Public Accounts Committee on March 9th, 2026

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Jean Yip]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 26 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the Standing Orders. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application. Oh, there are no members on Zoom.

I would like to remind participants of the following points. Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. All comments should be addressed through the chair.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(g), the committee resumes consideration of “Public Accounts of Canada 2024” and “Public Accounts of Canada 2025”, referred to the committee on Tuesday, December 17, 2024, and Friday, November 7, 2025.

I would like to welcome our witnesses. Thank you for coming today.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk, QC]

Madam Chair, before starting with their testimony, with my respect to them, I would like to table a motion.

My motion concerns an issue involving the Canada Revenue Agency that is deeply offensive. People are angry and outraged by what the Canada Revenue Agency is currently doing to the City of Laval. Therefore, I move:That, in light of recent reporting that the Canada Revenue Agency is requiring the City of Laval to issue a payment of approximately $1 million to former mayor Gilles Vaillancourt in order for him to remit taxes on funds previously stolen from the municipality and later returned, the committee invite the Minister of National Revenue and officials from the Canada Revenue Agency and the mayor of Laval to appear before the committee for no fewer than two hours at the earliest opportunity to explain the Agency's decision making process in this matter and to clarify the Liberal government's position on requiring a municipality to transfer taxpayer dollars to a convicted former official for the purpose of settling a tax liability related to proceeds of crime.

Madam Chair, like I said, there are many questions surrounding this situation, which was revealed this morning by Thomas Gerbet of Radio-Canada. We have to get to the bottom of it. The best way to shed light on the situation is to allow the minister to appear at the committee, and for the mayor of Laval to explain his position.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Jean Yip]

Thank you. We'll need to have that in writing, in both languages.

We have, from the Department of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, Paul Halucha, deputy minister; Michelle Baron, assistant deputy minister and chief financial officer, corporate management sector; and Matt de Vlieger, assistant deputy minister, strategic policy and integration sector.

We do not have any opening statements, so we will now proceed to rounds of questions.

The first round is for six minutes, and we have Ms. Lewis.

Good morning and welcome.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for being here today.

Across the country, municipalities are being encouraged to approve new housing developments, but many of these communities simply do not have the infrastructural capacity to support housing development. For example, my riding of Haldimand—Norfolk, which is a rural riding, has a development in a town called Port Dover. It has been stalled because of insufficient water and waste-water capacity to support the approved housing.

Does development track how many housing units across Canada have been approved but cannot proceed because of insufficient infrastructure for water, waste water or power?

[Paul Halucha, Deputy Minister, Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, Department of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities]

I don't have the actual number with me. I would say that the number is high. We certainly know it is a principal issue identified by municipalities.

That is why we are delivering the Canada housing infrastructure fund, which has as its sole objective increasing water infrastructure in order to enable housing developments to move forward. There are two streams to it, one of which is a direct delivery stream that has allowed for 190,000 potential units to be built. It's contributing to improving capacity.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

Thank you very much for that honest answer.

It's obvious to counties like mine that the federal government is encouraging municipalities and approving housing even though there is insufficient infrastructure to sustain those homes. This causes a lot of friction within the community. You have developers wanting to build, and you have those saying, “Well, we don't even have enough infrastructure for the existing homes.” Even though the government makes announcements to approve housing builds, we can't start building those homes because the supporting infrastructure doesn't exist.

Isn't it a fact that the federal government currently doesn't have a single coordinated program? Even though we have these programs you've announced, we don't have any way of coordinating housing approvals with, or integrating them into, the infrastructural requirements needed across the country.

[Paul Halucha]

The municipal level is obviously where housing approvals happen. That's where permitting takes place.

I would say we actually do a lot of coordination with provincial governments and municipalities to understand where their housing infrastructure needs are. That's largely what we've done through these programs. Typically, municipalities won't approve new housing permits unless they know the infrastructure is going to be there. As we have been running the programming, we have been keeping a real keen eye on where those municipalities want to build out. There's a lot of dialogue going back and forth.

The department largely does that sort of traffic control. We do it with CMHC, and we're now doing it with Build Canada Homes as well.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

You stated that something does exist. Is there a name for this coordinated program? How does this program ensure accountability across municipalities that these funding announcements are actually translating into housing starts?

[Paul Halucha]

We don't have a program name for this. This is Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada. This is part of the mandate of the department. We have a policy lead on housing, and the government has put housing and infrastructure together for exactly the reasons that you outlined.

It's our day job. It's not just one unit inside the organization that looks at that.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

Let's turn to something that is also very important and people are very concerned about, which is affordability in housing.

The average housing cost in Canada has risen dramatically over the past decade, and for many gen Z and millennial Canadians, the dream of owning a home seems increasingly out of reach. How does this government expect the dream of owning a home to remain attainable for the next generation, especially when housing starts and the supply are so low largely because of infrastructural funding? How does the government expect that dream to become a reality?

[Paul Halucha]

I want to acknowledge at the outset that you're absolutely right. It has become harder, especially for younger Canadians, to make the down payments. We've seen an increase in the number of weeks that people have to save in order to make their down payments. I 100% agree with you on your assessment and diagnosis. I think that's largely what has motivated the investments the government has made federally and those made by provincial and municipal governments.

It's important to recognize that there's shared accountability across different levels of government. Provinces have made investments, municipalities have made investments and the federal government has made extensive investments through the housing plan that was put out, most recently with Build Canada Homes; through the national housing strategy, which goes back a decade; and through policy initiatives like what we've seen through targeted tax relief, GST—

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

On these policy initiatives, how many units does the department estimate will actually be enabled by those infrastructural investments? How many units do you project will come out of those policies?

[Paul Halucha]

Is that specifically on infrastructure investments?

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

Yes.

[Paul Halucha]

As I mentioned, the program we have is the Canada housing infrastructure fund. Our estimates are, just through the direct delivery projects we've done, which is around 65 projects, that it's over 191,000 potential units.

Most of the money went to provinces, so they are the ones that now select and determine what the projects are. We'll know, as we review the projects and approve them, how much potential housing they're adding in.

[Leslyn Lewis, Conservative, Haldimand—Norfolk, ON]

There is no pre-set number of houses.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Jean Yip]

Thank you. That's the end of your question time.

We'll go now to Ms. Tesser Derksen.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

Thanks very much, Madam Chair.

Thanks to our guests today.

Just for some background, I'm a former municipal councillor. I was sitting around the municipal council table this time last year. When we talk about housing, I'm bringing a pretty particular lens to things.

I am going to follow up on Ms. Lewis's line of questioning, which I think was an excellent line of questioning, with respect to infrastructure.

I want to start first by addressing some criticisms that Build Canada Homes has been receiving, particularly the criticism that it's just adding to bureaucracy—that we already have programs that can do this work. Bureaucracy, in this question, kind of has a negative connotation. We're hearing from some people that the work of catalyzing homebuilding could be undertaken by other existing programs.

I recognize that the pace of homebuilding the government has planned is quite unprecedented. I want to give you a chance to tell us how you respond to that type of criticism—that Build Canada Homes might be redundant or simply unnecessary at best and actually could be detrimental or wasteful at worst.

[Paul Halucha]

Any time you add a new function, you have to address exactly the kinds of issues you've identified.

When we were tasked with developing Build Canada Homes, we looked very carefully at what was being done and not done by other organizations and what the criticisms were. On one side of our desk were the demands from stakeholders, municipalities and developers across the country and what they were not seeing from their interactions with the Government of Canada. The focus there was to address those issues, and by definition, we started with things that weren't getting done or things that were viewed as problematic. On the other side, there obviously weren't entirely positive views, I would say, around a lot of our existing organizations. CMHC and the Canada Lands Company were viewed as having some limitations in their capacity to deal with the current reality.

Putting those two together, we effectively came to a new organization that intends to—and I think is beginning to—deliver on housing potential and on the promise of delivering things more efficiently and more at scale than what was occurring through either of the organizations. That's, as I said, without criticizing the existing actors who were there.

It is a net new, and it does fill a gap in a significant way. I'm happy to talk about that if it's helpful.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

Thank you so much for that.

I'm going to get back to the municipal lens. Municipalities like mine in Milton and Halton Hills have spent years planning for population growth. The question I get now is from a federal perspective. What's the most important role that Build Canada Homes can play in helping that planned growth translate into actual homes on the ground with respect to water, waste water and infrastructure?

[Paul Halucha]

Build Canada Homes itself will not be delivering infrastructure dollars into communities. That will be the role of the department. It's one of the advantages of having proximity between Build Canada Homes and HICC, which does the infrastructure spends on behalf of the government. It allows the market intelligence around where they're investing to come over and impact the types of infrastructure projects we do. It's a real synergy that we will be getting over the next number of years.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

That's great.

One specific question I had was with respect to two-tier municipalities. Where we are, the region actually owns some land. One of the questions I got from one of my municipal regional councillors was how the land was going to be accounted for in the contribution of the region. Typically, the land might be worth a third of the total development value.

How does the regionally owned land figure into the value proposition? Will it be accounted for as a contribution of the region to the project or will it have to be in addition to whatever dollars the region brings to a project?

[Paul Halucha]

There's not a hard and fast rule on that. You're getting at how the investment policy of Build Canada Homes is set. It is set to allow for specific decision-making to be made around specific transactions.

They would allow for property coming from a regional or municipal level of government to be accounted for as BCH is considering what level of capital investment, capital allocation, to make. It was designed to have a lot of flexibility, both in terms of the instruments it has and in terms of the investment decision-making in the factors it brings to bear.

It plays at scale too. For example, if a regional government came forward to say that they were going to put in—I'm making up these numbers—$100 million and there was land valued at another $100 million, and they were going to look at reducing property taxes and development charges, Build Canada Homes would be able to say, “All in, the value of that contribution is x, and this is what we will bring to the table.”

I think it's notable that they can do that much earlier in the process than we could previously with, for example, what CMHC used to be able to do. Often, as you know, when dollars come in early on, when there's a surety of dollar value coming in, it brings a lot of certainty to transactions. It allows other capital to be crowded in and allows certainty of planning. That is the vision for how Build Canada Homes puts investments together and, as you noted, how property values and property coming in were envisioned.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Jean Yip]

Thank you.

Mr. Lemire, the floor is yours for six minutes.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

First, I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here today.

Mr. Halucha, the housing issue is obviously a major concern for many Quebeckers and Canadians. In 2024, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation funded projects totalling $1.3 billion, but $1.4 billion remained unspent. In 2025, once again, the CMHC was authorized to spend $2.1 billion, but it spent only $1.3 billion. We can therefore say that there is a shortfall of approximately $2 billion over two years.

How do you explain this situation?