Madam Speaker, there are not many, and this does not surprise me. In general, politicians do not know how to build anything, because they do not build things. Builders build things, and home builders build houses. In Canada, home builders have always built homes. The reason they are not building homes now is that they are not allowed to.
My friend Cal is a small-time renovator who lives in Kitchener. He bought a dilapidated house in London, Ontario, and wants to renovate it into a triplex so that three families can move in. He has waited months and months for the city to approve it.
I have an Albanian friend, Ben, who is a mid-sized housing developer in Kitchener. He bought a plot of land and wants to build 36 townhomes. The city fought him and said he can only build 16. He had to get lawyers and fight in the Ontario Land Tribunal for two years to finally be allowed to build homes during a housing crisis.
My friend Mike owns a gym in Kitchener. He moved locations, and to get his operations running up at capacity, he needed to put in a new washroom for a change room. It took months and months to get that permit for a toilet.
In each case, it is terribly demoralizing and financially injurious to have bureaucrats tell people what they can and cannot do with their own property when they are trying to build houses and provide services for our communities. In every case, and this is the issue from coast to coast to coast, bureaucrats stand in the way and say it takes nine months to approve a toilet.
Rather than standing up against this violation of property rights and letting builders build, the federal government is going to spend $15 billion for a new federal bureaucracy to add on to the municipal bureaucracies. This will not work; it is a bad investment. Even if people thought the Liberals had perhaps turned over a new leaf after 10 years of bad investment, I am sorry to disabuse them of this notion. Pouring money into bureaucracy will not fix the housing crisis; it is the cause of the housing crisis. We need to build Canada strong, but the budget builds Canadian bureaucracy strong.
I want to make a last point about the Liberals' last promise: generational investment. The budget is not providing generational investment; it is providing generational debt. They are increasing spending by a lot and investment by a little. The sum total is $2,000 of new debt for every man, woman and child in our nation just this year.
I have a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. How could I kiss them goodbye this morning and tell them that I am going to Ottawa to vote for a budget that puts them in thousands of dollars of debt before they even hit kindergarten? I honestly ask whether the Liberal MPs have small children. Have they told them that they are raiding their college fund, foreclosing on their future, to place bets on government bureaucracies that never pay off? I cannot imagine they have. In fact, I suspect that they were rather taken in by the Prime Minister's promises as well. I suspect that they did want to build Canada strong, spend less money and invest more and that many of them are feeling terribly disappointed now. To them, I extend my warmest personal invitation to come sit next to me on this side of the House. I ask them to please stand up now if they would like to take the offer.