Finance Committee on March 28th, 2022

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you very much.

I want to come back to the question of rent-geared-to-income housing, and try to situate it in the larger question of the housing spectrum.

I wonder if Ms. McIsaac would like to speak to the impact that serious deficiency in one area of the housing spectrum ends up having for folks in other areas of the housing spectrum.

Sometimes, when we lose rent-geared-to-income housing, people just drop out of the spectrum altogether, and into homelessness. They might end up in shelters. They might end up in motels, as Mr. Chambers was saying not that long ago. In some cases, they end up cannibalizing their budget for food and medication in order to compete in the affordable market space.

Anyway, I wonder if Ms. McIsaac might speak a bit about the housing spectrum, and how deficiencies in one area, particularly at the lower end, can actually resonate in other parts of the housing spectrum.

[Elizabeth McIsaac]

This is what my comments were focused on. This is the most dire part of the system, where people are literally on the edge. As inflation moves up, we can expect people to fall into arrears, and then that becomes a very difficult precipice to be on. You end up at motels that are effectively shelter motels. The one that was referenced in The Beaches is, I think, closing down shortly.

It is connected to the whole system. Part of the commentary around what we are doing.... The option around an acquisition fund is really critical, because we have parts of the private market that have been serving a very low-income area—things like rooming houses—that are moving into gentrified ownership. There is an opportunity for social housing providers, whether they be co-ops or non-profits, to move into that space. Why that's important for their ownership is that it protects that affordability into perpetuity. When it's privately owned, there isn't that protection, and that's where we are seeing the vulnerability for significant numbers of units that are being lost in the market.

There's an opportunity within the NHS to put something like that in place. It has been called for by a number of different players. We've seen a very small demonstration project of this in the Toronto market, where the City of Toronto put forward a multi-unit resident acquisition fund and tested it out in Parkdale. That's on a very small scale, but we need to look at larger opportunities around that. What's important is that putting that into social housing frameworks and ownership models protects it into perpetuity, and I think that's the most important part because, when it goes into the market, you may protect it for five or 10 years, but then we find ourselves back in the same place.

Rent geared to income is about the demand side of the equation. We have things like the housing benefit, which started out with the national housing strategy. It could be wider; it could be deeper. We could do more there. Right now it is affecting only a very small number of people who need supports in their housing. Rent geared to income allows people to have a more balanced budget in their households, so that it's at 30% as opposed to, in some cases, up to 50%, 60% or 70% of the household income, which, as you rightly say, then moves people into using food banks and other ways of filling in the rest of the household's essential needs.

That is also something to be worked out with the provinces. Provinces are the ones that are administering some of the RGI. This ties up with social assistance, which is also the purview of the province. It could also be an opportunity for us to have a more enhanced Canada social transfer, which would be an important thing for the federal government to consider at some point.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Blaikie. That is our time.

I want to thank our expert witnesses on housing for informing our study on inflation in the current Canadian economy. On behalf of the members, the clerk, the analysts, the staff and the interpreters who will be putting our report together, we want to thank you for your remarks, for your testimony and for the answers you have provided to many questions. We thank you, and have a great day.

Members, I'll need you for some time, just to go over our subcommittee report. You should have received the subcommittee report. The subcommittee met on Thursday, March 24, and you received the subcommittee report the next day, Friday. I think it was distributed at 4:32 p.m. Along with the report, you would have received a schedule, and members would have seen the schedule.

Do members have any comments or anything about the report?

The only thing I see is that, at the end of the report, for members who do not sit on the subcommittee, if the federal budget is presented during a regular committee meeting time, the subcommittee agreed that we would cancel the finance meeting that day.

I'd like to see if everyone is okay with that.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I'm sorry. I'm just looking for some clarification.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Yes, Mr. Fast.

The subcommittee agreed that, if the federal budget is presented during a regular committee meeting time, we would cancel the finance meeting that day, so we would be able to be in the chamber and listen to the....

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I think everyone is in agreement. Shall we adopt the report?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Hold on.

There's one item in here: “That, once the Budget Implementation Act is presented in the House, the committee start a prestudy on the bill.”

Why would we do that?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

That was agreed to by the subcommittee.

Mr. Blaikie, did you want to speak to that?

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Sure. I'd be happy to.

I think the discussion there was just around trying to make sure we have more time, rather than less, to be able to study the bill, and given that we're juggling a few different things, including wrapping up the EMA study, that it would be advantageous to have more meetings rather than fewer meetings.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I would be very uncomfortable doing that, because we have the inflation study and, quite frankly, even today's meeting was just so rich with information about what's happening in our economy right now as it pertains to inflation.

I do not want to see our current study program co-opted in any way by a prestudy of the budget, certainly not without first seeing what the budget entails. It could be a very tight and narrow-focus budget, which would allow us to narrowcast the meetings we have here. It could also be a massive budget that will require extensive study, but we don't know that right now.

For us to prejudge that and suggest that we're already going to do a prestudy, which may pre-empt or co-opt what we're already doing at committee.... At this point in time I'm completely unsupportive of that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Fast.

I have Mr. Chambers and then Mr. Baker on this.

[Adam Chambers, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Look, while I sense both arguments, I would like to put forward that I don't believe the inflation study is nearing its end. There are a lot of individuals and testimony we have not heard yet.

I'm interested in hearing from grocers, telecoms and financial institutions. If we want to talk about how to keep prices low for Canadians and look at how we can tackle inflation meaningfully, I think we have a lot of work left to do on that study. Put me down for not wanting to significantly impair our ability to focus on inflation.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Chambers.

Go ahead, Mr. Baker.

[Yvan Baker, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

If I go back to the discussion we had in the subcommittee and the rationale for this, which Mr. Blaikie just outlined, I agree with Mr. Blaikie: When the budget gets introduced, it's important that this committee allocate the time to study it, I believe. That's one of our key responsibilities.

The inflation study is also very important. I think that we have dedicated a lot of meetings to it, and I know that more meetings are coming, but I think it's important that we get to the budget.

What's in the subcommittee report that was agreed to doesn't stipulate the specifics. It doesn't speak to the size of the budget. It's not depending on the size of the budget, as Mr. Fast was alluding to, or the complexity, or anything like that. All it's saying is that when the budget gets presented, we should get to it as soon as possible.

From my vantage point, the reason for this is that it's something essential that this committee does. Certainly, I don't know what's in the budget, but I do know that every budget that's introduced is important to Canadians on a range of issues, so I wouldn't want our committee to delay in any way its movement on the budget.

I think we can do justice to the inflation issue by continuing that study as we have been, but we also have to make time for the budget. I think that's what this was meant to reflect.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Baker. Now we're going to Mr. Ste-Marie.

I spoke with the clerk and, yes, Mr. Baker is correct: We can do both. We did this, I guess, last budget. This is what we did with the last budget with the prebudget study.

Go ahead, Mr. Ste-Marie.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The budget is, first and foremost, a speech; it does not contain direct measures. It's really the budget implementation bill that we have to study carefully. It's always a mammoth bill and, as a general rule, the government tries to sneak things through.

I think the spirit of what was said in the subcommittee was that we give ourselves enough time to study this fully and not leave anything out, especially given that the time slots have been limited since the current special committees were created. At the same time, we always agreed that we would extend the study on inflation.

I see that time is running out.

I agree with Mr. Fast's point that it would be interesting to see what is not only in the budget, but also in the budget implementation bill, so that we can better assess how much time we need to study everything.

Perhaps I will take a cue from what Mr. Blaikie did and make a suggestion. Perhaps at this point, in order for us to move to a vote, we could simply withdraw this proposal in the subcommittee report and adopt it that way, bearing in mind that we will have to find the time needed to analyze the budget implementation bill. If it is agreeable to everyone, we could just remove that part of the subcommittee report and approve the report.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Ste-Marie.

I have Mr. Albas and then Mr. Blaikie.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

In regard to the one portion of it—“the committee reinvite the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance to appear on Thursday, March 31 and if the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance is not available, the committee invite Statistics Canada”—I want to reiterate how important it is for us to hear from the Minister of Finance on inflation, this being such a key issue. I don't think there's a bigger issue that everyone's talking about, right now, in the finance field.

If Statistics Canada ends up coming because the Minister of Finance decides not to come to the committee, I'd like to talk a bit about the CPI, housing and how it reports, and also about how the CPI has worked, historically—we haven't seen inflation like this for 30 years—versus the “basket of goods” that the CPI captures today. I'd also like to talk about the business confidence study that it recently issued.

Statistics Canada, I know, will want to come with at least some inkling of what I, at least.... I invite other members to discuss it, if they want to flag particular issues for StatsCan.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Albas. That will be helpful for StatsCan. That will be relayed to them through the clerk.

We have Mr. Blaikie and then Ms. Dzerowicz.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you very much.

I'm open to Monsieur Ste-Marie's suggestion to take out the item around the prestudy today, with the cautionary note that I know, in the past, there have been many extraordinary meetings of the finance committee to deal with the budget implementation act. At a certain point, there will be a desire to move things along, because I'm sure there will be a number of items in the BIA that the government wants to see implemented before the end of June so that it can carry on with the business of implementing its items.

I know that committee life has been challenging in the pandemic context, with the constraints on resources and things like that. That's why I'm concerned about seeing the committee tie its hands and forgo time leading up to the BIA's passage. I think it's important that we not end up feeling unprepared to deal with the clauses of the bill as it goes through.

That's why I'm open to a prestudy on this one. While I think it's regrettable, if the past is any guide, the fact is that budget implementation acts have been getting bigger, typically, not smaller. This means that unless we're able to stop the practice, what we need to do is make sure we're finding time in committee to conduct a proper study, which is why I'm open to the idea of a prestudy of this bill even though.... I think this may be where Mr. Fast is coming from. Prestudies of bills are not something I like, as a general principle, but this one is likely to be large and we're going to want time to look at it.

It's about trying to find the time, in a context of limited resources, to have a proper study. I know there are other committee members who want to speak. I'm open to taking it out for today, but I think it's something we should then try to revisit before the two constituency weeks, to make sure we're not missing a window of time that could be allocated to this study of the BIA.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Our subcommittee will be meeting again on April 7—that's when we have our next subcommittee meeting, for everybody's information on that.

Go ahead, Ms. Dzerowicz.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I believe we did this for the last budget. We started the prestudy on the bill once the budget implementation act had been presented in the House.

I'm hearing a number of different comments from the different parties. I agree that this is going to be a fairly comprehensive budget. I think it would be helpful if we could, perhaps, once the budget implementation act is presented.... There's always a set of stakeholders that we typically hear from almost right off the bat, and it would be great if we could start with them.

Should we just postpone it to the next meeting and continue this discussion then, or should we have a vote on this? How are people feeling? I wish Mr. Ste-Marie was here, because I could look into his eyes as well, to get a sense about it, to see whether there's any appetite.

Should we vote on it or should we just punt it to the next meeting? I wanted to look to my colleagues. What are you feeling?

I think the sentiment is to move it to the next meeting.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Mr. Albas.