Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Dear colleagues, I’m here to discuss very important matters.
I'm here technically to discuss the estimates, although I understand that there is a study on housing that the committee has undertaken and, of course, we recently released a national housing plan. I'm happy to take questions on whichever of those issues you may deem appropriate.
I'll spend a few moments going over the bones of the recently released housing plan to give you an idea of where we're coming from and what we're trying to achieve.
There are three main things the housing plan seeks to accomplish. The first is to build more homes, the second is to make it easier to rent or buy a home in this country and the third is to ensure those who cannot afford a home nevertheless have a roof over their heads.
Some of these measures will have a shorter-term impact. Others will take time to fully mature and to realize the potential we have as a country to solve the national housing crisis.
Under the first pillar—to build more homes—there are a few key things we're seeking to do.
The first is to reduce the cost of homebuilding through a series of different measures, including tax measures such as the GST rebate and the changes to the capital cost allowance to allow it on an accelerated basis. We're also moving forward with low-cost financing programs such as the apartment construction loan program, as well as an opportunity to partner directly with provincial governments through bilateral deals through the Canada builds program. We're not limiting the low-cost financing to large institutional builders and we are launching a program that's designed to help individual homeowners add accessory dwelling units with a low-cost loan to help them with the start-up costs.
In addition, there's a major opportunity to reduce the input costs of home construction by leveraging public lands. We are seeking to do something different by maintaining ownership of public lands and entering into long-term leases, which will protect the public interest and public lands. At the same time, we have an opportunity to further reduce the costs for construction and, potentially, the costs for the person who lives in the home that will be constructed at the end of the day.
It's not enough, though, to reduce the cost of homebuilding. We have to make it easier. We're working with different municipalities across Canada to help change their zoning and permitting practices through the housing accelerator fund.
We have other different tools we're using to negotiate improvements to the ways homes are built, including by addressing things like development cost charges through our infrastructure funding to support housing-enabling infrastructure, such as water and waste water. Similarly, we'll be negotiating deals with major metro regions across Canada to improve density near transit stations, through our transit infrastructure funding.
Even if we have a perfect suite of policies on cost reduction and municipal zoning reform, we're going to run into another bottleneck, and that's the capacity of the Canadian economy to actually produce the homes we need. We intend to address this through a series of measures, including training supports for Canadian workers, targeted immigration programs and, of course, incentivizing the scale-up of home manufacturing facilities—building more homes in factories. We intend to do this by creating a pipeline of demand for the businesses that will be able to produce homes in factories and by creating specific incentives to help with their scale-up.
The second pillar of the fund is designed to help make it easier to rent or to buy a home in Canada. There's a series of measures to help protect renters, such as the renters' bill of rights, which will require co-operation with provinces, but we also want to ensure that we have an opportunity for people to transition to home ownership if they choose. We intend to do this in a few key ways.
The first is to help renters establish a credit score, for those who face that as a particular bottleneck, by allowing them to use their rental history to establish credit, but a bigger stumbling block for more people trying to get into the market is saving up for a down payment. We want to help by creating a tax-free opportunity for people to save money for that down payment, including through the adoption of the first home savings account, which now has more than 750,000 Canadians who have signed up, and changes to the RRSP homebuyers' plan that will make it easier for people to take advantage of a tax-free opportunity by scaling up the amount they can put towards their home and extending the grace period during which they do not need to make repayments.
We also want to help by reducing the monthly mortgage payment, and we've started by increasing the amortization period for new builds from 25 to 30 years, which will have a positive impact on the monthly bottom line for someone who enters into a mortgage over a longer term. This is a particularly useful opportunity for a younger first-time homebuyer, who will still be in their working life at the time the mortgage has completed.
There are other measures that we want to move forward with to help free up stock that already exists, including measures targeting short-term rentals and attacking the issue of mortgage fraud, and a series of other measures. It's not enough to simply deal with the housing market; we have to improve things for non-market housing in this country. Canada has about 4% of homes in our country that exist outside the market. The OECD average is about 8%. We need to do better.
We are scaling up the investments in affordable housing for low-income families, including not just support for new builds but an acquisition fund that will help more organically affordable housing that exists in the market to be transferred to non-profit actors so they are maintained at a level of affordability forever. There's additional funding through the reaching home program to support communities that are seeking to support those who do not have a place to live, with additional supports to help communities that are struggling with encampments to help transition people to durable housing solutions.
Mr. Chair, there's much more to share, but I see that I'm out of time. I'm happy to take what questions my colleagues may have.
Merci.
