With it being five minutes, I'll jump right in.
Colleagues, if we're going to solve Canada's national housing crisis, we have to understand the constituent causes of the circumstances we find ourselves in and advance specific measures that are tailored to overcome the very specific obstacles that are posing challenges to home construction in particular.
One of the things I want to acknowledge before I get into some of the challenges and potential solutions to those problems is the scale of what we're dealing with. We're talking about needing to build homes and to build them by the millions. We have about 16.5 million homes in this country. We need to build more than five million more if we're going to restore the level of affordability that existed in Canada 20 years ago.
The way this is playing out is having very real impacts on real people in real communities across the country. We're talking about students who are not able to find a place near where they're going to school. We're talking about young professionals, sometimes who are in a two-income household, who can't afford to get into the market. We're talking about seniors who can't find an apartment when they're looking to downsize in a community where their grandkids are being raised. Of course, we're dealing with a significant number of people who have no place to call home.
My view is that we, as a society, should aim to do better. It's going to require the federal government, working with provincial governments, municipalities, the private sector and the non-profit sector advocates, and of course parliamentarians, to advance solutions that are going to have a meaningful impact. But we won't have a meaningful impact if we just come up with random ideas and throw them at the wall. We need to have targeted measures that are going to maximize the output when it comes to building more homes for Canadians at prices they can actually afford.
The first obstacle that I see is, really, the need to change the financial equation for builders. As a result of the increased cost of supplies and materials, labour, interest rates, the cost of land in Canada and a number of other factors, it's really hard for people to say yes to projects, even where they have the workforce, even where they've already had a project approved.
We have been advancing measures you will have seen recently. The removal of the GST on apartment construction in Canada is resulting in more homes going ahead that otherwise would not have. You may have seen the changes to the Canada mortgage bonds program, which is going to help free up low-cost financing. You will have seen programs that have existed as part of the national housing strategy, such as the rental construction financing initiative that makes money available at a lower price for the people who are looking at the equation, so they can say, “Yes, I can go ahead now.”
There are other things we can do as well, and I look forward to the advice of members of this committee, but it's not just the financial equation. We need to change the way that cities build homes, or in some instances don't build homes. We need to make sure that we're speeding up permitting processes. We need to make sure that cities are investing in housing-enabling infrastructure. We need to make sure that they are zoning in a way that makes it legal to build the kinds of homes that are going to help solve the housing crisis.
When it comes to changing the way cities build homes, we have introduced the housing accelerator fund, a $4-billion fund that is starting to show very serious promise and is already changing the rules cities have in place in places like London.
Peter, I know we were visiting your community a few weeks ago. More recently, Calgary has made a decision explicitly that relied, at least in part, on an exchange of letters we have had regarding the housing accelerator fund.
Of course, we continue to invest in infrastructure that allows more homes to be built, such as water and wastewater, such as public transit funding and the like, so that we make sure we're building not just places to store people but real communities and homes for Canadians.
As we continue to invest in housing, we can't forget that there are a lot of people who need homes that exist outside of the market. This was really the foundation for the national housing strategy: to build more affordable housing for low-income families. After 30 years of lack of investment by both Liberal and Conservative governments, I should say, we are hundreds of thousands of units behind where we need to be if we're actually going to make sure people who cannot afford a place in the market still have a roof over their heads. There's a social cost to not having the ecosystem exist as it should, and we need to work together to overcome it.
Even if we get the policy landscape right on these other areas, we are going to run into a bottleneck at a certain point in time when it comes to the productive capacity of the Canadian industry to actually build the homes that we need. We can overcome this by investing in training programs, as we have in partnership with unions over the last number of years. We can continue to invest in programs like the sectoral workforce solutions fund, but we can't just rely on training the existing Canadian workforce.
We also need to continue to embrace immigration as a strategy to bring in the skilled workers who we need. We had previously made changes to the express entry system through the category-based selection model to bring in more people as permanent residents who have the skills that are necessary to build homes, but even if we get all of those people building, we have to change the way that they build homes.
We don't build cars the way we did a century ago. We're more efficient. We build them in factories now. We need to be looking at innovative ways to build housing more productively by investing in factory-built homes. We need to be embracing technologies, including modular housing, panelization, mass timber and 3-D printing, if we're actually going to change the way that we build homes so we can do it on a much larger scale than we are today.
We need to continue to support labour mobility so workers that may be available in one jurisdiction in Canada can offer their skills to housing projects in other jurisdictions.
There are improvements that I think we need to make on the coordination of programs as well between federal, provincial and municipal programs, and I think in all honesty we can probably improve the way that we administer programs. It might require us to take on a little more risk by times to speed up the process for the projects that we want to support.
Before I conclude there are a few other categories that I'm happy to dig into should time permit, but we need to continue to respond to the changing nature of emergencies that put people in situations where they have no place to go.
My own community was impacted severely by Hurricane Fiona last year and people were displaced. We saw it again during wildfires, not just in Nova Scotia but in communities across the country as a result of severe weather events that are driven by climate change. We need to continue to support communities through our programs that deal with severe homelessness problems, and we need as well to make sure that we're supporting emergency shelters in communities that are facing undue pressures.
I don't want to ignore the need to also address the financialization issues that I know the finance committee has been studying, and I look very much forward to reviewing the report they are generating. However, there are measures we have implemented around changes to the tax regime on short-term rentals such as Airbnbs, the ability of foreign buyers to purchase and own homes, and taxation of people who are non-residents with non-occupied homes.
Finally, we can't ignore that there is a generation of people who feel like they have been left out. If we build all the homes that we can build as quickly as we can, we're still going to have a significant number of people who find themselves with the inability to save up for a down payment to get into the market in the first place.
My sense is that, if we tackle each of these problems with everything we have, in collaboration with every level of government, the private sector and the non-profit sector, we can make real progress. If we aim for anything short of solving Canada's national housing crisis, I think we will be selling ourselves short. I think Canadians deserve to see us working together to advance measures to solve each of the problems I've outlined for you today.
