Bill C-356

Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act

An Act respecting payments by Canada and requirements in respect of housing and to amend certain other Acts

This enactment enacts the Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act in order to
(a) establish a target for the completion of new homes in high-cost cities that increases 15% every year and ties federal infrastructure funding allocated to high-cost cities to that target;
(b) provide for the reallocation of $100 million from the Housing Accelerator Fund to municipalities that greatly exceed housing targets;
(c) require that federal transit funding provided to certain cities be held in trust until high-density residential housing is substantially occupied on available land around federally funded transit projects’ stations; and
(d) make it a condition for certain cities to receive federal infrastructure and transit funding that they not unduly restrict or delay the approval of building permits for housing.
It also amends the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Act , the National Housing Act and the Excise Tax Act in order to
(a) eliminate executive bonuses unless housing targets are met and to reduce executive compensation if applications for funding for new housing construction are not treated within an average of 60 days; and
(b) provide a 100% GST rebate on new residential rental property for which the average rent payable is below market rate.
In addition, this enactment requires the Minister of Public Works to table a report on the inventory of federal buildings and land, to identify land suitable for housing construction and to propose a plan to sell at least 15% of any federal buildings and all land that would be appropriate for housing construction, subject to certain exceptions. Finally, it requires the Minister of Public Works to place these properties on the market within 12 months of tabling the report.

Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Leader of the Opposition]

moved that Bill C-356, An Act respecting payments by Canada and requirements in respect of housing and to amend certain other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, on Thursday, the Prime Minister admitted he was not worth the cost. He found out that I was holding a monster rally in a Liberal stronghold, and he panicked. His phones lit up as Atlantic Canadian Liberal MPs, bawling their eyes out, pleaded with him to relent to the pressure that the Leader of the Opposition was mounting to axe the tax.

The Prime Minister said that he was stiff in spine and that he would never back down, and the Liberal MPs from the Atlantic caucus said that they would oust him as leader and he would lose his job. What would that do for his ego? The Prime Minister said, in that case, that they would pull together a press conference that afternoon, try to time it right before the Conservative leader's great rally in Windsor, where a thousand people were scheduled to rise up against the tax, and they would promise to pause the tax until after the election.

Now Atlantic Canadians know that if they elect the Prime Minister, they will get a massive tax hike on their home heating oil. If they elect the common-sense Conservatives, they will have tax-free heat. That is a pretty simple choice. The Prime Minister has just defined the issue of the next election. They can vote for him and have a massive home heating tax, or they vote for common-sense Conservatives and we will axe the tax for everyone and forever. Who would you vote for, Mr. Speaker?

The Prime Minister sent out one of his Newfoundland MPs to say that the reason only some Canadians were getting a pause on the carbon tax was that other Canadians did not vote Liberal. Soon they will have a new income tax rate for provinces that do not elect Liberal MPs, a new sales tax rate and new tax rates everywhere else. The problem with this bloody-minded divide-and-conquer tax strategy is that some Liberals seem to have failed to win over the Prime Minister's heart.

The Liberal MP for Sudbury does not get a carbon tax exemption. The two Liberal MPs in Thunder Bay, a very cold climate, do not get a carbon tax exemption. The Liberal member for Nickel Belt did not get a carbon tax exemption in those harsh, cold northern Ontario communities that use gas and propane. The extremely ineffective Liberal MP for Edmonton Centre did not get a carbon tax exemption. There is the loquacious, loud and never quiet member from Winnipeg, which they call “Winterpeg” because it is cold. The member for Winnipeg North, a man of many words but few actions, has failed to get a carbon tax exemption for Winnipeggers.

Apparently those people are forced to pay higher prices for their heat, because their MPs are so ineffective that they could not mount pressure on the Prime Minister to back down.

It is proven that he is not worth the cost, just like he has not been worth the cost for housing. After eight years, the Prime Minister has doubled mortgage payments, doubled the rent and doubled the needed down payment for a home.

Let us just review the housing hell he has caused since he promised to lower housing costs. It now takes 25 years to save up for a down payment in Toronto. Before the Prime Minister, a person could pay off a mortgage in that time. Families are now stretching out their mortgage terms to 90 years and 120 years, because interest rates on their exorbitant mortgages have stretched out the amortization. People used to pay off an entire mortgage 25 years in and then they could retire mortgage free.

Now, not only will they never be able to pay off their mortgage in their entire lifetime, but even if they hand their house and mortgage to their kids, they might not be able to pay it off in their lifetime. They would then have to hand the house to a third generation that would still inherit a mortgage. So much for the government taking on debt so Canadians do not have to.

Under the Prime Minister, homes cost 50% more than they do in the United States, and a person can buy a castle in Sweden for the price of a two bedroom in Kitchener. Toronto is now ranked the worst housing bubble in the world by UBS Bank. Vancouver is the third-most unaffordable housing market on earth, when we compare housing costs to income, and Toronto is the 10th. Vancouver is now more unaffordable than New York, London, England and Singapore, which is a tiny island with 2,000 times more people per square kilometre than Canada.

Canada should be the cheapest place in the world, because, of course, we have more land per person than all but four countries on the planet. In other words, we have a lot of space, just not a lot of homes. In fact, we have fewer homes per capita than all other G7 countries even though we have by far the most land on which to build. In fact, we have fewer homes per capita today than we did eight years ago when the Prime Minister took office, promising more homes and more affordable homes.

If members want the best all-in-one measurement of the Prime Minister's performance on housing, look at the OECD, which compared housing costs to income, starting in 2015 to present, among all 37 OECD countries. How has the ratio of home prices to family incomes grown in Canada relative to the other 36 OECD countries? We are the second worst. In other words, housing costs outgrew incomes in Canada at a faster pace than in all but one of the other 36 OECD countries. This is a new problem that occurred after the Prime Minister took office and it is a problem that is unique to Canada. He cannot blame some prior government and he cannot blame other countries, because it is worse than Canada has ever been and worse than almost anywhere else in the world.

This is a made-in-Canada problem unique to the Prime Minister. Why? Because he has spent the last eight years building bureaucracy rather than building homes. He brags that he has the most expensive housing programs. He complains that when I was housing minister, my programs did not cost as much, and he is absolutely right about that. I had far more affordable housing programs. In fact, there were far few billions in my housing programs than there are in his programs, but we do not measure the success by how expensive we can be. We measure success by how affordable we can be.

He even made up a fact. He looked at a CBC headline, which is always a dangerous thing to do, and he said that when I was minister we only built 99 homes with $300 million. I thought, “What the heck is he talking about?” I have a mind like a steel trap. I would have remembered if I had announced a $300-million housing project, and so I checked into it. Here is what actually happened.

First, the program was created in 2008, a half decade before I even became the minister. Second, it did not spend any money. The program was designed to encourage private home ownership by first nations. It invested capital of $300 million, but did not spend a penny. Because the money was invested commercially, it actually grew to $380 million. Also, it was not 99 homes; 7,000 homes were built, purchased or renovated for first nations people.

It did not cost any money. It made a profit and it built, renovated and bought 7,000 homes. By the way, the entire thing is run by first nations themselves. No wonder the Liberals do not like any of that, but forget the facts. If I had to deal with the bare body of facts in litigating the housing file, I do not know what I would do. I might have to hallucinate to come up with some other facts too. I might even get desperate enough to read CBC headlines as well.

In the meantime, let us talk about the real common-sense plan to bring in homes Canadians can afford. Let us talk about my bill, the building homes not bureaucracy act.

Principle number one is that it will require cities to boost home completions by 15% per year or they will lose federal infrastructure money. We give them $5 billion a year in direct transfers. They can pretty much do whatever they want with that money. I am saying that this is going to be a housing incentive. We are going to start paying city bureaucrats the way real estate agents get paid, on volume. They get housing completed, they get more money. They do not get it completed, they get less money.

The bureaucrats will have to wake up every morning and think about how they can approve as many permits as quickly as possible so Canadians have a place to live. It is going to be very mathematical. I will require them to hit 15% more home building per year. If they beat that by, say, 10%, they get 10% more money. If they miss it by 10%, they get 10% less money. Maybe then the bureaucrats and the mayors will wake up everyday and think about how they can get it done quickly. Mayors would then be forced to move their offices right into the permitting room, a big open room with big screens. Permitting times would be on one wall showing the number of homes waiting, how many people are on hold right now and how many homes are being held up. Imagine if they had big screens in city hall and all the bureaucrats were busy motoring away, trying to get to a “yes” and getting things done. Would that not be incredible if we actually focused on results, rather than on building more bureaucracy? That is what my bill would incentivize.

Right now, by contrast, the current housing minister has come up with a program that works very simply. He calls up the mayors. He says to them that everyone knows housing is hell after eight years of the Liberal government. He asks if he can go to the town and take credit for homes that it were already going to build. He then will write a big cheque for it if the town does that. He shows up and notes that there was already a subdivision being built. If the town gives the minister credit for that, in exchange he will stroke a big cheque for $40 million with which the government can build more bureaucracy. Then the bureaucrats will be happy, the politicians will be happy and everyone else will be miserable. That is what he has been doing.

We know that this is not leading to more housing construction, because housing starts this year are down 9%. Yes, he can show up and say, “Look at these 24,000 homes, which were already going to be built”, but the overall housing starts, the number of shovels put into ground, is down 9%. Two years after the so-called housing accelerator was created, not a single solitary new house has been completed; a $4-billion housing program that does not build housing. My plan would create a strict, mathematical formula that pays for results.

The second principle is that we will require federally funded transit stations to be surrounded by housing so people can live right next to the bus or train. I have been right across the country and countless stations do not have housing. In fact, in Winnipeg, the gatekeepers actually stepped in to block 2,000 new homes right next to a transit station that was built for those homes. They had to get slapped down in the courts. What did the Liberals do? They gave more money to the incompetent politicians at Winnipeg city hall to block housing for the people who needed it.

I am going to put all the federal funds for transit stations into a trust. The city will not get the money for the transit station until there are apartments occupied all around the station. That way they will have to hurry up and approve the housing if they want to get that money. We will, again, pay for results.

Next, the bill would require that the federal minister of public works do a full inventory and come to the House within months to announce all the buildings that would be sold in order to build housing. The Prime Minister promised that eight years ago. In eight years, with all the 37,000 federal buildings, the 6.2 million square metres of office space, and the thousands of acres, how many homes has he managed to build on that federal land and in those federal buildings? I asked him and he did not know either. It is 13; not 13,000, not 1,300. My bill would make it mandatory by law that the minister come here with a plan to sell off 15% of all federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land so that we can build on that land that is being used for nothing.

On the fourth principle, federal bureaucrats will have to get their act together as well. I was speaking with a builder who builds beautiful environmentally friendly homes and apartments in Atlantic Canada. He is in the process of building a carbon-neutral building right now. It will be the greenest apartment complex in the world. He had to wait two years for CMHC to approve the financing on that building.

The benchmark is supposed to be 60 days, so here is how life is going to work around here when I am prime minister with what is in this bill. CMHC bureaucrats will have to hit the 60-day target within six months. If they do not, I am cutting their pay in half. If they do not do it within a year, I am firing the entire executive. It is right in the bill. That is life. If a barber does not cut hair well, they get fired. If a mechanic has an engine block fall out, they get fired.

In the real world, when people do not do their job, they do not get bonuses. That is not how life works under the Prime Minister for the senior, six-figure bureaucracy. This bill would put an end to that. We are going to pay for results, not for bureaucracy and the privilege of incompetent bureaucrats who make life miserable and costly for everyone else.

The building homes not bureaucracy act is common sense, the common sense of the common people united for our common home: their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Housing]

Mr. Speaker, the thing I think the hon. member left out of his speech is that under his watch as the so-called housing minister, there were 800,000 fewer affordable housing units.

Why go to war with mayors over infrastructure? Infrastructure is the key to getting more houses built. Why would he cut that? Inevitably, he will see fewer homes getting built.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, this will have to be a case for Unsolved Mysteries. He claims that when I was minister, 800,000 homes went missing. What happened to them? Did aliens from outer space come and just pluck these homes? What has remained? Are the basements still there? Where did they go? These guys are unbelievable. It sounds like the member is having an LSD flashback or something.

Let us talk about when I was housing minister. Rent cost half as much. It cost $950 to rent the average one-bedroom. Now it is about $2,000. The average mortgage payment on a newly purchased average home was $1,400. Now it is $3,500, an increase of 150%. The average down payment was a very modest $20,000. That was my record.

We are not proposing to cut infrastructure money. We are proposing to link dollars for cities to the number of homes their bureaucrats and mayors allow to be completed. It is an incentive. Those who build more homes will get more money. That is the real world. That is common sense. Let us bring it home.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will tell the leader of the Conservatives exactly what happened to those 800,000 units: The rent went up from $750 a month to over $2,000. That is what happened. That is where those 800,000 units went. That is how the Conservatives lost affordable rental apartments for people who needed them.

In the bill the member put forward, there is zero mention of social housing or the need. The Conservative leader talked about Singapore. It has 80% social housing. What does Canada have? It has 3.5%. The Conservatives cut the co-op program and gutted social housing. That is why we have this crisis.

Why are the Conservatives not supporting communities in building social housing and co-op housing?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, people want more homes and more affordable homes; they do not want nationalized, government-controlled homes.

When I was minister, the average rent was $950 and now it is over $2,000 under the NDP-Liberal government. When I was minister, the average mortgage payment on an average newly purchased house was $1,400. Now it is $3,500. Housing was not just affordable; it was cheap when I was minister, and Canadians could afford to buy a house.

Under the NDP government in B.C., B.C. is probably the most unaffordable housing market in the world. The NDP government tried the Soviet-style experiment in the NDP's heartland of B.C. and we know the result. It is pain, it is misery and it is tent cities. We do not need a Soviet-style takeover of housing. We need Canadians to have a chance to own their own homes, and that is what they will have when I am prime minister.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

I would like to once again issue a reminder so that we can start the week off right. When the member for Vancouver East has the floor to ask a question, I would ask all members to remain silent so that we can hear her, and I would ask her to do the same when her question is being answered.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to hear what the leader of the official opposition has to say. He seems to have a magic wand this morning. It is funny. We are currently examining a bill that he thinks will fix everything. He found new culprits to blame for the housing crisis: municipalities and mayors. That is the Conservative Party's approach. It is dangerous to accuse people who go to work every morning to try to improve things in their communities.

The Conservatives are talking about bypassing bureaucracy, but what they are proposing would do exactly the opposite. My colleague is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He wants to add new targets and objectives and he wants to make all the rules for municipalities. I would like to remind my colleague from Carleton of the rules. Section 92 of the Constitution—

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

I do not want to interrupt the member, but his time is almost up. Would he please ask his question so that the Leader of the Opposition has enough time to answer?

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my colleague this. Why does he not respect the Constitution? Why does he not respect provincial autonomy? Why does he want the federal government to dictate the rules of the game when Quebeckers never asked it to?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the law dictates nothing to the municipalities. It does not dictate rules, only results.

The federal government is already giving $5 billion to the municipalities. That means the federal level is already involved, and I simply want to match up those dollars to results. I do not want to pay the mayor of Montreal to prevent the construction of 24,000 homes, as she did. We are not going to give money to municipalities only to have them block housing construction. We are going to encourage them to build affordable and private housing that Quebeckers can afford to buy.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Housing]

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be here talking about housing. The Conservatives talk a really good game. During question period and during the last 15 minutes, there has been passionate discussion of housing. However, when the rubber meets the road, they are nowhere to be found.

The Leader of the Opposition just glossed over his loss of 800,000 units of housing. When someone questioned him on it, he had the gall to answer with insults. The reality is that there was no action on housing in the decades previous. We find ourselves in a crisis that is decades in the making, but we are ready and are up to the task.

There is something the leader said that I do want to correct. He said that housing starts were down. Housing starts are actually up 4%: 20% in Toronto and 98% in the city of Montreal.

This is fundamentally an important issue for all Canadians, and what does the Leader of the Opposition want to do? He wants to go to war with municipalities. However, municipalities understand the crisis before them. It is one thing to come up here and pound a desk and say they are going to take away infrastructure money from municipalities. That does not work.

We need to work with municipalities. We need to focus on infrastructure, because infrastructure is what is going to get housing built. We cannot just take an empty field and plop houses down on it. The aliens the Leader of the Opposition talks about that took away housing are not going to deliver them on lands, on empty fields. There needs to be sewage. There needs to be water. There needs to be electricity. There need to be all of the services that are required. That is forgotten.

The Conservatives would rather have a big speech, puff up their chests, pound their desks and ignore the reality of getting housing built. It is about rolling up our sleeves. It is about getting the job done. They are not interested in that. They are just interested in slogans.

Their plan is to cut funding to municipalities and increase the tax on rental construction. The Leader of the Opposition spent the first few minutes of his speech talking about taxes. He left out the part where he is going to raise the GST on purpose-built rental construction. It is shocking.

I would like to point to a housing expert, Mike Moffatt, who said of the Conservative plan, “This is a sign that the federal Conservatives don't understand the urgency or scale of the housing crisis.” Again, they pound their fists. They yell. They scream. They jump up and down. They call members names. They heckle. However, they have no plan. They have smug comments and smug heckles, but no plan to actually get the job done.

They can look Canadians in the eye and say they will do it, but they are not going to do anything to do it. They are going to yell at people and cut their salaries and then starve municipalities of infrastructure funds. That is all they have. That is not going to get anything built. Their plan is to do less than what they were doing when they were in government, which is nothing. It is shocking that they want to take steps backwards on this file.

I look to cities across the country. I have met with mayors and municipal officials. I have met with municipal officials in my own community. There are infrastructure challenges. In the city of St. Catharines, sewer upgrades are required to get more housing built. We can approve a permit for a 20-storey building, but if there is no sewer capacity, we cannot build it.

I know it is not fun or sexy to talk about sewer capacity in this place, although some people may think it is very on point to be talking about sewer capacity in the House of Commons, but these are the important things that are required to get housing built. If the leader just wants permits to be approved, maybe that is a great thing, but if infrastructure money is not going to be applied and the federal government is not going to be there, then the Conservatives do not understand the depths of this crisis.

This is fundamentally a crisis not only of housing, but also of infrastructure. We need to do more, and we need to be partners with municipalities and provinces. The more partners we have, the more housing we can get built.

We are ready for this. The housing accelerator fund is already seeing results. We have had partners across the country. We have seen that, in Kelowna, Halifax, London and Hamilton, housing is getting built. We are making more housing legal in this country. The Minister of Housing is accomplishing this with as of right four units housing being built in these municipalities.

This will allow for greater housing built for generations in this community with the housing accelerator fund, and to also fund those infrastructure needs and those bottlenecks. Again, they talk a good game. We can pound our desks, and we can yell and scream, but the member did not mention the bottlenecks in our system and how he is going to accomplish that, apart from going to war with the mayors, which is something I do not think Canadians want us to do. They want us working together. They want us to come up with a plan for more housing and work together.

I genuinely look forward to more of these announcements and to see more municipalities step back from NIMBY policies, which have plagued municipalities across this country, and ask how we get more housing built. I know in my hometown, there are many ambitious councillors who want to see that work happen, and I am looking forward to hopefully making announcements there soon.

Over the course of generations, we have seen communities across the countries make decisions that actively restrict the ability of communities to build houses for their residents. It creates challenges for building livable communities, but the Government of Canada has stepped up to directly support more housing. We are actively working with all partners in the government and private sector to solve this generational challenge.

Again, we did not hear from the Leader of the Opposition how we are going to work together on housing. He is just going to yell at bureaucrats. He is going to get into fights with mayors. That is not how we get anything built in this country. I guess that explains his record as the so-called housing minister under the Harper government, when nothing got built and there were 800,000 fewer units of affordable housing when the Conservatives left office.

Through the national housing strategy, we have seen housing get built or repaired. We have had 126,000 units of housing repaired and 113,000 new homes. The Conservatives would tell us that they did not support that and they would not support that. They would already be 200,000 more units behind if they were in charge. Adding that to the list, that would have been a million units fewer of affordable housing if they had continued to be in charge and if the member had continued to be the minister.

Things are changing. There is an understanding. We are going to continue to work with our municipal partners across the board, and that is why we have brought forward legislation to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing. What are the Conservatives doing on that? A tangible thing they can actually do is help expedite this. They are stalling and delaying, and are not working with the government.

The Conservatives talk a good game, and I am sure there will be many more passionate speeches about how the Conservatives care, but when it comes to tangible things they can do, like voting for the affordability legislation before this Parliament, they are no where to be found. They are silent on the issue, and silent on any effort to actually approve homes. I get that their nature is to want to get into a fight. They want to yell, scream and hurl insults, and come up with slogans. I think their environmental plan is based on recycling slogans, but slogans do not get anything built.

Unfortunately, that is where the Conservatives are. We are ready to stand up and work with municipal and provincial partners. We are going to get housing built. This plan is half-baked at best. It is not going to work. We are going to get the job done.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-356, and I have a lot to say about this bill. In my speech, I will try to address first the Conservative position and then that of the Bloc Québécois. If I have time, I will speak briefly on homelessness.

Bill C-356 reiterates the Conservative leader’s rhetoric on the housing crisis. In his view, the municipalities are responsible for the housing crisis by tying up real estate development in useless red tape. Let us recall that the Conservatives were among the first to play politics on this issue by directly attacking municipal democracy when they stated, during their opposition day on May 2, 2023, that they wanted to penalize municipalities that do not build enough housing.

The Bloc Québécois has long held that those best positioned to know the housing needs in their respective jurisdictions are the provinces, Quebec and the municipalities. The federal government has no business interfering. Moreover, let us keep in mind that housing is the exclusive jurisdiction of Quebec and the provinces. Should our colleagues need a reminder, I invite them to refer to subsections 92(13) and 92(16) of the Constitution, which give the provinces exclusive jurisdiction over property and civil rights as well as matters of a local nature. The federal government therefore has no right to interfere.

Let us keep in mind the importance of municipal policy, the importance of this level of government and its closeness to the people. Municipalities know their areas and the actual needs of their citizens best. They are the ones that provide direct services and organize their living environment and their neighbourhoods.

When the Conservatives say that municipalities and cities are the ones that delay the process, that is nonsense. They call the phenomenon “not in my backyard”. We believe that the Conservatives prefer to dodge public consultations that help obtain social licence by communicating effectively with the neighbours of a given project. Instead, they prefer to give a free pass to real estate developers. To their mind, the public consultations that cities and citizens are calling for are a terrible scourge that harms everyone and blocks the construction of new homes. Nonetheless, the Conservatives should understand why public consultations exist; they exist particularly because we do not build just anything, anywhere, willy-nilly.

When it was elected in 2011, the Conservative government did not see fit to increase the budget to assist households still deemed to be inadequately housed, letting it stagnate at its 2011 level, or $250 million a year. When it introduced its 2015 budget, that government chose not to extend the funding for social housing stock. Bill C-356 blames the entire housing shortage on municipalities, but this crisis would not be nearly as serious as it is now, if, under the Conservatives, the federal government had not withdrawn funding for the construction of social housing.

The bill aims to control municipalities. It is an irresponsible bill that denies any federal responsibility in the matter and confirms that the Conservative Party will do nothing to address the crisis if it comes into power.

It is also a bill that offers no solutions. There are lots of condos on the market at $3,000 a month. What is lacking is housing that people can afford. That is where the government should focus its efforts. This notion, however, is completely absent from the Conservative leader’s vision. Bill C-356 gives developers the keys to the city so they can build more $3,000-a-month condos.

In short, the bill’s solution to the housing crisis is to let the big real estate developers do anything, anywhere, in any way they see fit. The populist solution offered by the bill ignores the fact that people do not only live in housing, but also in neighbourhoods and cities. That means we need infrastructure for water and sewers, for roads, and for public and private services, such as schools and grocery stores. Cities have a duty to impose conditions and to ensure that their citizens are well served.

Bill C-356 is also disrespectful and divisive. Since 1973, under the Robert Bourassa government, the Quebec Act respecting the Ministère du Conseil exécutif has prevented Ottawa from dealing directly with Quebec municipalities. The Canada-Quebec Infrastructure Framework Agreement reflects this reality, stipulating that Ottawa has no right to intervene in establishing priorities.

What Bill C-356 proposes is to tear up this agreement. Considering that the agreement took 27 months to negotiate, Bill-356 promises two years of bickering, during which all projects will be paralyzed. In the middle of the housing crisis, this is downright disastrous.

If housing starts in a city do not increase as required by Ottawa, Bill C‑356 proposes cutting gas tax and public transit transfers by 1% for each percentage point shortfall under the target it unilaterally set. For example, housing starts in Quebec dropped 60% this year instead of increasing 15%. If Bill C‑356 were in place, this would mean a reduction in transfer payments of about 75%.

Bill C‑356 goes even further, proposing that financing for urban transit be withheld if cities do not meet the 15% target it unilaterally set. This policy would result in a greater use of automobiles, since transit would only be built after the fact, not in conjunction with new housing developments.

Furthermore, the Bloc Québécois already has a wide range of proposals for solutions to deal with the housing crisis across Quebec and Canada. First, we welcomed the Canada-Quebec housing agreement signed in 2020. This agreement is valued at $3.7 billion, half of which comes from the federal government. However, we lamented the fact that negotiations for this agreement spanned three years. Funds that should have gone to Quebec were frozen until the two levels of government found common ground. The Bloc deplores the federal government's constant need to dictate how Quebec spends its money. Quebec wants its piece of the pie, no strings attached. If it had gotten it in 2017, Quebec could have started the construction and renovation of several housing projects, including social housing, three years sooner. This definitely would have eased the current housing crisis.

Unconditional transfers would greatly simplify the funding process. The multitude of different agreements creates more red tape and delays the actual payment of the sums in question. The Bloc also reiterated how important it is that federal funding address first and foremost the needs for social and deeply affordable housing, which are the most critical. Here is what we proposed during the last election:

The Bloc Québécois proposes that Ottawa gradually reinvest in social, community and deeply affordable housing until it reaches 1% of its total annual revenue and implement a consistent and predictable funding stream instead of ad hoc agreements.

The Bloc Québécois proposes that federal surplus properties be repurposed for social, community and deeply affordable housing as a priority in an effort to address the housing crisis.

The Bloc Québécois will propose a tax on real estate speculation to counter artificial overheating of the housing market.

The Bloc Québécois will propose a reform of the home buyers' plan to account for the many different realities and family situations of Quebec households.

The Bloc Québécois proposes that the federal government undertake a financial restructuring of programs under the national housing strategy to create an acquisition fund. This fund would enable co-ops and non-profits to purchase housing buildings that are already on the market, ensure they remain affordable and turn them into social, community and deeply affordable housing.

The Bloc Québécois will ensure that Quebec receives its fair share of funding, without conditions, from federal programs to combat homelessness, while also calling for the funding released in the past year during the pandemic to be made permanent.

In fact, I floated these ideas during the last election campaign in a regional debate in the Eastern Townships. The groups really liked the Bloc's recommendations. However, they lamented the fact that both the Conservatives and the Liberals did not attend the debate. Their absence did not go unnoticed. When parties say they want to make housing a priority but do not show up for the debates, what message does that send?

I am going to take a few moments to quickly talk about homelessness, a phenomenon that is on the rise throughout Quebec and Canada. We are now seeing that homelessness is becoming regionalized. In 2018, 80% of homeless people were in Montreal, compared to 60% in 2022. I am seeing the effects of this in Granby, which is in Shefford, the riding I represent. It is having an impact. The increase in homelessness is caused by issues stemming from the financialization of housing and real estate speculation. All of that reduces the availability of affordable housing.

In conclusion, the Bloc Québécois will be voting against Bill C-356.

I would like to add one last thing. Families and seniors affected by the housing crisis need realistic solutions for social, community and deeply affordable housing that meets their needs. Granby and the broader Shefford community are already concerned about social housing and certainly do not need to be hit with another example of Conservative misinformation. Our communities are capable enough to handle this themselves.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, Canada is faced with a housing crisis. The crisis did not happen overnight. In fact, it began 30 years ago. People cannot afford to buy or rent a home. Canadians are living in cars, and homeless encampments are popping up in communities big and small throughout the country. In Vancouver East, we have a permanent encampment. Earlier this month, the metro Vancouver homelessness count showed a 32% increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness since 2020, with 33% of those people being indigenous. Rent has skyrocketed. Young people have no hope of ever owning their home.

Predictably, the Conservatives are suggesting that helping wealthy investors and developers would solve the housing crisis for Canadians who cannot afford to buy or rent the very homes that these wealthy investors are putting on the market. It is no joke: The Leader of the Opposition talks about the elite and the gatekeepers; he should look in the mirror and at those around him. Half of those on the Conservatives' national council are lobbyists for big pharma, big tech, oil, anti-union corporations and, we can guess what else, real estate companies. The Conservative leader is the ultimate lackey for wealthy CEOs, whose main job is to help perpetuate corporate greed.

The Conservative leader is not who he says he is. He wants people to believe that he cares about the housing crisis, people and their families and what they are faced with. If that is the case, why is he completely silent about the wealthy investors who are displacing renters by renovicting them so that they can jack up rent? The Conservative leader's housing bill does not even mention the very people who are in desperate need of a home that they can afford. The bill offers no solutions to those who are being renovicted so that wealthy investors can jack up rent and increase their profits.

As part of the Harper government, the Conservative leader had an influential role in the administration. He sat at the cabinet table. He was even the minister of housing. What happened during that time? Not only did the Conservatives gut housing programs, but they also cancelled the national co-op housing program; in addition, right under his nose, Canada lost 800,000 units of rental apartments that cost $750 a month. While tenants were displaced, wealthy investors and corporate landlords stuffed their pockets.

What did the Conservative leader do? He cheered on the private sector: the people who are benefiting from Canada's housing crisis. He celebrated the fact that the Liberals gave special tax treatments to real estate investment trusts, whose business model is just to maximize profit. Even now, there is mounting evidence that wealthy investors are displacing tenants and jacking up rent. The Conservatives are still on the side of wealthy investors. We can talk about gatekeepers; it is gatekeeping for wealthy investors.

As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” This is just another Conservative plan to line the pockets of their friends and insiders. While they do it, they also plan to kick municipalities in the shins by slashing funding that communities need. This is just what the Conservatives did before: They cut funding to housing programs, downloaded housing to local governments and then blamed them for not delivering the homes that people need. We should make no mistake: It was the Conservatives who cancelled the national co-op housing program and cut funding for social housing in 1993.

The Liberals, of course, are no better. After promising during the election that they would restore the cut funding, they then went and cancelled the national affordable housing program. Much to the glee of the wealthy investors and corporate landlords, both Liberal and Conservative governments let the private sector run the show for 30 years. Both parties relied on the private market to deliver the housing Canadians need, and we can see where it got us. Rents are up to $2,600 a month in Toronto and to almost $3,000 in Vancouver. Hundreds and thousands of people experience homelessness annually. Shelters are underfunded and over capacity.

I have met schoolchildren who are worried about their housing situation and women fleeing domestic violence who have to return to abusers because they are locked out of the market and the housing supports are not there for them. I have worked with families whose children were apprehended, just because they could not meet their housing needs; they could not afford the rent.

The wealthy investors and developers that the Conservatives want to give a blank cheque to are the same people who created a housing market that not even the middle class can afford to compete in. When the Leader of the Opposition said people were living in a shack, it was actually regular housing that people live in. Across the country, financialized landlords are pursuing aggressive rent increases and displacing long-time tenants, including seniors on fixed incomes, as a business tactic.

Enough is enough. More for-profit solutions are not going to change the course. There is a glaring absence of any measures to ensure that homes built are actually affordable to everyday people in the Conservative leader's bill. There is zero mention of the need to build up Canada's social and co-op housing stock in the Conservative leader's blueprint to fix Canada's housing crisis. He wants us to believe that the wealthy investors will suddenly wake up and decide that they are not driven by profit anymore.

It is a delusional fantasy. It will not happen in a million years. There is zero common sense in that belief.

We have seen the results of the trickle-down theory of boosting for-profit housing over the last 30 years. The 30 years of underinvestment from Liberal and Conservative governments has resulted in the loss of over 500,000 units of affordable housing that would otherwise have been built today.

Conservatives and Liberals slashed programs that built and protected affordable housing in 1993, and the next Conservative government lost 800,000 units of low-cost rental apartments priced at $750 a month. They allowed wealthy investors to buy up the low-cost rental apartments and jack up the rent to maximize profit.

The result is that Canadians are locked out of neighbourhoods they love, where their family, friends and jobs are. To be clear, housing prices also went up, not down, under the Conservative government. There is no question: The Liberals are no better. Canadians have lost another 250,000 homes under the Liberals. That is over one million homes lost while both the Liberals and Conservatives were at the helm. Neither party will even acknowledge the need to stop the loss of existing low-cost rental apartments to wealthy investors and corporate landlords.

Steve Pomeroy found that, on average, we have been losing 15 affordable homes to rent erosion for every one unit built. Hamilton is losing 26 affordable homes for every new one created. The NDP takes a different view. We believe in investing in people. We believe in putting people before profits. We are saying that we should keep the private sector's hands off public lands.

Doug Ford promised to deliver housing. He made backroom deals to carve up the Greenbelt, to make his developer friends even richer. He bulldozed local planning, only to backtrack months later. What does he have to show for it? He has three cabinet resignations, a criminal investigation by the RCMP and no affordable housing.

Unused federal buildings should be leased to non-profits to provide housing for people in perpetuity. It needs to stay in public hands. Instead of privatizing Canada's federal lands for wealthy investors and corporate landlords, they should be returned to the first nations, Inuit and Métis people that they were taken from. The legacy of colonialism has led to drastic overrepresentation of first nations, Inuit and Métis people experiencing chronic homelessness and living in tent encampments.

This has to stop. Lands should either be returned to indigenous peoples, the first peoples, or they should be kept in public hands through non-profits so that we can get that housing built for people. In terms of suggesting that we could rely on the market to address the housing crisis, we have already seen that play before. This is what the Conservative leader is advocating. Just now, he suggested that, oh my goodness, building social housing and co-op housing is a Soviet-style model. He should give his head a shake. He should actually go into the communities and check out the social housing and the co-op housing. They are models that are to be envied. That is what we have to do address the housing crisis, not just strictly rely on the market.

It is time for action, not more of the same.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Carleton, our next prime minister, for sharing his time with me on proposing his important private member's bill.

Those watching at home today will probably be familiar with our interventions during question period. Every day, our Conservative team stands up on behalf of everyday Canadians who are suffering after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government. Our job, of course, is to hold ministers to account and try—

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

The hon. member for Vancouver East is rising on a point of order.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I was here for the speech by the Leader of the Opposition. He did not mention, at any point in time, that he was sharing his slot with anyone, so I seek—

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

I thank the hon. member for Vancouver East for her intervention. However, I would like to reassure her that the member for Carleton is not sharing his time with anyone. It is this member's turn in the debate schedule for this bill.

The hon. member for Thornhill.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, our job here in the House of Commons is to hold ministers to account and to try to get answers to why so many things have gone wrong here in Canada. However, every day, members on the other side of the House get up and insist that Canadians have never had it so good, and that things are going so well in this country. It is as if they do not talk to anyone at home. To make their point, they bring meaningless, manufactured statistics that are supposed to show how great they really are. In fact, the statistics show how out of touch and clueless they truly are.

One of Liberals' favourite tactics is to talk about the global forces, other countries and wars in distant lands, to pass the buck from Ottawa to someone else, to somewhere else and to something else. We are talking about housing today, like we have been for many months and even years, but the Liberals still do not seem to get the message that the cost of a home in this country is just too high for anyone. Therefore, I am going to try to put it in terms that they would understand, showing exactly how out of control our housing crisis has become. I am going to take some prices and see what someone can buy here and what they can buy elsewhere, which has the added benefit of showing Canadians that this is a uniquely Canadian problem, at least in scope.

I will start in Toronto. A two-bedroom house covered in graffiti, in the Kensington Market neighbourhood, is on the market for $2.8 million. The very same amount of money can buy a 20-bedroom castle on five acres in Scotland. It has 45 rooms, a movie theatre, a botanical garden, a pond and even a private beach, and it has the added bonus of being in a country with no carbon tax. If someone does not want to live in the big smoke, I can understand. In fact, I do not really understand why people do not want to live there, but I can understand why they would have their preferences. In Kitchener, there is another two-bedroom home up for a steal, $1.8 million. Here is a spoiler alert: It is not a steal at all. It is a tiny property with a little backyard and hardly enough room to raise a family. It costs $1.8 million, and if someone wants a bit more breathing room, maybe they could consider spending that $1.8 million on a lake-facing castle on a four-acre property in Sweden. There would be much more space for everyone.

If people are still not convinced, let us go to Vancouver, where the member opposite is from, where a three-bedroom house sells for $4.6 million. A buyer would also get to pay the highest gas prices in Canada and some of the highest taxes. They would get to drive to work in an open-air, government-supplied drug market, which the NDP-Liberal government supports. It is absolutely stunning. If they prefer more peace and quiet or maybe want a bit of a deal, there is an 11th-century castle in England up for sale for $4.4 million. It comes with 32 acres of land and 22,000 square feet of living space, including 17 bedrooms. It is “an idyllic retreat” with farmland and even its own creek, with fishing rights included.

I could go on and on: France, Honduras, Argentina or Wisconsin. The fact of the matter is that Canada's housing market is so broken, and the Liberals are the ones who broke it, with the help of the NDP, of course. Housing prices have doubled in just eight years. A mortgage payment has doubled. The average income needed to buy a home in Ontario is over $175,000, which is much more than the average salary, as we all know. No amount of partisan spin can minimize the fact that it is now cheaper to buy a castle in Europe than a family home in Canada. If that does not convince the Liberals that home prices are unattainable to the average Canadian, I do not know what would. We have to ask, what are people supposed to do?

Nine in 10 of the young people looking to break into the market, pay off their student loans, start a job and maybe start a family do not believe they will ever own a home in this country. There are newcomers looking to Canada for opportunity and a life better than the one they left, like my parents did 48 years ago. Everyone else is struggling under repeated, double-digit increases in the cost of rent; it has doubled too in just eight years. It used to take 25 years to pay off a mortgage. In Toronto, it now takes 25 year to save up for a down payment on a single-family home.

The answer, of course, is that they cannot do anything, because affordability is too far out of reach. Despite working 50, 60 or 70 hours a week at multiple jobs and cutting back on the things they want, people are getting left behind. They are losing hope and giving up on the Canadian dream that was on offer even eight years ago. Things were not like this eight years ago, and they are not going to be like this when the Liberals are gone.

Our mission is to bring that back: to ensure that one can get a good home in a safe neighbourhood through hard work, dedication and savings, which is the way it always was in Canada, and to make Canada the place where we do not have to compare the price of an average home to that of a luxurious castle in Europe to make the point.

It is going to take a new government with a new vision to do that. We cannot and should not trust the same people who got us into this mess to get us out of it. Specifically, we should not trust the same people who paid $54 million for a useless border app to companies that did not even do the work on the app, who lost track of nearly a million people, who have students living under bridges and in tents, who cannot bring themselves to put repeat violent offenders behind bars and who cannot do anything close to competently. Our party is the only one with a common-sense plan to put Canadians back in control of their own lives and return the promise of Canada that always was—

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

I am sorry to have to interrupt the hon. member for Thornhill, but the time provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business has now expired and the order is dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the Order Paper.

The hon. member will have three minutes the next time this matter is before the House.

The House resumed from October 30, 2023, consideration of the motion that Bill C-356, An Act respecting payments by Canada and requirements in respect of housing and to amend certain other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Housing]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour, as always, to rise in the House of Commons to debate and discuss the issues of the day. One of those issues, arguably the most pressing issue certainly in my community and in communities across the country, is housing. We have a private member's bill that has been introduced by the Conservative leader, which stands, as he has said, as the Conservative plan on housing. Unfortunately, for he and his party, it leaves much to be desired.

On this side of the House, we have recognized the crisis that exists. That crisis is underpinned by a supply crisis. Therefore, to understand what this means for the country and how we bring costs down both for prospective homebuyers and for renters, we have to find a way to add supply, and that is exactly what this government has done.

First, let me highlight the housing accelerator fund, which my friends on the other side would do well to learn from, with all due respect to them. This, at the very core of it, requires co-operation. It requires co-operation between the federal government and municipalities. Municipalities are central to this.

Last week in question period in the House, I was asked by a Conservative member about what they call “gatekeepers”. The Conservatives always use the term in the pejorative. They always want to insult and engage that way. The reality is that those whom they call “gatekeepers” are municipal councillors, mayors and public servants at the local level who are responsible for zoning.

As we know, zoning is fundamental to dealing with the housing crisis, because that is how we get more homes built, namely, adding more missing middle housing to the equation. That includes row houses, mid-rise apartments, duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes. All of these examples have a place in this discussion and debate. We need more supply and we will get more supply through embracing missing middle housing, and the housing accelerator fund does that. The reality is that while zoning is certainly not under the federal jurisdiction, it is completely in the municipal purview to deal with.

We are incenting changes across the country. No less than 179 agreements have been finalized with municipalities to push them so that we have more homes built. The reality is that in these communities, we will see more homes built. We will see federal dollars put on the table as a result of our saying to municipalities that if they change their zoning, there are federal dollars available for more affordable housing, for infrastructure for housing purposes and for public transit for housing purposes. In my community in London, let me highlight that office buildings that are vacant can now be potentially used for housing as a result of a $74-million investment that this government has made in London. London has agreed to embrace a different approach when it comes to zoning.

I have talked about renters. We do need to increase the supply of apartments to make rent more affordable. That is why we have lifted GST from the construction of purpose-built rentals. With all due respect to my Conservative colleagues, one of the glaring weaknesses of this private member's bill is that it would keep the GST on the construction of purpose-built rentals. It is astounding to me that the Leader of the Opposition, who, throughout his very long career in public life, has campaigned to cut taxes at every opportunity, does not believe that. It is all a charade. It is all an act, because if he actually believed it, he would lift GST from the construction costs of purpose-built rentals, just like this government has. It is unbelievable that he would go in this direction.

If he does not want the advice of the government, that is fine, and I know he will not take it. However, he should listen to key advocates, like the Canadian Homebuilders' Association for instance, that has for years now called for this change. The government has moved in this direction and the Conservatives have not supported it. They have obstructed this measure, in fact, through a variety of ways, and they have not answered for that at all.

With respect to federal lands, we have an opportunity here to seize the moment when it comes to using more federal lands to build more housing to ensure greater affordability. As I said, this is about dealing with a supply crisis. What do we see? The government very appropriately recognizing that, between the two options of selling federal land that is either underused or not used at all or leasing it, a leasing approach would allow for something that is much more promising. In that case, we can ensure affordability as much as possible. With the other option, obviously, affordability would be out of the government's hands once the sale has taken place.

The opposition has said nothing about this at all. It has also said nothing about how it would deal with development charges, which, if we are honest, are attacks on home building. There is no doubt about that

I see the housing critic for the Conservatives in the House today. We work well together at the committee that is responsible for housing. He has brought up, quite rightly, the issue of development charges at that committee. Unfortunately, there is no plan on the other side, and certainly not in this private member's bill, on how they would deal with development charges.

We have made clear to provinces that, as a condition of receiving infrastructure dollars from this federal government, there would have to be a freeze implemented on development charges according to April 2024 levels. Home builders have asked for that for a long time. Recently, I engaged with home builders in my community of London who were quite excited to see this change, because, as I said, development charges stand as an attack on home building. In the context of high interest rates and high costs for labour and construction supplies, among other factors that stand in the way of greater homebuilding, we have to put measures on the table that incent, that provide a green light to those in the construction sector so that they can build more, and this would do exactly that.

Finally, homelessness is absolutely fundamental in the discussion on housing. We cannot talk about housing without talking about the most vulnerable members of our communities, who unfortunately find themselves in a very difficult position now. The Conservatives have not brought up housing very much in the past few months, but they brought it up a lot last week, and that is fine. It is good to bring up the issues of the day, especially this one, in the House whenever there is an opportunity, but the Conservatives have tried to lay the blame of the homelessness crisis on the federal government, as if the federal government caused it.

Let us be clear on one thing. It is our responsibility to deal with homelessness. It is our responsibility to engage constructively and co-operatively with not-for-profit organizations that want to be part of the solution, with provincial governments that want to be part of the solution and with municipal governments that want to be right there working with us. There are many examples of where that can work and is working. I salute the efforts of Premier David Eby in British Columbia. I salute the efforts of mayors across the country who are part of this, and not-for-profit organizations. However, the opposition, by simplifying the debate, actually is not contributing to it in any meaningful way.

If opposition members actually go to the encampments that exist across the land, leave the camera at home and not politicize this issue, and talk to the people in encampments, they would find that years of trauma underpin the inhabitants' reality, trauma in the form of sexual or physical physical abuse that led to a mental health crisis has led to homelessness, or it is the pandemic. The pandemic and its impact with respect to increased costs and the lack of supply that we find has pushed many of our fellow citizens to encampments as well.

What do we do in that context? We can either politically profit off the unfortunate and unacceptable circumstances faced by people or we can put tangible solutions on the table to address the crisis. That is why this government has allocated $250 million in the most recent budget to address homelessness, specifically encampments. There is nothing from the other side, zero.

Finally, if the Conservatives want to get serious about housing, let us work together. Are they capable of that? I do not think they are. I think the other parties might be, but I do not think the Conservatives are. When I hear the Leader of the Opposition describe co-op housing, and let us remember 250,000 Canadians live in co-ops across the country, as Soviet-style housing, that is unacceptable.

I see continued efforts to obstruct the government's agenda to get more homes built. I see, as I said, the fact that the Leader of the Opposition does not want to lift taxes, GST specifically, off the construction of purpose-built rentals for the middle class. At the same time, and maybe it is not surprising, when he was housing minister, he was responsible for the construction of six affordable homes; he lost 800,000 units.

The Conservatives do not care about housing. They care about profiting politically so that they can add to their fundraising or add to whatever it is over there. They are not serious. We are serious.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise this morning to speak to Bill C-356, an act respecting payments by Canada and requirements in respect of housing and to amend certain other acts, introduced by the leader of the official opposition.

On reading Bill C‑356, it is obvious that the bill blames the entire housing shortage on municipalities, but this crisis would not be nearly as serious as it is now if the federal government had not decided, under Harper, to withdraw funding for the construction of social housing.

The bill seeks to exercise control over the municipalities by preventing them from taking measures to protect their farmland, from setting a minimum percentage of social housing, or from protecting their built heritage, on pain of having their funding slashed, including funding for public transit development. This bill denies any federal responsibility in the matter and confirms that the Conservative Party will do nothing to address the crisis if it comes into power.

It is also a bill that offers no solutions. The market is not lacking in luxury condos. What is lacking is housing that people can afford. That is where the government should focus its efforts. This notion, however, is completely absent from the Conservative leader's vision. Bill C‑356 gives developers the keys to the city so they can build more condos that rent for $3,000 a month or more.

In short, the bill's solution to the housing crisis is to let the big real estate developers do anything, anywhere and anyhow. The populist solution offered by the bill ignores the fact that people do not only live in housing, but also in neighbourhoods and cities. That means they need infrastructure for water and sewers, for roads, and for public and private services, such as schools and grocery stores. Cities have a duty to ensure that their residents are well served and to lay down conditions.

This is also a bill that will cause bickering. As members know, since 1973, Quebec's Act respecting the Ministère du Conseil exécutif has prevented the federal government from dealing directly with Quebec municipalities. The Canada-Quebec infrastructure framework agreement reflects this reality, stipulating that the federal government has no right to intervene in the establishment of priorities. What Bill C‑356 would do is tear up this agreement. Although it took 27 months to negotiate the agreement, Bill C‑356 sets the stage for two years of bickering, during which all projects will be paralyzed. In the middle of a housing crisis, this would be downright disastrous.

If a municipality's housing starts do not increase as required by Ottawa, Bill C‑356 would cut its gas tax transfer and public transit transfer by 1% for every percentage point shortfall from the target the bill unilaterally sets. For example, in Quebec, housing starts are down 60% this year rather than up 15%, so transfers would have been reduced by about 75% if Bill C‑356 had been in effect. That is unacceptable.

Bill C‑356 goes even further by withholding funding for public transportation if cities do not achieve the 15% target it unilaterally sets. This policy would encourage car use, since transit would only be built after the fact, not in conjunction with new housing developments.

It is clear that Bill C‑356 is not a good solution to the housing crisis in Quebec and across Canada. As members know, the housing crisis currently plaguing Quebec, which was once known as one of the most affordable provinces, is not confined to large cities. It has been a problem in my region for more than 15 years. It has resulted in a shortage of housing units and restricted access to affordable housing.

In my riding, the housing crisis affects both availability and affordability. Prices are also limiting access to housing in the regions. Although the housing crisis initially affected mostly low-income households, it is now increasingly affecting companies' ability to recruit and retain employees.

I cannot help thinking of Nunavik, in my riding. Half of all Inuit in Nunavik live in overcrowded housing, and almost a third live in homes requiring major repairs. This overcrowding created serious issues during the pandemic. We even had to bar access to the communities to protect them from exposure to the virus.

The housing crisis in southern Quebec is nothing compared with the situation of Inuit communities in Nunavik, in the north. It is not unusual for five, six, seven or even eight people to live in a two-bedroom unit. If one of them has social issues, it impacts the entire family.

The housing problem in Nunavik is nothing new. There has been a housing shortage since 1990, when the federal government stopped funding construction for five years. Nunavik currently needs around 800 more social housing units.

The housing shortage in Nunavik has also been a long-standing obstacle for students. Its impact on students who live in cramped accommodations can be severe, since they have no place to study or do their homework in peace. In addition to affecting young people, the housing shortage and lack of infrastructure in Nunavik are having a significant impact on every aspect of education, notably the working conditions of local staff, the ability of school boards to hire and retain teachers, and the ability to offer specialized programs.

Students are not the only ones affected by the housing crisis. Entire families are impacted by toxic cohabitation. This is not something that is tracked in housing statistics, and it is often neglected in analyses of the crisis. It refers to couples who are separated but continue to live together because they cannot find another place to live. It also refers to households in which one member develops an alcohol or drug addiction, which can compromise the safety of the other members of the household.

Bill C-356 will certainly not remedy all these problems. However, the Bloc Québécois already has a vast array of potential solutions to suggest.

Let me name a few: that the federal government gradually reinvest in social, community and truly affordable housing until it reaches 1% of its total annual revenue to provide a consistent and predictable funding stream instead of ad hoc agreements; that all federal surplus priorities be repurposed for social, community and deeply affordable housing as a priority in an effort to address the housing crisis; that a tax be placed on real estate speculation to counter artificial overheating of the housing market; that the home buyers' plan be reformed to account for the increasingly different realities and family situations of Quebec households; that the federal government undertake a financial restructuring of programs under the national housing strategy to create an acquisition fund; that Quebec receive its fair share of funding, without conditions, from federal programs to combat homelessness, while also calling for the funding released in the last year of the pandemic to be made permanent.

The Leader of the Opposition should have based his bill and its wording on these sound proposals by the Bloc Québécois. A simple transfer to the Quebec government with no conditions attached would be ideal. Had this been done in 2017, Quebec could have built and renovated a number of social housing projects three years earlier. It certainly would have mitigated the housing crisis we are facing today. Unconditional transfers would make the funding process much simpler. In contrast, the various agreements add to the associated red tape and increase the wait time for actually collecting the sums in question. I would point out that the programs enacted by the Quebec government are often innovative and effective.

It must also be said that the Bloc Québécois has reiterated the need for federal funding to target first and foremost all the myriad needs for affordable social housing, as this is where the most pressing needs are.

Bill C-356 is not the way to go if we want to build housing and cut red tape. That is why we must vote against Bill C-356.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, Rafah experienced the worst horrors of war again last night with atrocities that defy humanity. As human beings from across the globe protested for the terror to end, those in power did not stop it. Shame on every leader who has allowed this to continue. Innocent lives have been taken and maimed, and the scars of the children will not be healed. The trauma of war is now imprinted in their DNA and will be a reoccurring trauma. The last eight months have been unthinkable trauma for Palestinians and Jews in communities all across the globe. Their histories will be forever scarred by the inhumanity of man. No one wins in war.

I implore the Canadian government to stand up for humanity and peace. The drumbeat of war is spreading across the world to the point that the leader of the United Kingdom is now proposing mandatory conscription. There are nine days—

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not entirely sure how this relates to the private member's bill before us right now, so I am wondering if you could help us out here.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

The Chair has been very tolerant of the beginning of the hon. member's speech, but the Chair would appreciate it if the member would draw all this together with the private member's bill before the House at this time, Bill C-356.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, there are nine days until the 80th commemoration of D-Day, and it seems that the leaders of this world have learned nothing.

Now, what we are here to debate today is the Conservatives' gatekeeper bill. The Conservatives do not like gatekeepers, unless it is them. The leader of the Conservative Party is the largest threat to Canada's freedoms since Confederation. A little known fact is that the leader of the Conservatives and I went to the same high school. Yes, I am a Calgarian. When I read this bill, it reminded me to revisit the far-right manifesto written in Alberta by the far-right mentors of the Leader of the Opposition, called the “firewall”. It lays out a plan to gatekeep Alberta against Canada, punish those who believe in a strong, united Canada and reward those who will adopt and manifest its doctrine of power with exclusion.

As we speak, Danielle Smith, the leader of the UCP and the Conservative Premier of Alberta, is passing laws that come directly from this manifesto, making it possible to throw out municipal governments' decisions, throw out municipal governments she does not like, limit academic freedoms by gatekeeping the research funds and destroy the Canada pension plan to keep people down in retirement. The firewall manifesto envisions that decision-making processes that affect people's lives and freedoms—

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

The hon. member for Lethbridge is rising on a point of order.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I understand that there is a great deal of latitude in terms of how we address different speeches in this House. The issue at hand right now is housing, Bill C-356, a private member's bill brought forward by the hon. Leader of the Opposition.

The member is currently talking about provincial politics. That does not seem to fit within the scope of this bill. Furthermore, she is talking about some far alt-right conspiracy theory. Again, I am not sure how that fits within the scope of this bill.

I would ask you to make a ruling, Mr. Speaker, that would be most appropriate for this.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Greg Fergus]

The hon. member for Port Moody—Coquitlam is talking about housing in general. The Chair has been pretty tolerant in terms of the latitude.

I will invite the hon. member for Port Moody—Coquitlam to make her point on the bill that is before the House at this time.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the firewall manifesto envisions that decision-making processes that affect people's lives and freedoms flow through premiers' offices. This is exactly what the leader of the Conservatives wants to do when he says he will use the notwithstanding clause to pass his laws. The NDP is here to stop him. This right-wing ideology of Conservatives imposing their will on women and all Canadians is dangerous and serves only the corporate class who have controlled federal governments since Confederation.

This reality is so obviously true in housing. Governments at every level have overseen the financialization of housing. Instead of protecting our social housing stock for people, they have encouraged upzoning and gentrification in the name of density. Density dreams belong to developers, who have made millions and billions of dollars off the displacement of low- and middle-income Canadians. The financialization of housing is only working for the wealthy and leaving people behind. The well-being of persons with disabilities and seniors is sacrificed to millionaire CEOs.

Liberal and Conservative governments have ensured that truly affordable social housing has been sacrificed to create an asset class for the wealthiest people and companies across the globe. Right now in my riding of Port Moody—Coquitlam, hundreds of affordable townhomes and apartments are being emptied and are sitting empty. There are entire blocks of homes boarded up, ready for redevelopment, and some of these homes have been empty for years. Developers choose not to fill them so they do not have to spend one cent on maintenance or pay tenants out when the time comes to begin their redevelopment. This is wrong.

During this housing crisis, governments have allowed wealthy developers to hoard housing, allowing perfectly good homes to sit empty to protect the profits of corporations over the well-being of residents. High-end sales centres for luxury condos exist in every neighbourhood across this country, right beside where low- and middle-income Canadians have been displaced. These corporate density dreams are not focused on local buyers; they are marketing their luxury product overseas. When a traveller arrives in the international terminal of YVR, they are enticed by posters of luxury housing to attract international investment.

The current housing crisis is a crisis of negligence in protecting precious housing supply that people call home. I hear the calls for supply in the community, but this is not what this bill is talking about. I need to clarify what that supply call needs to be: affordable housing supply. The federal government must put a laser focus on maintaining what is left of housing co-ops, purpose-built rentals and not-for-profit housing in the country. It has to put that before investment. The federal government needs to immediately reinvest in social housing, not in capital loans, which it so feebly continues to bring forward, but ongoing stable operating funds to get people housed now.

The need to act cannot wait, and the solution is not Conservative gatekeeping. Conservative policies are the ones that caused this problem. We cannot have one more person lose their home because they have been displaced by corporate capitalism.

Let me reiterate how Canadians got into a situation where homelessness is growing, rents are skyrocketing and property purchase is out of reach for an entire generation. Conservative and Liberal governments encouraged the financialization of housing instead of protecting our social housing stock. They encouraged upzoning and gentrification in the name of density and profits. Density dreams are for developers. The financialization of housing is only working for the wealthy, and the most impacted right now are renters. We are losing rental homes at a rate of 15:1. For every new unit the government prides itself on building, an unaffordable new unit, it has not protected 15 other renters, who now have to find themselves evicted or demovicted from their homes.

The government must immediately act to end the financialization of housing before more Canadians lose their homes, before more children are displaced from their schools and their friends and before more seniors lose services as they are forced out of the community in which they live. I can guarantee that what the Conservatives have proposed in this bill would not do that. As a city councillor in Coquitlam, I saw how these types of policies played out, with the trading of density happening in the corner offices, while seniors, persons with disabilities and single moms were losing their homes.

I am going to tell the story about 500 Foster, a redevelopment in the city of Coquitlam. I went to see those folks before a public hearing, only to find out they received a letter from the developer, even before upzoning, telling them to start moving out. There was a single mother with a child who has a disability and a senior over 70, begging me to find him what he called an “old person's home” to move into. This is going on in every community of this country.

I will close by saying that New Democrats that know housing is a human right and that we will continue to stand up for people and block the harmful ideologies of the corporate Conservatives, who are attempting to roll back the clock so that the Leader of the Opposition can continue to act like a high school bully.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was relieved, when this debate began, to hear the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Housing describe that we are in a housing crisis because, of course, a year ago, the Minister of Housing could not even use the word “crisis”; he could not be brought to do it.

Something obviously happened over the course of the summer, and the Prime Minister's Office woke up and recognized that we are in fact in a housing crisis and that the use of the word “crisis” does make sense. We know we are in a crisis because we see the results of what is going on. Rent has doubled in the last nine years. Mortgages have doubled in the last couple of years. Home prices have doubled. Mortgage rates have skyrocketed. Inflation is out of control. There are too few homes for too many people.

It is absolutely a supply crisis, as the parliamentary secretary mentioned. We see this with young people who are forced to stay at home and live in their parents' basements. They are not starting their lives as they normally would. The number of homeless people in this country continues to grow. We see tent cities in communities large and small all across Canada now. The cost of lodging, rent and mortgages is impacting affordability generally.

On top of that, there is the carbon tax. The carbon tax applies to the materials used to build homes, so the materials for homes are getting more expensive. Buying food and heating those homes are also getting more expensive. More people are struggling to maintain the homes they have.

We know that it is a supply issue, but it is also a housing affordability crisis. We have to think about what impacts the cost of a home. We know those materials I mentioned, like the two-by-fours and those kinds of things, cost more money. The carbon tax is applied to the production of those two-by-fours, to the delivery of materials to job sites and to everything.

There is a shortage of skilled trades and labour right now, which is adding to the problem as well. We need to make sure that we are attracting people to this country who can help us build homes. That is not really happening. The approval processes at the local levels are also slowing things down and are adding costs to the process of building homes. There are also taxes, fees and government charges.

Let us talk about that for a second. Who makes more money on housing than anybody else? The question is rhetorical, but Canadians would be horrified to know that it is not the big, greedy developers I hear the NDP talk about; it is government. In fact, between 2013 and 2023, the costs have gone up dramatically. The land value in this country has gone up about 34%, and that is due to the fact that we have a lot of land. We have a lot of land in this country, and there should be no reason that we have trouble building homes. Construction costs in that 10-year period have gone up 122%. That is the cost of materials. However, what have gone up the most are Government charges and taxes. From 2013 to 2023, government charges have gone up almost 250%. Those are charges at local levels. The HST charge on houses has gone up 221%. That means nobody makes more money on housing than governments. About 33% of the cost of the average home in this country is government.

What makes up those fees? HST is a big part of it; there is no question about that. However, municipalities are absolutely on the front lines of this situation, and they are also one of the biggest culprits of the problem. At the local level, we have infrastructure charges and development charges. Those are charged are per lot, and they can be staggeringly expensive. We have planning approval fees, parkland and parking fees. We often have school charges that are charged by the school board. We have density bonusing fees in some cases, building permit fees, and water and sewer connections fees. There are all kinds of fees.

At the provincial level, there are land transfer taxes when a home gets sold. There are sales taxes, like the GST and the PST. There is mortgage insurance, if someone cannot put down more than 20% on a home. These fees add up to over $200,000 on average. They are all government charges that go right to the bottom line of owning a house. Now we know why house prices just keep getting more expensive; it is that the government makes so much money. The beauty of the Leader of the Opposition's private member's bill, which is actually a very simple bill, is that it tells the municipalities on the front lines of this, which charge the biggest fees, that they just need to get the job done.

The Liberals are happy to talk about their housing accelerator fund, which I am happy to take a moment to talk about right now. The parliamentary secretary was hopeful that I would learn something from it. I have learned something from it. It is a joke. That is the truth. It is a $4 billion fund in the context of a government that is borrowing money. This $4 billion is borrowed money that it is giving to municipalities based on the promise that those municipalities will be better.

I asked to see the agreements between the municipalities and the federal government several months ago. I did not get them. The best I could come up with was searching through each of these municipalities' staff reports to council and some of the media reports, which have been very interesting. All of them have language such as “we will do this” or “we will do that”. They say that they will permit higher density, will look at ways to improve the process or will think about things. There is nothing definitive in any of the staff reports to council. They have been adopted, but not much of it has actually been done.

I will focus on something very specific. The Minister of Housing is incredibly proud of this housing accelerator fund. He is proud because he is focused very much on allowing four residential units as of right in any zone across the city. That means you could turn your single-family home into a fourplex without having to go to the municipality to get approval to do it. He thinks this is some kind of silver bullet, I guess, because the City of Windsor said it was not going to do that, but it had a proposal to do higher density around transit, where it made sense. It had a proposal to permit fourplexes around the university, for example, and things like that. It would have permitted thousands of units, but that was not good enough because the government wants fourplexes as of right.

The City of Toronto has had this rule in place now for just over a year, having fourplexes as of right. This is the great panacea the Minister of Housing is so proud of, having fourplexes as of right everywhere. Since May last year, when the government adopted this, there have been 74 applications in the City of Toronto, so clearly that is not the silver bullet the Minister of Housing thought it was. However, the Liberals sure have gone all over the country doing photo ops and press releases, being so proud of the $4 billion they are going to spend on the promise of doing better, when they are not getting the job done.

On top of the affordability issues we face, the housing accelerator fund money is going to cities that are increasing their charges. Can members imagine, in an affordability crisis, that the Liberals are sending money to cities that are increasing charges? Case in point, the City of Ottawa is going to get $178 million. It just approved an increase to its development charges by 11%. It will now cost an extra $55,000 on a house in Ottawa. The City of Toronto got $471 million. It increased its development charges this year by 21%. It is making housing more expensive in a housing affordability crisis, and what it got out of the Liberal government is a cheerleading squad.

The Leader of the Opposition is not proposing to tell the cities how to plan what kind of housing they need, nor how to do their municipal zoning and approvals process; rather, Conservatives are saying that government needs to get out of the way. We will deliver that kind of result by tying federal infrastructure money to cities with results. It is the fundamental difference between a government that is long on photo ops, talking points and being proud of its parade, and a government in waiting that would deliver results and would pay for those results. There would be no more promises. Canadians deserve results; they are tired of the photo ops and the vacuous grandstanding. They need results. If the Leader of the Opposition becomes prime minister, they would get them.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, it is a bit much, listening to the member. He was the mayor of Huntsville, and he is talking about the costs and the percentage increases in terms of government costs. When he was the mayor, development charges went up 20%.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

That is a lie. That is not true. We cut them.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it will be interesting to see. The member says it is not true, but that is the number I have been provided with. We will find out what is the truth. It might upset him, and justifiably so.

Let us take a look at the bill itself. Imagine the leader of the Conservative Party is trying to give the false impression that he actually cares about housing in Canada. What did he do when he was the minister responsible for housing in Canada, when we lost literally hundreds of thousands of housing units that went from low-income affordable to much more expensive? It was hundreds of thousands of rental units. When he was the minister of housing, and I need two hands on which to count this, he actually built six low-income housing units, and it cost him millions and millions of dollars to do that.

Now he comes in today as if he is going to be the one who fixes the housing issues in the Canada. He has to be kidding. How is that possible? Let us take a look at the record of the Conservative Party. Not only was the leader of Conservative Party a disaster when he was the minister of housing, but the Conservative Party also abandoned housing.

Contrasting that to today, there is a Prime Minister and a government that are working with municipalities and provinces, recognizing the importance of housing and investing not only time but also hundreds of millions, going into billions, of dollars into housing. We understand it is an issue of fairness. We must think about the millennials and generation X, and ensure that the housing dreams of Canadians will be there and alive into the future.

We have a government that cares about housing, in contrast to a government under Harper and the former minister of housing who is today's leader of the Conservative Party that did not care about the housing in our country. The facts are there. That is the history. Let us contrast that to the billions of dollars when the Prime Minister came up with the first-ever national housing strategy years ago, and the types of financial assistance we are providing to non-profit housing, whether the habitats or the infill homes, as well as supporting housing co-ops and non-profits. These are the type of investments we are putting into housing. That is not to mention working with provinces and municipalities.

There was a time when all political parties did not support housing, whether they were New Democrats, Liberals or Conservatives, in the early 1990s. We would have to go back generations before we found a prime minister and a government that have invested so much energy in ensuring that the federal government plays an important role in housing. We are demonstrating that and have been doing so ever since we tabled the national housing strategy years ago. The housing strategy is more than just paper; we have invested hundreds of millions, going into billions, of dollars.

We are working with governments at all levels, and non-profits, to ensure that affordable housing will continue to be a reality for Canadians. That is something we are doing in a tangible way. That is why I am totally amazed that today's leader of the Conservative Party is trying to give the impression he is.

The leader of the Conservative Party goes around Canada talking about how Canada is broken. He amplifies the fears and anxieties of people in regard to housing. Yes, it is a serious issue. While the leader of the Conservative Party goes around speaking to the extreme right, the Prime Minister has been working with the federal minister, along with the provinces and municipalities. A good example of that happened not long ago, maybe two months or eight weeks ago, when the Prime Minister was in the city of Winnipeg.

In Winnipeg, the Premier of Manitoba, the provincial minister, the federal minister, the Prime Minister and the Mayor of Winnipeg talked about how Manitoba is moving forward in dealing with the issue of affordable housing. The Mayor of Winnipeg, along with me and others, last December, talked about how the federal government is investing and encouraging municipalities to build more homes, not only encouraging but also providing financial support. We have seen cooperation in the province of Manitoba.

It is not just governments but also organizations. I often make reference to Habitat for Humanity, which across Canada does phenomenal work in ensuring that homes are affordable. Individuals who would otherwise never get the opportunity to have a home are getting a home. Over the years in Manitoba alone, we are talking about 600 homes. The contributions it has made to Winnipeg North, I would suggest, are very significant. From a non-profit point of view, they are probably second to no other.

The current government has not just opened its eyes, as the Conservative leader has said, on the issue of housing. We have been dealing with housing for years now, recognizing that it is not just Ottawa's responsibility. Ottawa has a responsibility to lead and be there, to assist where we can and provide resources where we can. We have been doing just that.

Contrast that to the attitudes that come from the leader of the Conservative Party or from the Conservative Party in general and the extreme right. What do they talk about? Conservatives criticize the municipalities. They argue in terms of having money and being prepared to give money, but such-and-such things must be done, and if they are not done, then there will not be any money given. There is no sense of cooperation coming from the Conservative Party, none whatsoever. It is either the Conservative way or the highway when it comes to the development of housing.

It is only in the last two years that I have actually started to hear Conservatives talk about housing, unlike the government, which has been talking about housing in terms of the housing accelerator fund for purpose-built apartments. Conservatives oppose that fund. Talking about the GST, the Conservatives would like to get rid of it. Some provinces like the federal policy so much that they are doing the same thing with the provincial sales tax. The Conservatives do not believe that the GST is a good policy either. Conservatives talk about the federal lands, but we have been talking about the federal lands for years. We have actually taken actions on that.

Think of Kapyong Barracks as an example, in the city of Winnipeg. With respect to development charges, we are funding literally billions of dollars to support provinces and cities while ensuring that the price of housing remains lower than it would be without that sort of fund. Again, we are looking for cooperation. There is $250 million in the budget towards fighting homelessness; of course, the Conservatives are voting against that also.

The Conservatives seem to believe they have a nice shiny plan tied up in the bill before us. Welcome to the game. However, the Conservative Party has no credibility on the issue of housing, and that is the bottom line. As the Liberal government continues to demonstrate that it genuinely cares, the Conservative Party focuses on cuts. That is the difference: Liberals care; Conservatives cut.

[Mario Beaulieu, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-356 reiterates the Conservative leader's talking points about the housing crisis.

According to him, the municipalities are responsible for the housing crisis by tying up real estate development projects in supposedly needless red tape. One of the Conservatives' proposals is to set a target for increasing the number of housing starts. Beginning on April 1, 2024, the target would increase by 15% each year.

Bill C-356 places the entire blame for the housing shortage on the municipalities, even though the current crisis would not have been this severe had Ottawa not pulled out of funding for social housing under the Harper government.

Bill C-356 would in effect put municipalities under outside control by preventing them from taking measures to ensure a minimum of social housing or from protecting their built heritage, under penalty of having their funding reduced—including funding for the development of public transit.

In my riding of La Pointe-de-l'Île, I have met met many times with seniors, families and community associations and that has helped me realize the enormity of this tragedy. Expensive condos are already largely available on the market. What is sorely lacking is affordable housing. The resulting mad scramble for rentals betrays people's growing sense of despair. They feel that the government is doing nothing to help them.

The pressing issue is not to continue encouraging big real estate developers to participate in this frantic race, but rather to address the housing shortage affecting most low-income people. The Bloc Québécois has already made a wide range of proposals and interventions. For example, it is proposing that the federal government reorganize its funding for the various programs under the national housing strategy to create an acquisition fund. This kind of fund would enable co-operatives and non-profit organizations to acquire apartment buildings currently available on the private market, keep them affordable and convert them into social, community or deeply affordable housing units. For example, in my riding of La Pointe-de-l'Île, Corporation Mainbourg, in association with the Quebec government and the City of Montreal, acquired Domaine La Rousselière. This is a 720-unit complex that will be protected from the speculative market to ensure its long-term affordability will be maintained.

The Bloc Québécois has long said that the provinces and municipalities are in the best position to know the housing needs on their territory. It is not the federal government's place to interfere. I would remind members that housing is exclusively under the jurisdiction of Quebec and the provinces. Since 1973, Quebec law has prevented the federal government from negotiating directly with municipalities, and Bill C-356 would tear up that agreement. It would create a series of conflicts. It took two years to reach the agreement, and we cannot afford another two-year delay that will bring all projects to a halt. All of the interference brought in by Bill C-356 means that this irresponsible bill would create a breach that would foster sustained conflict and certainly paralyze every project, right in the middle of a housing crisis.

I would remind members that we welcomed the $3.7-billion Canada-Quebec housing agreement signed in 2020. Half of that money came from the federal government, but the negotiations took three years. The funding that was supposed to go to Quebec was blocked until the two levels of government came to an agreement. Had that happened in 2017, Quebec could have built and renovated many social and affordable housing projects since then, which would have helped mitigate the current housing crisis.

In closing, the Bloc Québécois deplores the federal government's constant need to spend its money, interfere in Quebec's jurisdictions and tell Quebec how to spend its money. We are asking that the federal government transfer its share with no strings attached. That is why we will be voting against Bill C-356.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The hon. Leader of the Opposition has five minutes for his right of reply.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Leader of the Opposition]

Madam Speaker, after nine years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of housing, which has doubled since he took office. It is hard to believe, but on my last day as housing minister, in November 2015, the average rent in Canada's 10 biggest cities for a one-bedroom was $973. Can members believe that? It is now $1,893.

The average down payment needed for a new home then was $22,000; it is almost quaint. Now it is almost $50,000. The average mortgage payment needed on a brand new home was just $1,400. It is now almost $3,500. It took about 39% of the average family paycheque to make monthly payments on the average home. That number has now risen to 64%, a record-smashing total, meaning that one would not be able to eat, clothe oneself, own a vehicle or do anything other than pay taxes and one's mortgage if one is the average family buying the average home.

The Prime Minister did not care much about any of this until he started crashing in the polls, and then he panicked and appointed a big-talking housing minister to take the helm of the ministry of housing. This minister had already, according to Liberal admission, caused immigration to run out of control. Since that time, we have seen a flurry of photo ops and new government programs designed to generate media headlines. However, predictably, these headlines have not reduced housing costs or increased home building. Home building is down this year. The federal housing agency says that it will be down next year and the year after that. Rent and mortgage payments continue to rise.

That is because the government, under the Prime Minister, is building bureaucracy rather than homes. My common-sense plan is the building homes, not bureaucracies act. It seeks to provide exactly what it says: less bureaucracy, more homebuilding.

In a nutshell, here is my common-sense plan to build the homes: First, we would require municipalities to permit 15% more homebuilding as a condition of getting their federal funds; second, we would sell off thousands of acres of federal land and buildings, so they can be used to build homes; and third, we would axe taxes on homebuilding. In this plan, we would get rid of the carbon tax, the sales tax and other taxes that block homebuilding.

This is a fundamentally different approach than what we see from the current Liberal government. What it currently does with its so-called housing accelerator program is to fund box-ticking. It puts together a bunch of boxes that municipalities have to tick for procedural and bureaucratic reforms. Once the boxes are ticked, the money is sent and we move on. The problem is that, even if those are the right boxes to tick and the municipality ultimately ticks them, when the feds turn their backs, the city can then put in place a bunch of new obstacles. For example, municipalities such as Ottawa and Toronto have actually jacked up development charges after getting federal housing accelerator funds. The City of Winnipeg got federal funding and then blocked 2,000 homes right next to a federal transit station.

That is why trying to manage process will get one nowhere. When one pays for bureaucratic box-ticking, that is what one gets. However, people cannot live in a box ticked by a bureaucrat; they have to live in a home. That is why my plan would pay for results. It simply requires that municipalities permit 15% more homes per year. If they hit the target, they keep their federal money. If they beat the target, they get a bonus. If they miss the target, they pay a fine. They are paid on a per completion basis, just as a realtor or a home builder is paid per home built. We want to pay for keys in doors and families sitting in a beautiful new kitchen, enjoying their dinner. We want families to be housed, healthy and safe, with money in the bank. That is the result we are going to pay for. Now let us bring it home.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The question is on the motion.

If a member participating in person wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Madam Speaker, I request a recorded division.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Pursuant to Standing Order 93, the division stands deferred until Wednesday, May 29, at the expiry of the time provided for oral questions.