Evidence of meeting #39 for Finance in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cmhc.
A video is available from Parliament.
5:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
Ms. Farha, give a fairly tight answer, if you could, so that we can get one more question in.
5:55 p.m.
Global Director, The Shift
I would just say that I'm deeply concerned and that I don't think that Canada is yet on the path to dealing with the deeply affordable housing needs and social housing needs. The rental housing finance initiative is about 40% of the national housing strategy budget, and it's just not good enough. The affordable units are really not deeply affordable for the people who are most in need, and then they only have to be affordable for 10 years. They should be affordable in perpetuity.
There are some advances that the CMHC can make and changes to those programs that would benefit the country.
5:55 p.m.
Conservative
Pat Kelly Conservative Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB
Thanks.
I want to just go right back to where I was with Dr. Kershaw, talking about getting into interest rate policy, monetary policy and what that has meant during a pandemic, during a time of economic contraction when the price of real estate across the country, the national average, is up 30% year over year or something like that. It defies explanation other than monetary policy being primarily what creates incentive for every type and every level of homebuyer to bid up prices.
Could you comment on how we see asset prices rising even as economic activity shrinks and incomes for working people remain stagnant?
5:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
Dr. Kershaw, could you hold that answer to a minute? We have a three-hour briefing on the Budget Implementation Act that starts in about a minute.
Go ahead.
5:55 p.m.
Founder, Generation Squeeze
One can't do justice to that question in 60 seconds, but the long and the short of it is that solutions-wise, we need to be encouraging more lending outside of real estate. Then we need to be encouraging lending that is within real estate to be homing in on co-op and affordable purpose-built rental housing, and we need to invite Statistics Canada to rethink how it's measuring the inflation of housing as it's calculating CPI.
Those three things are critical to address some of the worries you're raising, and you're right to be worried about them.
5:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
Okay. Thank you very much for holding that answer tight.
Thank you to all the witnesses. We had a really good wide-ranging discussion, even with a bit of politics thrown in. It was, I think, a very good discussion, with a lot of information that we can glean from that panel.
With that, thank you to all the witnesses once again, and we'll see finance committee members at the briefing in less than a minute.
The meeting is adjourned.