Madam Speaker, I want to inform you at the outset that I am proud to be splitting my time with the biggest and strongest proponent of affordable housing across the country. I am of course referring to the member for Vancouver East.
We are in a crisis, which has been brewing for many years. I will come back to that. The reality is that even though the Conservatives moved this motion today, they do not put forward much in the way of solutions. For example, they blame the municipalities. However, I know that many municipalities are doing everything they can to ensure they have affordable housing. What is often lacking is the federal contribution. The Conservatives also say that municipalities should plan. Back home, in the greater Vancouver area, municipalities are already doing that.
The Conservatives are also proposing that federal buildings be converted to housing. I would just like to mention that, during the Harper regime, the Conservatives sold off federal government assets. It is a bit rich to hear them say today that they made a mistake during their 10 years in power, that they really ripped Canada's social fabric, but that they now want to make amends and turn the federal government's assets into something useful.
What is missing from their motion? There is no mention of co-operative housing, which has been a long-standing solution in Canada. There is no mention of community housing, which is foundational in helping people access affordable housing.
There is also no mention of the role that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or CMHC, has played over the years. The fact is, it has been very slow to provide adequate funding, and instead, it has often served to increase banks' profits. During the financial crisis, the Harper government made sure that tens of billions of dollars went to maintaining bank profits, rather than building affordable housing. We saw the same thing more recently from the Liberals during the COVID-19 crisis. Some $150 billion from the CMHC was used to prop up our big Canadian banks, rather than invest in affordable housing.
These are not solutions. One solution would be to change the aspect of our tax system that encourages investors to buy up affordable housing and convert it into housing units for the rich and wealthy. This is a terrible aspect of our tax system, one that has to change. We need to prioritize and fund affordable housing, ensuring that at least one-third of the new units built are affordable. All the things I just mentioned could improve this motion and ensure that we have a policy based on common sense. I know my colleague from Vancouver East will speak to that later.
We are in a crisis. There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who cannot find affordable housing, and we have had a federal government that has been very slow in the pickup. The NDP has been pushing, in this minority Parliament, as we did in the last, to force the government to make these investments. We are making some progress, but it is not at all on the scale that is required.
For a time in my life, like so many other Canadians, I simply could not afford housing. I had to couch surf. I fortunately had a second-hand car that I was able to sleep in. These are the kinds of things that Canadians should not have to struggle with. There should be that right to housing, and this is something the NDP has brought forward repeatedly over the course of the last few years, which is to put in place housing policies that actually make sense.
The Conservatives are bringing forward a different motion today, and this is something that we are all rejoicing in. They normally do the carbon tax for every one of their opposition days. Today, they are finally tackling housing. However, what I was hoping to see was the member for Carleton standing up to say, “We are sorry, Canadians. We are sorry about our contribution to the housing crisis. We are sorry that we almost doubled housing prices during the Harper regime.”
Yes, the Conservatives can point to the Liberals for doing the same thing, but this tit-for-tat does not provide the affordable housing that Canadians need. I thought that the member for Carleton would stand up to say that they were so sorry that, in the last five years of the Harper regime, they lost 322,000 affordable rental units. I thought he would say that they are sorry they did that to Canadians, that they contributed, over the course of the 10 years of the Harper regime, to stripping apart the social safety net and allowing the destruction of affordable housing, with so many housing units converted to higher-priced units, so people could not afford them.
I was hoping the member for Carleton would do that, but we have not had any apologies from the Conservatives for their absolutely lamentable record over the course of that dismal decade of the Harper regime, where they stripped apart all of the protections that Canadians needed. The Conservatives basically amplified a despicable decision made by Paul Martin to end the national housing program and, instead of saying it was developing as a crisis and that they needed to address it, we saw the results.
We saw that the Conservatives did not protect those affordable housing units and did not make the investments in social housing, co-operative housing or community housing, which Canadians, seniors, students, families and people with disabilities need. The Conservatives did not do any of that. They had an appallingly bad record.
The first step the Conservatives need to take, as a party, is to recognize what a deplorable, appalling record they have. They nearly doubled housing prices with respect to market housing, and they basically did not protect hundreds of thousands of rental units that were affordable, and those that were lost to higher-priced units in conversions. These are things that Conservatives should acknowledge. These are things for which Conservatives should step up to say that they are sorry, to Canadians, for their very large part in provoking the housing crisis that exists today.
However, not a single Conservative has done that. No Conservative has stepped up to say that they were wrong to do what they did during that dismal decade and to acknowledge their contribution to this housing crisis. Yes, the Liberals are culpable as well, but the Conservatives played a significant, major and disappointing role in the housing crisis that we know today.
After the Conservatives allowed those rental units to be converted, and people with disabilities, seniors, students and families lost their affordable housing, the most reasonable person in this country would say that, really, when the Conservatives are raising in the House on the issue of housing for the first time ever for their opposition day, they should have started off by saying that they are sorry for all the neglect and everything they did that has contributed to so many people being homeless today.