To refresh a few ideas that I've spoken to the committee about previously, the banning of short-term rentals is a fantastic idea. Even though it falls mainly within the provincial world, maybe there's some way to adjust or consider federal-provincial transfers in a way that would encourage provinces to bring an end to this terrible scourge—effectively, illegal hotels—which removes inventory for first-time homeowners and removes inventory from long-term rentals. That is all a good thing, and illegal hotels are just a bad thing.
Realistically, and somewhat to Mr. Polito's point, provincial and municipal approvals for new homes and new developments are ridiculously long, laborious and complicated. We built so many homes in the seventies. Roughly 250% more than today is what we built in the seventies, and approvals were fast. They were efficient. Inspections were quick.
What's happened is the opposite, so why has it happened?
A lot of it has to do with the development of enormous bureaucracies at municipal levels. They have to justify their work and to find a reason to exist, and it's become incredibly complicated to have new homes and new developments approved. This doesn't really make any sense. We need the housing, so there has to be a way—again, not necessarily in the federal purview—to speed it up.
With regard to changes in mortgage rules, I've discussed this before. It makes no sense that you can do 100% financing for a rental property. You can extract money from your existing residence through a line of credit or through another mortgage, go out and get a mortgage on the balance and effectively end up with a 100% funded rental property. This is fantastically different from what a first-time homebuyer has to do to come up with the cash to find the down payment. They're, therefore, at a great disadvantage.
That has to be an easy move—it's a simple move—for the bank regulator to make, and it's actually technically simple to check off.
There is a massive imbalance between ongoing property taxes in most municipalities and development fees. This is really a crazy concept, because the people who pay property tax typically enjoy the use of their municipal services for years, if not decades, yet they are underwritten by astronomical costs associated with new homebuyers purchasing in new developments.
This is a very strange idea, but it develops from the fact that municipal councils want to protect their seats, and they know that the maddest people are the people who get increases in property taxes. Why burden new homebuyers and long-term rental people with unmanageable development fees: $170,000 for a condo unit in Toronto. On the housing side, it goes much higher. A townhouse can sometimes reach up to $300,000 in taxes, levies and development fees. This is putting new homebuyers behind the eight ball.
I believe that some things can be addressed by the committee, some of them the federal government can address and some of them are provincial matters, but it's still vitally important to try to level the playing field for people who want to get into the housing market.
Thank you.