Mr. Speaker, this is my first late show, and I am happy to have the opportunity to speak again on housing. At question period, I asked whether the government believed that the supply issue was serious and whether the lack of supply and supply inflation were causing the housing crisis.
I come from a region that is very much like all the other regions across Canada seeing such a dire position on housing, and this comes down to our lack of supply. Where did our numbers come from? When we compare ourselves with other G7 nations, we are dead last in supply per capita, even though we are the country with the second-most amount of land on the planet. That means all of those countries, even the U.K., an island, have way more supply per capita than Canada does, a nation with an incredible amount of land.
When it comes to what is happening, we have all seen it and have been talking about it all day. We have people who right now, because of the lack of supply, are having trouble deciding whether they can afford rent or groceries. We have individuals who have become homeless by no choice of their own. My region has seen double the homeless population at a time when we do not need that because we have so many other problems. We also have many people who cannot find affordable housing.
When I talk to home builders in my region, those who are building homes, they say it is harder now than at any other time in their existence to build a home, and they are not finding support from the local government. We are now seeing it take up to two or three years before we even get subdivisions started in the ground. We have seen the conditions in Toronto, where from start to finish an apartment building now takes a decade. We have seen the conditions created when people want to put plans together and go into certain neighbourhoods. We get Nimbyism, or “not in my backyard”, because people are saying it is not something they desire. We are finding that it takes longer and longer in this country to build a home.
Let us look at how many homes we need. To meet the average number of houses in the rest of the G7 countries, we need, right now, 1.8 million homes. We have been hearing all week from the government about the programming that is going into building homes. However, as confirmed by the Minister of Immigration this week in the House, the government only built 100,000 homes over six years, spending $29 billion. That is not enough.
To build 1.8 million homes, we need to ensure that we are unleashing the innovation that comes from our home builders and that we are working with the provinces and municipalities to free up the red tape that is holding back our Canadian workers, our skilled trades and our municipalities from being able to put up enough homes to house not only the people we have here, but the backlog of immigrants whom we surely will have coming into this country. There is an opportunity to create jobs to make sure we have a lot of trade jobs and others that create paycheques for housing. This opportunity comes from unleashing innovation.
Will the government commit to working on creating supply, with bills that include discussions on all sides with all governments, to fix our housing crisis?