the NDP elected or leading in 46 ridings, and the B.C. Conservatives in 45, both short of the 47 majority mark in B.C.’s 93-seat legislature.
If the Conservatives win both of the recount ridings and win all other ridings where they lead, Rustad will win with a one-seat majority.
If the NDP holds onto at least one of the ridings where there are recounts, wins the other races it leads, and strikes a deal with the Greens, they would have enough numbers to form a minority government.
But another election could also be on the cards, since the winner will have to nominate a Speaker, reducing the government’s numbers in the legislature by one vote.
Elections BC says it will also be counting about 49,000 absentee and mail-in ballots from Oct. 26 to 28.
The NDP went into the election with 55 ridings, representing a comfortable majority in what was then an 87-seat legislature.
Jeram, with Simon Fraser University, said though the counts aren’t finalized, the Conservatives were the big winners in the election.
“They weren’t really a not much of a formal party until not that long ago, and to go from two per cent of the vote to winning 45 or more seats in the B.C. provincial election is just incredible,” he said in an interview Monday.
Jeram said people had expected Eby to call an election after he took over from John Horgan in 2022, and if he had, he doesn’t think there would have been the same result.
He said the B.C. Conservative’s popularity grew as a result of the decision of the BC Liberals to rebrand as BC United and later drop out.
“Had Eby called an election before that really shook out, and maybe especially before (Pierre) Poilievre, kind of really had the wind in his sails and started to grow, I think he could have won the majority for sure.”
He said he wasn’t surprised by the results of the election, saying polls were fairly accurate.
“Ultimately, it really was a result that we saw coming for a while, since the moment that BC United withdrew and put their support behind the conservatives, I think this was the outcome that was expected.”
— With files from Darryl Greer
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
