Madam Speaker, we are into our fourth week here in Ottawa since the summer recess of this chamber. Over the summer, like many people here, I spent a large amount of my time door knocking. I reconnected with my constituents and, indeed, British Columbians across the province. Irrespective of where I went in British Columbia over the summer, two issues came up every single time: First, people cannot afford to live there; second, the cost of living has gone up so much. I separate those two issues because the second is about groceries, car payments, insurance and so on, just the general cost of life. The shelter issue just deals with the exorbitant costs that British Columbians are faced with. I would argue that it is probably more acute where I live in the Fraser Valley and in the broader Vancouver region, the Lower Mainland. Some questions I heard from young Canadians are as follows: “What did I do wrong? What did my kids do wrong? Why is there no pathway for the life that I envisioned when I was growing up in British Columbia?”
A colleague and I were talking earlier today, and we reflected on when we graduated from university, around 2006-07, and the prospects we had for owning a home in the Lower Mainland, even in Vancouver. Back then, it was still affordable. Today, a six-figure salary, living in Abbotsford, is barely enough to cover rent and basic necessities. I never thought in my wildest dreams that we would come to a place in Canada where a six-figure salary would no longer necessarily be enough to raise a family. Let us break that down. Someone may be taking home $6,000 or $7,000 a month after taxes and any pension contributions on that salary, or maybe a little bit less. They may be making between $5,000 and $6,000 a month, or maybe a bit more, on a $100,000 salary. Right off the bat, they are going to be paying $3,500 of that to rent a house or a unit that will enable them to have kids. After that, they are going to have their car payment, their Fortis payment for natural gas, their cellphone bill and then, of course, their groceries and clothing.
If someone is starting out today and living on a salary of around $100,000 a year, it is not necessarily enough to get by. That is the sad reality of living in Canada right now. It does not have to be this way. It was not like that before. Many Canadians surmise that the Canada they once knew is no longer there. They do not know what happened; it happened so quickly. Was it during the pandemic? Was it afterwards? They did what they were told. They went to BCIT, UFV, SFU or UBC to get that degree. They landed that first job, maybe even working for government or a small business. They thought the money they were making right now would be enough to save up for a down payment, to start a family and to live the life they always wanted to live. That dream is dying at an alarming rate in British Columbia.
In fact, I am 40 years old. Some of the friends I grew up with just did not get in soon enough before housing costs skyrocketed in 2016, and then again in 2019, at such an alarming rate. They wonder about this. They have great jobs and their kids are in school, but they just do not have the security of home ownership. Alberta or the Maritimes are looking a lot better today than they did five years ago.
British Columbia is about the most blessed place that anyone could imagine. We have the best agricultural land found anywhere in the country in the Fraser Valley, in the Okanagan Valley or in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island. British Columbians have natural resources in forestry, liquefied natural gas and mining that are essential to the security and well-being of all Canadians, yet we are not profiting from the wealth of our province. Many factors have led to this.
Most important is the housing market that has accelerated at a rate that young people who grew up in the province just could not keep up with, in terms of the market changes that happened so quickly. For many years, we tied it to the role of foreign buyers. The Conservative Party put forward a platform commitment to ban foreign buyers. The New Democratic Party put in a satellite tax for people not making money yet taking advantage of the generous social programming we have in our province.
However, the young person staying here today, the young nurse working at Abbotsford Regional Hospital who did everything right, does not care about all the different variables. The only things she is thinking about are when she can start a family, when she can settle down and when she can live a reasonable life that she should get as a British Columbian, as a Canadian, who followed all the rules. I guess our social contract seems a little broken right now.
Part of the reason it is broken relates to small businesses. The majority of Canadians are employed by a small business. Businesses with one to 19 employees employ 5.2 million Canadians. In 2023, small businesses reported lower revenues compared with 2022, and in 2024, they “remain less optimistic than larger businesses” in respect to their viability moving forward. In fact, three in 10 businesses in the one to 19 employees category reported lower revenues in 2023 compared with 2022. I would suggest that the numbers in 2024 may not be too different.
If our business owners do not feel they can offer salaries and paycheques at a rate that is tied to the cost of living, then young people are not going to want to stay and work in those positions. If someone works in public administration or in health care, the government cannot afford to give them a salary that keeps pace with the rampant inflation we have seen as well. Young people are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I know that for a future Conservative government, we have some big challenges to address this problem, to create powerful paycheques again and to give these young people hope. Right now, they do not know what they are going to do and that is a problematic place to be.
One thing we could be focusing on that we have not addressed yet, and which, I think, there is broad unanimity in Parliament to address, is housing supply.
Yes, in my previous question in tonight's debate, I talked about the rental construction financing initiative, but there has been a historical amount of money allocated to building homes in Canada. Unfortunately, we have not seen those homes built yet. In the report we are discussing tonight, they talked about hearing from Infrastructure Canada, which is working with CMHC to address the real challenges young people are facing in our country. I think those are good recommendations and good points to follow up on.
One of the things the Conservative Party wants to do is tie future infrastructure dollars to the number of new homes being built. Across the board, the number one thing I think all governments recognize is that we need to build a lot more homes. Parliament is only one level of government that needs to play an active role in this but an important one, because we hold the federal taxation power.
The federal government funds a large portion of all infrastructure in Canada. I believe the federal government needs to start signalling, in real and concrete ways, to municipalities that until municipalities start permitting more, until they start being more efficient with the taxpayer dollars they collect through property taxes and development cost charges, and until they build the homes that young people need, the federal government is not going to give them the infrastructure dollars. I think we need to start with that.
It is not just me saying it. Romy Bowers, the president of CMHC, has said it again and again. I think every economist in the country understands that if we do not get a handle on supply, we are not going to meet the objectives of young Canadians. We have to meet the objectives of young Canadians.
The Conversation reported, “Canada’s housing market is among the most unaffordable, with one of the highest house-price-to-income ratios among OECD member states. Housing prices soared over 355 per cent between 2000 and 2021, while median nominal income increased by only 113 per cent.” Home ownership is increasingly precarious.
For people like me, us millennials, who are talking to their baby boomer parents or their parents' friends, when we say it is so much harder to get a home, they will say, “People just need to pull up their own bootstraps and get that second job.” Well, no. Today in British Columbia, in the Fraser Valley or Lower Mainland, it would take, on average, about 25 years just to save up for a down payment to purchase a first home. I think some of the cheapest homes in the community I live in, looking at townhouses, are easily over $600,000, probably $700,000, and for a single detached home, if you can still get one, it is more like $1.3 million or $1.4 million today. Even if someone is making a six-figure income right after graduating from one of our universities or trade schools, they are not going to be able to afford to get into the market. That needs to change, and supply needs to be a central component.
One of the biggest challenges we face related to supply, going back to our businesses, is that insolvencies have increased year over year. In the last report from Statistics Canada, the number of businesses in Canada has decreased by 9,000, most notably in the construction sector. Until we start doing something to change business confidence in Canada, we are not going to see more homes built because right now, be it because of the capital gains changes, the CPP and EI tax increases or the red tape that small businesses face, we are not going to see more people start businesses in the home-building construction sector. They do not see a path to profitability like they used to in Canada, despite the growing need. We have to change things on housing. We have to change the number of homes being built and how businesses feel that they can operate in the economy today.
I would be remiss in my time if I did not quickly touch upon homelessness because the biggest consequence of not building enough homes is that people are falling between the cracks more and more often across Canada. In October 2023, there were more than 30 homeless encampments spread out across the Halifax regional municipality. By July 2024, the number of homeless had risen to 1,316, a 30% increase in just nine months. According to Cheryl Forchuk, a professor at Western University in Ontario, “Government data estimates that there are some 235,000 homeless people across the country, but that is only counting people who access shelters.”
In some cases, even our refugees are homeless, including, for example, Ukrainian evacuees in Calgary. Agencies have said that they have found newcomers sleeping on the streets, at the airport or at homeless shelters because nothing else is available. Toronto's shelter system has seen a 283% rise in violence over the last decade due to overcrowding and inadequate mental health support. The PBO has outlined “that the number of chronically homeless people has increased by 38% relative to 2018.”
Habitat for Humanity noted, “61% of young Canadians aged 18-34 are concerned about their ability to pay their mortgage or rent over the next 12 months.” RE/MAX outlined in its fall 2024 market housing outlook, which just came out on September 3, that 28% of Canadians said they are considering moving out of not only British Columbia, but also our country for greater affordability. On October 31 of last year, The Globe and Mail reported, “A new survey suggests stalled construction projects are holding up the delivery of at least 25,000 homes across Quebec...the figure potentially represents just a fraction of the true number of blocked units...since just 42 of the association's members responded to the survey” related to housing construction in Quebec.
Regarding some of the government's responses to this, the housing accelerator fund has been a big failure. After giving Toronto $471 million, Toronto increased development cost charges by more than $20,000. Those costs are passed on to first-time homebuyers and others alike. After giving Ottawa $176 million, Ottawa increased its development charges by 11% and 12%.
Vaughan was given $59 million to reduce red tape, and within a year, it increased development charges by 25%, or nearly $40,000. Mississauga increased development charges by over $10,000 within a year of receiving $112 million from the Liberals under the housing accelerator fund. Abbotsford, my community, is proposing to increase development cost charges by 53%, despite receiving $25.6 million from the housing accelerator fund.
My next point is that municipalities cannot be putting their bureaucracy and red tape onto the buyers, who need more affordable homes, and the government has to put stricter conditions on funds like the housing accelerator fund if municipalities are going to access federal dollars.
One of the other consequences of our precarious housing market is the use of food banks. The need for food banks in British Columbia has never been greater than it is today. With 382,000 British Columbians living in poverty, according to the market basket measure, B.C. currently has the second-highest poverty rate in the country. This number includes 40,000 children in low-income families and 36,000 seniors.
In my own riding of Mission, it is reported that over 5,000 people access the food bank each month, in a town of 46,000 people, and 38% of those people are under the age of 18. Archway Community Services, also serving my riding, reports that Abbotsford can no longer meet the demands for increased food bank usage and is urgently looking for more space to fill donation bags and give children, especially, nutritious food.
Food Banks Canada's 2024 poverty report shows that almost 50% of Canadians feel financially worse off compared to last year, while 25% of Canadians are experiencing food insecurity. On top of this, Food Banks Canada reported that the cost of living has become so high that food banks have seen a 50% increase in visits since 2021.
As a direct consequence of the Liberal government's inflationary spending and taxes, millions of Canadians are struggling to keep their heads above water. New research from the Salvation Army shows that nearly a third of Canadians continue to feel pessimistic about their future and their personal finances, while 25% of Canadians continue to be extremely concerned about having enough income to cover their basic needs.
For this reason, Food Banks Canada downgraded the government's grade from a D in 2023 to a D- in 2024. Canadians desperately need relief, but the Liberal government is no longer listening. Last month, the Prime Minister decided to hike his carbon tax again, which is going to increase the cost of food again.
In conclusion, as food security worsens in this country, Conservatives are going to continue to call for an election to axe the carbon tax, to build more homes, to fix the budget and to stop the crime, which is an issue I did not even touch upon tonight. The Canadians I met with this summer at doorsteps reflect some of the damning statistics I listed off this evening. That is, they followed all the rules in Canada; they did what they were supposed to do, but the Canada they once knew is not the Canada today; and they do not feel they can get ahead in their province or in their country like their parents' generation could.
On this side of the House, Conservatives want to give young people a future again. We want to provide them hope, and right now they just do not feel that. We need to work to call an election, to have a carbon tax election, and bring Canadians affordability and change to restore hope once again.
