Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Hamilton East—Stoney Creek.
I am going to start by making sure that everybody is aware that I was a home builder in my previous life. I was a small home builder, but I still believe that I built more houses in 10 years than the government has built in 10 years.
Conservatives want to build homes. We do not want to build bureaucracy, whereas Bill C-20 would build bureaucracy and not homes. I think that is pretty clear. The government is great at building bureaucracies. I do not know how many bills have come to the House that have been all about bureaucracy, and this is just another one of them. This bill would establish a new Crown corporation on top of the existing ones. We already have the department, for one, and then there is CMHC and Canada Lands Company. Now there is this fourth organization called Build Canada Homes.
This would be an opportunity to give patronage appointments to good Liberal supporters and to funnel a lot of money into the pockets of good Liberal supporters. There would be an advisory council, and I am sure there would be lots of money funnelled to certain people through that. Of course, it would also allow a lot of money to be spent, which is the whole point of these bureaucracies. As we all know, the Liberals are very good at spending money, no matter what.
The one thing missing from this act is an actual requirement to build homes. There is nothing in here about that; it is just about establishing the bureaucracy. We need somewhere around 500,000 homes a year to be built. Unfortunately, right now we are building about half that, and that number has been coming down. It was about 300,000 in 2021, and it just keeps getting lower. In my view, this bill would only reshuffle the chairs on the Liberal housing bureaucracy Titanic. It would not achieve any good result.
Why do new homes matter so much? We get a lot of economic prosperity through building houses, the labour put into houses and all the materials that are there. The other interesting thing about building new houses is that it creates more flexibility and more housing in the country. It does not matter if someone is building a house on the smaller scale or the affordable side, where somebody can move into that house. Someone can build on the expensive side as well, and people just keep moving up. Someone will move into that house, which will free up another house. No matter where a house is built, it adds capacity, and it is another house built in our country.
I want to talk today about the federal building code because it is an alternative plan. There are a lot of reasons why we are not building as many houses as we need to be and why houses are as expensive as they are in our country. The bill before us is a possible solution, which we all know is not going to work as it is a bureaucratic solution. I want to raise a real, practical solution, which is the building codes.
Right now, the codes update every five years, and they dictate how housing has to be built in our country. There is one consistency in building codes, which is that they always get more complicated, and with complexity comes cost. Every time a new building code rolls around, costs go up. That is just the reality of building codes. Some things are good, but many things are not, and it creates uncertainty for builders and consumers.
There is a government agency called the National Research Council that controls building codes. Once it creates a building code, the provinces have to adopt and use it. Cities also have the ability to modify codes and add things to them, which they are notoriously known for doing, and this creates even more complexity. It also creates a discontinuous set of rules across the country, even within a province. Even cities that are side by side can have different building requirements, making it extremely complicated for builders, and these add costs.
Right now we are working on the 2025 code. It has not yet been adopted, to my knowledge, anywhere in Canada, but it is being worked on. Codes used to be done based on common sense, but now activists have gotten involved. Whether it is somebody who is an activist for energy, weather or health, there are all kinds of activists getting involved in building codes, and the changes being made are not necessarily based on common sense anymore. Right now there is a fight between cities, provinces and the federal NRC on adopting the new building code because there are some issues.
The Canadian Home Builders' Association put out a policy position recently, and I want to read a bit from it:
When a code system becomes overloaded or unbalanced, it can however reduce sector productivity, undermine housing affordability, increase risk for builders and limit the ability of builders and renovators to deliver needed housing.
CHBA has observed that Canada's recently renewed building code development system is showing significant gaps and is advocating for a pause on all building code changes (as has been done in Australia for the same reasons) to restore the system, resolve outstanding issues, and ensure future code development supports safe homes, climate goals, affordability and housing objectives.
It goes on to say:
The high volume of new compliance areas and the high pace at which these significant subjects are being developed without national training or industry capacity support is not only impeding the federal priority to build 500,000 homes per year, it also leaves unfinished and often unclear provisions to builders and officials to solve in the field further reducing current levels of productivity.
It also makes a very important point that “building code changes have been driven by political mandates rather than technical evidence.” It goes on, stating, “Examples include operational [greenhouse gas] requirements, which were approved without any stated benefits and without recognition of known zero-emission technologies such as rooftop solar.”
CHBA is calling for a pause on implementing these building code changes until these unresolved issues are dealt with. That is pretty significant because it represents the ones who actually have to implement the housing we are trying to do in Canada, and they are the ones calling for a pause.
I will give members a couple of examples of this.
We all understand air conditioning. It is mandatory in the new building code. That means one cannot build a house in Canada if it does not have air conditioning at some level in a house. I can understand the reason for that, because we do not want to live in hot houses, but that is going to add $3,000 to $5,000 to the cost of every house. There are places in my province where one does not really need air conditioning. One can survive quite well without it.
That brings up the imbalance across our country. Trying to have a uniform set of standards across the country is difficult. Mandating this is not a good idea, in my opinion. A lot of of customers will pay for it if they want it, and that is great. That is the way it should be. If one does not want air conditioning, one should not be forced to have it because some activists said we need to have it.
Another one is something that is a little more complicated. It is lateral load. When the wind blows on a house, it needs to stand up. The requirements are getting very complicated and difficult, to the point where one has to, for any house, get it engineered so that the engineer says it is good enough. If not, one needs to add more lumber to make it stronger, which, again, we do not need in lots of places in our country.
As for windows, this is a good one. The codes do not want too much sunlight coming into the house, which make the house hotter inside, and this makes sense on a hot summer day. Once again, in a place like Saskatchewan, what is the opposite of a hot summer day? It is a cold January day. On a cold January day, I want the sun to come in through my windows.
Here we have a conflict, again, where it does not really make sense to mandate this. It would be good to have the information and have standards that people can work to, but having it mandated does not make a lot of sense.
The other issue I want to speak briefly to is accessibility, for example, wheelchair accessibility. It is a good thing to have accessibility in houses that need it, but to mandate it into all houses, which is what the 2025 codes are moving toward, where all houses will need accessible washrooms, wide hallways and wide doorways, does not make sense for 100% of the houses. It does make sense for some houses, but it does not make sense for 100% of the houses.
These are the kinds of changes that are being forced onto home builders through the activist methods being used today.
Of course, energy efficiency is something we need to focus on, but I think we are seeing the conflict between what we truly need for energy efficiency and the Trudeau-era activism that has been going on. These things are colliding in our building codes. Building codes are based on electricity, of course, and that does not help a province such as Saskatchewan, which relies on natural gas to create electricity. Again, there are inconsistencies across our land.
Finally, I just want to say what Conservatives want to do. We would like to recognize that builders are frustrated and that bureaucracy is not the solution to the problem we face.
We need to work on things like building codes, as I talked about, as well as municipal government development charges and delays. This is another huge issue. There has been 10 years of inaction from our federal government with regard to municipalities. We could take the money that we would put into this bureaucracy and instead use it to find a way to help local governments reduce their development charges and reduce the cost of new houses.
The bill is just adding more bureaucracy, and that is what we do not need to do. Conservatives will reduce costs. We will get Ottawa out of the way, and we will allow housing to be built.
