Mr. Speaker, it is great to rise today to speak to this motion that has taken on a bunch of different forms today.
I will be sharing my time with the member for Scarborough Centre.
Where I will start is by properly answering the question that the parliamentary secretary asked the member for Elgin—Middlesex—London. He asked where the number of 41 million hectares of land came from. I can actually answer that question.
I would encourage anybody out there who is watching this, and who might be interested, to google the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and land. It will show the actual list of land that is owned by the federal government. It starts to break down how much land is owned by each department within the federal government.
The end result where it gives a total is just under 41 million hectares of land. That is where the member for Carleton, who first started talking about this a number of days ago in question period, got his number of 41 million hectares of land. It is from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat document that outlines where the land that the federal government owns is actually located.
The problem is that, when we start to dig into it and look at the various departments that own land, members will notice that the top three own 97% of the land. Parks Canada owns just under 36 million hectares of the 41 million hectares. Environment and Climate Change Canada owns 2.4 million hectares and National Defence owns 2.2 million.
Why is this so important to talk about? It is because the entire premise for this motion, and the narrative we have heard from the Conservative Party this week, has been the idea that the federal government has all of this land available that can suddenly become ready for housing. I want to dive into this for a second to examine why the Conservatives are making this claim and why it is such a false claim to make.
For starters, I do not think that any member in the House is going to actually suggest that Parks Canada land should be divested for housing. More importantly, there would be very little Parks Canada land that would be serviceable for the creation of housing.
Earlier, I mentioned to the member for Edmonton Riverbend the planning responsibilities of municipal councils. He was oddly critical of municipal governments for somehow being responsible for the problem we are in right now. I will come back to that in a second.
There is this idea that we can just take land and start using it. The truth is it is not developable land, and certainly not 15%, which is what they are suggesting. One has to ask: Why are the Conservatives talking about land as though that is the only solution to the problem that we have? It is twofold. First, they think that running around and saying this 41 million number sounds so incredible. If that was all someone knew, they would ask why we were not using that land until they started to understand, as I have tried to outline, where the land is from. It is a really good talking point because it will come off very well.
More importantly, why do Conservatives focus so much on land? Why do they not talk about buildings? Why does the member for Carleton not talk about buildings? It is because the Conservatives know that those who develop land are part of their base. When we sever off land and look to build housing on it, no federal government is going to go into an area and start severing individual property lots to sell to individual people to build housing on. They are going to sell to a developer.
They are going to sell hectares at a time to developers who are going to develop that land to build housing. It explains why they were dead set against the NDP amendment to this, because that is their base: developers and people who build things. It is fine. We should be supportive of developers, but that should not be the only area we look at. When we talk about developing housing affordability, we also need to talk about affordable housing. The term the member for Elgin—Middlesex—London was trying to get was “rent geared to income”. A lot of people out there need their rent geared to their income. Severing off land and selling it to developers who are going to build houses is not going to help the problem of people who need rent that is geared to their income.
The other issue that I wanted to go back to was how the member for Edmonton Riverbend criticized me earlier this morning, as though I was part of the problem that we are now in when I was on city council, because we were not able to tackle this problem as a municipal government. Members can imagine that. A member of Parliament, through one statement, has broadly accused every city council in the country that has a problem with housing for creating this problem.
I would like to educate the member for Edmonton Riverbend on what I went through. My introduction into politics was sitting on the affordable housing development committee in the city of Kingston. Do members know who brought forward money in order to enable that? It was the Dalton McGuinty provincial Liberal government. I brought this up earlier, and the member for Edmonton Riverbend started asking if I wanted to lump myself in with the McGuinty and Wynne governments.
They were the only ones doing anything for housing. Stephen Harper would not put any money into housing. I sat on the committee that received the funding from the provincial government and used it to build housing in the Kingston area. Not a dime came from the feds. It all came from the province. For this Conservative member to somehow accuse city councils throughout the country of creating this problem, when the previous Conservative government played a major role in limiting the funds, is extremely disingenuous.
The member for Kenora accused me of political grandstanding. He should read the first line in this motion, if he wants to talk about political grandstanding and implying that governments are failing. This is the problem with Conservative motions. They always do this: They bring in these motions that have one clause they know we will never support, and then try to put in a bunch of reasonable clauses, not because they actually think the motion will get passed, but because they want to say later on that they brought this forward and talked about capital gains, and the Liberals would not vote for it. They will say they told the House what we were doing all along.
This is the problem with these opposition motions from the Conservatives. Every time they bring them here, they do not actually expect them to pass. All they are trying to do is create ammunition for their next political fight, which is disingenuous to what they are supposed to be doing in this place: helping Canadians with the problems they are having. They refuse to do that. I feel bad for the Bloc, because I think that the Bloc members came in today thinking they would support this and that it made sense, but as the day has been going on and the holes have been shot straight through the opposition motion, they are probably starting to wonder how they can possibly reassess their position on this.
In any event, I have appreciated the time that I have had to speak on this today. This is, unfortunately, not a motion that I am going to be able to support. That is no surprise to the Conservatives. Nonetheless, this government will continue to fight for Canadians and make sure we can bring in as much housing supply as we possibly can.