moved:
That, given that, after nine years of this Liberal Prime Minister,
(i) monthly rent and mortgages payments have doubled,
(ii) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finds that Canada has the most unaffordable housing market in the G7, and the second most unaffordable in the entire OECD,
(iii) Habitat for Humanity finds that almost one-third of Canadian millennials would consider relocating to another country to find affordable housing,
(iv) the PBO says that chronic homelessness is up by 38% across Canada since 2018 despite Liberal promises to eliminate it by 2030,
in order to save Canadian homebuyers up to $50,000 or $2,500 per year in mortgage payments, the House call on the Liberal government to immediately eliminate the federal sales tax (GST) on new homes sold under $1 million and call on the provincial premiers to match this proposal.
Mr. Speaker, I want to let you know that I am going to split this time.
Today we are here, once again, to discuss the economic vandalism of the Prime Minister and his Liberal-NDP partners and what they have inflicted upon Canadians. Nowhere is that vandalism clearer than in the housing crisis today in this country. All we have to do is look at a real estate listing or talk to someone with a mortgage to realize that, after nine years of the government, the dream of home ownership in this country is simply dead.
My parents came to this country looking for opportunity and they found it. They worked hard. They made countless sacrifices. They saved up. They were eventually able to buy a home for about $150,000 in the place that I grew up, in Thornhill. That was on a taxi driver's salary. Today, a house in that same neighbourhood is selling for close to $2 million, but one could get a deal at $1.5 million, a more than tenfold increase. I can assure members now that taxi drivers, small business owners and nearly everyone else who works for a living is not earning a tenfold increase in salary to match that tenfold increase in housing prices.
Because my parents had an affordable place to live in a safe neighbourhood, they could raise a family. They could start a business. They could live the life they dreamed of after fleeing one that we would never know. That dream is being cruelly taken away from too many in this country.
In Toronto, it used to take 25 years to pay off a mortgage. Now it could take more than 30 years to save up for a down payment. The average salary needed to afford the average home in this city is $263,300. That is not a mansion or a palace, but an average home, a bungalow, in a place like Scarborough.
Who makes $263,000 a year? It is certainly not most people in Toronto, where the average salary is $60,000 a year. It is certainly not a new immigrant to this country who is coming here to look for a fresh start and to forge new horizons. It is certainly not new graduates, looking for a place to start their careers and thinking that maybe they will be able to start a family. It is not even a parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Housing.
The Liberals have made this country so unaffordable that even their own MPs could not afford a home in the place where they came from or in our nation's capital. That is not a knock on them, but a reality that their boss has inflicted upon Canadians right across the country. That is not just in Toronto. It is in Brampton, where home prices are up 139% in just 10 years, in Burlington, where they are up 101%, and in rural places like Prince Edward County, where prices are up 211%. In fact, 24 out of 28 areas in Ontario, as defined by the Canadian Real Estate Association, have seen price increases over 100% in the last 10 years alone.
I also want to tell members that it is not just in Ontario. In Prince Edward Island, housing prices are up 137% right across the province. In British Columbia, they are up 90%. Even in Quebec, which used to have some of the country's most affordable homes, they are up 81%.
Actions have consequences and the Liberal-NDP government is certainly finding that out now as the results of its economic vandalism become clearer and clearer. This is what happens when we pump a half-a-trillion dollars of inflationary spending into the Canadian economy, disproportionately benefiting asset holders and not the people who are looking for somewhere to call home. This is what happens when we ship billions of dollars off to municipalities with no strings attached to how that money is used or what it goes to. The government sent $471 million to Toronto, but since then housing starts are down 40% and, get this, development charges are up 42%.
That is what happens when our immigration system is broken by a government that cannot do the simple math. In 2022, we accepted 437,000 new citizens and 607,000 permanent residents, but we only built 219,000 new homes. Anybody who would do the basic math on this could have anticipated what would happen next.
However, the Minister of Immigration at the time did not. In fact, he ignored the recommendations from his own department that warned about a housing shortage. This guy is now the Minister of Housing. The man who helped break the immigration system, in addition to losing track of all of the people that he let in, is now responsible for fixing housing in this country. It is going exactly how we might expect. Housing prices continue to rise and housing starts continue to go down.
We know the Liberals try to distract Canadians with what is happening in other countries as a way to somehow minimize the valid concerns of the people in our own country, so let us talk about some of these foreign countries for just a moment. Housing in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal was deemed much more unaffordable than cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. Toronto and Vancouver were also deemed “impossibly unaffordable” when compared to Australia, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S.
What do we do about all of this? The Liberal answer is to continue to keep funnelling money into an accelerator fund that has built exactly zero homes and to keep shovelling cash into the infrastructure bank, which has completed exactly the same number of projects. They are doubling down on the same approach that got us here and are not willing or are unable to make new housing available while, at the same time, continuing to mess with the immigration system, a mess that has the weak Prime Minister staring down the barrel of a 25%-tariff threat from the U.S.
Common-sense Conservatives have a different approach. We are going to cut the GST on new housing construction so it is cheaper, not more expensive, to build the units Canadians need. We are going to make life more affordable by increasing the supply and availability of places to live from coast to coast.
The current Liberal housing minister loves the photo ops. Most of his job is big, fancy photo ops but no meaningful results, because we cannot argue with the facts. We are going to quit the photo ops and the posturing and replace them with actual negotiation that ties the number of infrastructure dollars that cities receive to the number of homes they build. We will make sure that high-density housing gets built near critical infrastructure like public transit.
It is a common-sense approach. What we incentivize, we get. The government incentivizes inaction and delay, and that is what they are getting. We will incentivize results for Canadians so they can achieve the dream of home ownership.
Even Liberals approve of the plan, Liberals like the Prime Minister's adviser, Mike Moffatt, who called it “bold”. He said he was a big fan of the idea. He knows that it is time for real action, as do most other Canadians. It seems like everyone except the ones who sit on the other side of the House know exactly what the solution is. Conservatives are going to axe the tax, build homes and finally bring home a country where hard work pays off once again and where affordable housing gives way to that Canadian dream.
There is much more I can talk about. I could go on about the lowest projected growth among advanced economies, the 1.5 million Canadians seeking work who cannot find it, the rapid growth of our bureaucracy and the red tape here in Ottawa, the impending quadrupling of a carbon tax that will delete more than $30 billion from our GDP or the new capital gains tax, which will send all that money down south.
I could go on and on. Unfortunately, I will run out of time. I would much rather have four years to come up with the solutions to address the problems created by the Liberals and the NDP instead of the 10 minutes that this debate affords.
All Canadians needed a carbon tax election yesterday, which is what we are hearing right across the country, so we can have a common-sense Conservative majority government led by the member for Carleton, who will fix this mess, axe the tax, build homes, fix the budget and stop crime. It is within our reach. We are going to build homes that Canadians can actually afford. We are going to bring it home after the next election, after we have a Conservative majority government in this place, led by the member for Carleton.