Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise and again speak on an issue close to my heart and to the next generation of young Canadians, which of course is the issue of housing and the lack of housing in Canada.
Build Canada Homes, this new bureaucracy, is emblematic of what is wrong with government thinking these days. It is what is wrong with Liberal plans these days. For every problem, there is a new government-driven response. For childhood nutrition problems, we have a government-run lunch program. For bad actors on the Internet, we have a government-run censorship program. For a lack of housing supply, we have not one, not two, not even three, but four government-run bureaucracies. If any of these Liberal solutions worked, after 10 years, we would have seen things improve. However, in fact, in housing, the opposite has taken place. It is now more difficult than it has ever been in Canadian history for the next generation to own a home anywhere in Canada.
Even if we thought another government bureaucracy was the solution, Build Canada Homes will not fix our housing woes. That is because this bureaucracy's stated objective is only with respect to non-market housing, which means affordable housing and at non-market rates. This means that most Canadians, those of middle income or higher, will see zero benefit from this new bureaucracy.
Estimates suggest that this new bureaucracy will deliver only between 1% and 2% of the needed new home supply. Even at full capacity, the non-market focus would therefore only address a tiny fraction of the overall supply gap in Canada. A report from the Canadian Home Builders Association agrees, saying, “With the non-market housing focus of BCH, it will only impact a small fragment of what will be required to achieve the government’s 500,000 homes per year target.”
How about unimaginable speeds? The only thing that this budget could point to with respect to housing was the selection of certain sites for construction, maybe sometime in the future; a few hundred homes in the north, maybe in the future; and a few hundred in Toronto, maybe in the future. That is a far cry from the 500,000 new homes that the Liberals' own housing agency says need to be built in Canada, and that is just to get us back to 2019 affordability levels. In fact, the government's own housing bureaucracy said just this week that housing starts are actually down again year over year. CMHC reported this week that housing starts are down 3% year over year.
My question for the parliamentary secretary is this: Can she please try to explain how a new government bureaucracy that builds only non-market homes at unimaginably slow speeds will allow the next generation to afford a home in Canada?