Finance Committee on Oct. 20th, 2025

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Your city has one of the worst records, by the way.

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

Twenty years ago, an affordable housing crisis was already impacting us, and for 10 years, we saw the Harper government do nothing to make housing more affordable in my city. Now the problem has proliferated.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Housing was half the cost when the Harper government was in.

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

It doubled. In Vancouver, if you look at the housing market between 2005 and 2015—

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

After you become mayor, yes.

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

—you will see that there was a dramatic rise.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Housing costs have doubled since 2015.

Minister, respectfully, your government spent $89 billion on housing, supposedly to make housing costs come down. Rents and mortgages have doubled since your government spent more than $89 billion. Now your government is creating a fourth bureaucracy after the first three were responsible for doubling housing costs, which made sure that young people lost the dream of home ownership. Nine out 10 have given up on home ownership. Unless someone has the bank of mom and dad in this country, they don't have enough money for a down payment on a house.

If the first three bureaucracies failed and you spent more than $89 billion to accomplish all of that, what's this fourth bureaucracy going to do?

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

I am very confident that Build Canada Homes, with an initial $13-billion investment, will be able to make housing more affordable for Canadians. We are seeing—

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

The last 10 years of your government have proven that wrong.

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

I was elected six months ago. The government I'm a part of now is rolling out this tax measure to save first-time homebuyers $50,000—

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

It's all the same ministers and it's all the same policies, so we don't believe that there's anything new.

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

This is a new tax measure to save first-time homebuyers $50,000 on a new home, and that will help with the affordability.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

I have limited time. I will ask you one last thing.

CMHC executives received bonuses every year, even though housing starts decreased and housing prices have doubled in this country.

Can you confirm whether CMHC executives will receive bonuses this year for doubling housing costs?

[The Chair, Liberal, Karina Gould]

Give a very brief response.

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

I can get back to the member with those details. I haven't seen the latest on CMHC bonuses for the year.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

We expect you to get that, please.

[The Chair, Liberal, Karina Gould]

Thank you, Mr. Hallan. That's time.

Thank you, Minister.

I'm going to go now to Mr. MacDonald from the Liberals for six minutes.

Thank you.

[Kent MacDonald, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for coming today.

You were fortunate enough to get to P.E.I. this summer and meet with stakeholders in my community of Stratford in my riding. We heard many different things there that day. In particular, we heard that P.E.I. and Atlantic Canada are doing well with affordable housing, but that there's a need for more deeply affordable housing: not-for-profits, co-ops and other such buildings.

What is in the Build Canada Homes program that will allow us to speed up the building for those people who need the deeply affordable homes?

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

Build Canada Homes will be partnering with governments at all levels, so hopefully we'll see the Government of P.E.I. come forward with proposals and opportunities to build affordable housing in partnership.

Build Canada Homes will help finance projects that have deeper levels of affordability, all the way to supportive transitional housing. There's $1 billion that is earmarked to go to those who are at risk of homelessness or who are currently without a home, and to building transitional supportive housing in partnership with provinces.

We need the provinces to fund the wraparound services and the health services that are critical for stabilizing people coming off the streets and out of shelters. We'll see a significant investment in partnership with the provinces on that deep, core-need housing. I'm also very encouraged by the interest in seeing projects—social housing, co-op housing, workforce housing—again in partnership with provinces, in some cases cities or first nations, working with the non-profit sector on the operating side and with the private sector on the building side. I think it's using the strengths of all different sectors and strategically financing projects or portfolios of projects that get the most affordable housing built as fast as possible.

[Kent MacDonald, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

I have a second question. I was home last week and visited a lot of potential businesses that are looking into modular and prefab. What in our program that we've announced is going to help leverage dollars for modular and prefab construction, particularly in Atlantic Canada?

They applaud what we're doing on skills training, but it's going to take some time to develop a workforce to address the stick-building that has been going on traditionally. What specifics have we announced that will deal with promoting modular homes and prefab components for housebuilding?

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

Thanks for the question.

We're seeing opportunity with factory-built housing components. In some cases, entire modular homes, and, in many other cases, components like walls and floors, kitchen and bath pods and different pieces of homes, can be manufactured in a factory and then assembled rapidly on site. We are looking at having criteria in the Build Canada Homes investment policy that maximizes the content of manufactured products: Canadian-manufactured, with Canadian materials, Canadian workers and Canadian building technologies. We want to see all of that advance as part of investing in the Canadian economy and accelerating the construction of housing.

We know that we can manufacture in a factory year-round, literally 24-7, 365. It's very efficient. As with all other products we have, basically, we manufacture them in factories. We need to be shifting our home manufacturing into factories. We're seeing less than 5% of Canada's housing stock manufactured off-site in a factory. In Europe right now, I think the leader is Sweden, with almost 50% of their homes manufactured in factories. We need to catch up.

We need to see our manufacturers advance their technologies and create more jobs. It will help with productivity. Fewer workers working in factories can produce a lot more homes, which speaks to the earlier question about doubling housing construction. The only way we can do that is if we invest and support the manufacturing industry to be more productive in putting homes together.

[Kent MacDonald, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you.

In regard to a lot of the smaller municipalities in ridings like mine in Atlantic Canada, they face capacity challenges when it comes to the planning, the permitting and the environmental assessments.

What are we doing to help those communities accelerate housebuilding? We've heard from speakers here in the last two or three sessions of our committee who have talked about development costs. How are we addressing that for Atlantic Canadian developers and communities?

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

There are a number of ways that we can address the challenges with approval times and the cost of building. Our government is looking at reducing development costs, the charges that many local governments apply currently—

[The Chair, Liberal, Karina Gould]

Could you wrap up that thought in about 10 seconds?

[Gregor Robertson, Liberal, Vancouver Fraserview—South Burnaby, BC]

Okay.

Reducing development costs is one piece of the puzzle. On design standards, we just relaunched the CMHC housing design catalogue last week, with detailed designs that can help local governments fast-track approvals as well.