Mr. Speaker, in 2017, we saw the Prime Minister announce with great fanfare the national housing strategy. He said it was going to be life-changing and transformational. That was in 2017.
Since then, house prices have doubled, and we have just heard the opposition whip remind us that about nine out of 10 young people in this country do not own a home and do not believe they will ever have that opportunity. Rents have doubled in this country, and that is if someone can find a place to rent. Vacancy rates are now at an all-time low, generally hovering around 1% across the country.
Inflation is skyrocketing, which of course, means that interest rates have spiked, which caused mortgage rates to go up. Mortgages have doubled. People with variable rate mortgages have seen their payments double. Those with fixed rate mortgages who are going to renew those mortgages in the next several months or years are worried that they are not going to be able to afford their home anymore. This is in the midst of a housing crisis.
Homelessness is on the rise. There are tent communities now in cities large and small all across the country. There are new immigrants and students who are living in homeless shelters, like Covenant House in Toronto. On average, three homeless Canadians die every week on the streets of Toronto.
The national housing strategy has certainly been life-changing for many. It has been transformational, but not the transformation that I suspect the Liberals had hoped for. It is not just in the big cities, of course. I represent a smaller community. I would like to say it is as beautiful as South Surrey—White Rock, maybe more, but it is also very expensive there.
Forty percent of households in Parry Sound—Muskoka spend more than 30% of their income on shelter costs. The median employment income in Parry Sound—Muskoka is about 20% lower than the provincial average across Ontario. The vacancy rate for rentals in Muskoka is 0.65%. That means there is nothing to rent. People are stretched thin because they cannot afford to pay for groceries because of the carbon tax. I get calls every week, and I am sure everyone in the House gets these calls as well, from constituents who are facing high prices at the grocery store. They feel the pinch of the carbon tax every time they go to the grocery store, fill up their car or need to get more fuel to heat their homes.
The people in my riding do not think the Liberal government cares, and it is hard for me to tell them otherwise. With an ever-increasing carbon tax that punishes rural Canadians and the most vulnerable in our society, there is no relief in sight.
On grocery prices, it is no wonder prices are so high. There is carbon tax one and carbon tax two point zero. It is on the farmer who grows the food and the trucker who delivers the food. It is a tax on food.
Here we are today. Over the summer, the Prime Minister shuffled his cabinet and named a new Minister of Housing. Someone started to wake up and realize that there is in fact a crisis in housing, and that the government has to do something because what it has done clearly is not working. However, it was not before the Prime Minister took an opportunity, while announcing a few units in Hamilton, to deflect from his failure by saying that it is not primarily his responsibility.
It was a life-changing, transformational program in 2017. In July 2023, he told Canadians that it was not really his fault. Now today, we have Bill C-56, which is supposed to be a big new change coming to the housing portfolio. What is offered on housing in this bill?
The Liberals are finally delivering on a promise they made back in the 2015 campaign to give back the GST on the construction of new rental buildings. That is it. That is all. We were expecting big change from the new minister and big change coming from the Prime Minister. However, this is what we got.
What is not in the bill? How about some CMHC reforms? The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which reports to the government, might be one of the biggest gatekeepers in the whole country. I know lots of colleagues around the House who have heard from people in their ridings, whether it is from small community groups trying to get housing built or smaller municipalities, about the stories of anguish when they go to CMHC to try to get their ridiculously complicated funding application approved. With the bureaucratic hurdles at the CMHC and in Ottawa, they often give up. If they do get a response, they often do not even get a reason why they have been rejected.
We can see builders and community groups, which do not really have the resources to battle with the CMHC, going back to the drawing table without much guidance on what they have to do differently. It is like this, of course, because this government has allowed the CMHC to grow and grow over the last eight years, and it kills more projects that it approves.
The member for Carleton, the Leader of the Opposition, put forward a bill that Bill C-56 certainly would not address. It would provide accountability to Canadians for the CMHC in Ottawa. The CMHC would have, on average, 60 days to respond to an application. We would put the executives at the CMHC on notice. We would put their bonuses on the line and say, “You have to meet these timelines”, because in a crisis, we pull out every stop. It is a bold target, but in a housing crisis, there cannot be some bureaucrat in Ottawa who is blocking homes. They have to be looking for every way possible to get more homes built.
Speaking of targets, they are another thing that is missing from the bill before us. For too long, the federal government has been happy to give massive federal transfers to cities to help them build all kinds of infrastructure with no strings attached to get more housing built. We need to tip the scales back in favour of the builders, not the blockers, because there is a scarcity of housing. There is a huge lack of supply. There are not enough townhomes, triplexes and single family homes, and not nearly enough density around transit. We need to make housing abundant again in this country. What is missing in the bill is any target for the municipalities to meet.
The Liberals are happy to fly around the country and hand out a cheque here and a cheque there for a few hundred units here and a few hundred units there, and that is as far as it gets. They do not have targets, so we see no results. On this side of the House, we believe in results. On that side of the House, they seem to believe in photo-ops and talking points, and that is not working. We need accountability, incentives and targets.
To me, it is pretty clear that the government just does not get it. The last minister of housing could not even admit that housing was a crisis in this country. The new minister started out doing what the last minister did by trumpeting on social media about the great success they are having on housing. He then went on a little housing retreat in P.E.I. and listened to the experts, including some experts who actually proposed some pretty good ideas. Then he went to London for another retreat and teased the media on the way in about something that will be really big that we have never done before in housing. Then he came back out and announced the same old funding from a program they started a year ago, which has delivered no results. It is more of the same: meaningless photo-ops and announcements of a little bit of money. There are no plans, no targets, no goals and no results.
To the young people shafted by the government, to all the seniors on fixed incomes worried about how they are going to get by and to the new Canadians who come here and feel like they have been sold a bill of goods, I say that I am sorry we have a government that pretends to care but does not really deliver.
To the House and to the government, I say that Bill C-56 is a cruel joke. It is not serious. The Liberals give themselves lots of pats on the back, but there are no results. The proof of their failure is in the dismay of the young people who have given up the hope of owning a home. It is in the tear-filled eyes I see when seniors come to me and feel ashamed that the food bank they used to donate to is one from which they now have to get their groceries. The proof is in the tent cities, where people living in tents go to their jobs but cannot find a home. The proof is in the number of homeless Canadians who die on the streets.
There is a housing crisis in this country, and Bill C-56 is further proof that the government just does not get it.