Mr. Speaker, after the solemn Yom Kippur holiday yesterday, as a Jewish parliamentarian and one who represents the largest Jewish riding in the country, before I speak to the matter today, I will address what happened in this place last Friday: a full-blown international embarrassment for our Parliament and for our country. A Nazi was invited to this House, welcomed and celebrated as a hero. I will say what nobody has said. Nobody from the government has said this: This man is not a hero. He is a monster, and he had no business being here. We will never accept collective responsibility for that. It is not anybody's dishonour to bear except for the government, which is responsible for allowing him in this chamber.
Yesterday, we observed Yom Kippur. It was the miracle of repentance. I will add this one thing, because I think it is important: It is not that we just start a new page; we also look back at the past and reflect on what happened. As I prayed and fasted, I thought about my ancestors who prayed and fasted throughout the Holocaust, through the hunger, fear and risk of death. They kept their faith. They needed to show God that, despite being locked in hell, they were still capable of singing his praises. Such people as the one honoured in this House forced them into that hell. It is particularly troubling to me, as somebody with family members who lived on the eastern front in Ukraine. It is not trauma or pain; it is actually anger that has deepened, knowing that nobody in a position of power did anything about it.
I hope my colleagues listened carefully to that. I will turn to the matter at hand today, because I would like to move to the conversation on the floor. It is an important one.
Bill C-56 is a nice try at some new legislation but, ultimately, as the saying goes, “too little, too late”. Right off the top, I want to make clear that the government should have started building houses eight years ago, not today, two years in the future, four years in the future, eight years in the future or never. The government's inaction is actually the root of the housing crisis that we are debating today, which they woke up and had an epiphany about after a summer of bad polling.
For example, last year our population grew by 1.3 million people. We built 286,000 homes. Where did the extra million people go? If we take that times eight years under the Prime Minister, we can see why the price of a home has nearly doubled to $900,000. We can see why the cost has doubled and why the average monthly mortgage payment has grown, in my neck of the woods, to over $3,000 a month. That is what happens when the government is asleep at the wheel for nearly a decade and when government members did not prioritize construction, when they wake up after a summer of bad polling and decide that now is the time to do something about housing, when they add more red tape instead of cutting it and when they raise taxes instead of lowering them. That is what the government is doing to everyday Canadians.
Bill C-56 is a perfect representation of the Liberal-NDP failure on housing, because its central promise of ending GST on construction of rental housing is a promise they made six years ago. Here we are, eight years later, and the reality is that a house will take a lot of time to build. Endless paperwork needs to be completed, and workers need to be hired somewhere.
I also have to split my time with the member for Chilliwack—Hope.
The reality is that, because it takes so much time to build homes, this is too little, too late. One cannot snap one's fingers and expect to have a million homes sitting, ready to sell. Neither can the problem be solved by telling people that it just does not exist, although that is what we heard from them for almost eight years.
We saw finger pointing. The last minister's parting gift to Canadians was an op-ed in a national newspaper saying that none of this was his fault. In fact, they got the guy who actually lost a million people in the portfolio before that to become housing minister, to fix housing in this country. All of these things that are part of the Liberals' strategy on housing seem to be based in magical thinking.
What is more, we cannot change the inflation in Canada, affordability in Canada and interest rates in Canada, all the things that we are trying to address, without changing the fundamental framework, things like government spending, raising taxes, bigger bureaucracy and outright waste on consultants, and on apps that do not work and that nobody uses. The list is endless.
This government’s endless tax-and-spend leads to record deficits that lead to higher inflation, which means higher interest rates. That means higher mortgages, higher costs to borrow and higher everything for Canadians struggling to keep a roof over their head, food on the table and gas in their car.
Without fixing that, we cannot do anything here. We will not actually make peoples’ lives affordable unless the Liberals want to steal those ideas too.
By the way, all of these ideas are stolen ideas. One of them exists in our colleague’s private member’s bill. The other one was announced that same day.
It is going to take an actual new plan and a government that realizes that there is a problem, not one that tells us how it is doing on the world stage and that everything is fine and that Canadians have never had it so good.
That is what we hear from the benches opposite, except in a mild reprieve when they realize that, hey, maybe there is a problem, maybe Canadians are struggling and maybe it is their own caucus that is finally telling their Prime Minister that the summer they had in their ridings was probably the opposite of what they have been saying right here in the House.
This is going to take an entirely new plan. It is going to take entirely new ministers and it is going to take an entirely new government and hopefully a Conservative majority government after the next election.
Here are our ideas. It will not take long. Here are our ideas on housing and how to make it more affordable in Canada.
We need to drastically increase the pace of homebuilding by cutting red tape and removing gatekeepers to stop construction that raises prices, and encourage municipalities to put shovels in the ground with incentives and building bonuses for their top performers.
We also said that we would sell off 15% of government buildings to create the much-needed apartment housing in our biggest city centres, and, of course, we will end the carbon tax and the war on work, to lower the price of materials and labour that we need to actually build.
The Liberal plan on all of this is to have a bunch of meetings with bureaucrats in fancy suits, issue a press release, maybe issue a press release calling for another meeting, reward bad behaviour with an endless supply of money with no strings attached, blame everything on Stephen Harper, we cannot forget that, and tell Canadians that their taxes need to be higher and that, again, they have never had it so good.
One cannot understand the extent of the problem that lies ahead if one does not think there is a problem at all. According to a recent report, we need to build 3.5 million more housing units on top of what we are already projected to build and we need to build it all by 2030.
I would like to ask Canadians who they trust to bring home those homes, who they trust to make life more affordable and affordable housing more attainable, more of what got us here or a bold plan to actually get costs down?
The cost of inaction is clear. That is why we are having this debate. That is why they rushed this legislation right through the House after a summer of brutal polling and constituents telling them that they have had enough.
