Mr. Speaker, budget 2025 was supposed to mark what we were told was going to be a generational shift in this country. That is what we were told. When it came to housing, the government promised something truly historic. In fact, the budget documents declared rather boldly, I might add, that budget 2025 was the most ambitious housing plan since the Second World War, backed by more than $11 billion in a brand new top-down federal initiative called Build Canada Homes. That is a pretty big claim, and when a government promises to match the scale of what Canada achieved in the Second World War, it is probably worth remembering just how extraordinary that moment was in Canadian history.
Back then, Canada was not just short on housing; we were in a full-blown emergency. Ten years of economic depression, followed by six years of war, had nearly wiped out homebuilding in Canada. When peace finally came, over a million veterans returned in a matter of months. They were getting married, starting families, looking for work and looking to start their futures, but Canada simply did not have any homes.
We know this from the debates in this very House. On August 12, 1944, then finance minister James Lorimer Ilsley warned Parliament that housing had become one of the gravest domestic problems facing the nation. He described overcrowding, rising rents and a shortage of adequate dwellings in every major centre, and he was not exaggerating. According to the government's own 1946 report on housing and community planning, Canada was short more than 200,000 homes. Cities were reporting families living in garages, converted barracks and temporary wartime huts. Wartime Housing, which was a temporary agency during the war, had to expand its operations because so many Canadians simply had nowhere else to go.
Here is the critical lesson from that era: Canada solved that crisis. We solved it with focus, with urgency and with a government that understood that its job was not to control everything but to clear the way for builders, for communities and for families. When the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation was created in 1946, its mandate was clear: accelerate construction, cut through bureaucracy and partner with the private sector to rebuild the country. It worked.
Between 1947 and 1955, Canada built more homes per capita than at any other time in our history. Entire communities were built from the ground up. Neighbourhoods in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Halifax flourished. Builders built, trades worked, families prospered, and the government kept costs low and approvals fast. It stayed in its lane. It empowered Canadians instead of layering on more red tape. That was the formula. That is the lesson.
The contrast with today's reality simply could not be sharper. Young Canadians now face a housing crisis that by many measures is even worse than what we faced in 1945. The Bank of Canada and Statistics Canada tell us that housing is more unaffordable relative to income than at any other time in our history. Government-imposed costs, development charges, fees, taxes and regulatory delays equal between 30% and 50% of the price of a new home in major cities in this country. The C.D. Howe Institute and the Canadian Home Builders' Association have been telling us this.
The CMHC, the very agency created to cut red tape back then, now warns that red tape is one of the biggest barriers to building the homes Canadians need. Their 2023 “Housing Supply Report” confirms that Canada builds fewer homes per capita today than we did in the 1970s, despite having the fastest population growth in more than half a century.
This is not because Canadians have somehow forgotten how to build. We have some of the best builders and tradespeople in the world. It is not because we lack the land, the lumber or the talent. This is a crisis created by government, with layer after layer of fees, years-long approvals timelines and endless paperwork. It is a system so slow and so expensive that viable projects become unaffordable before a shovel even hits the ground. Instead of cutting through the barriers, the government keeps building new bureaucracies, including a fourth federal housing body. They then call it ambition.
Budget 2025 was supposed to break this cycle, but instead of addressing the real structural problems, it would simply repeat the approach that has been failing Canadians for almost a decade. The Prime Minister promised to cut development charges in half, for example. In budget 2025, there is nothing about that. He promised to incentivize private rental construction through the old MURB program. Budget 2025 says nothing about that either. He promised a “generational shift”, but we know the first six projects announced under the Build Canada Homes announcement are all Canada Lands Company projects that it has been working on for years.
While the government claims to be fighting the gatekeepers, it continues to reward the worst offenders. Let us look at Toronto. After charging massive development fees, including a 40% increase just after receiving approval for its $471-million housing accelerator fund, a deal it is not even honouring today, the federal government still handed the city $283 million for a sewer project that it had already charged developers for. The government is rewarding failure. It is rewarding the worst housing gatekeepers in the country.
Meanwhile, the scale of the crisis continues to grow. CMHC tells us that Canada needs 480,000 homes a year for the next 10 years to restore affordability. This year, we have not yet reached 200,000 starts. In fact, 2025 is on track to being the worst year for homebuilding in three decades.
Young Canadians are doing everything right. They are working hard and are saving what they can, but they still cannot afford a home. They are delaying families. They are delaying their careers. They are delaying life itself because they cannot find or afford a place to live. This is not the Canada we want to leave them, and it does not have to be this way.
The postwar generation showed us exactly what works when we take the housing crisis seriously. They kept costs down. They reduced government barriers. They aligned federal, provincial and municipal efforts. They partnered with builders instead of fighting them, and they measured success by one outcome: getting homes built.
This is the approach the Conservatives would bring back. We would lower the cost and burden of government, because every delay and every dollar added by government adds to the price of a home. We would eliminate duplication, streamline approvals and bring common-sense timelines to projects. We would reward municipalities that open doors and stop giving money to those that slam them shut. We would treat housing as a national priority, not just as a slogan but as a mission grounded in results.
Canadians are practical. They are builders and problem solvers, and our history proves it. After the war, we did not back away from the scale of the challenge; we met it head-on, and in the process, we built a future that gave families hope, stability and prosperity.
Budget 2025 fails all the Canadians who believed the Prime Minister when he promised to build at a scale not seen in generations. We can do it again. The example is in our own history. Young Canadians deserve a government that works as hard as they do, that cuts red tape instead of adding it, that empowers builders instead of blocking them, that rewards cities that are getting the job done, not the ones that are not doing the job, and that focuses on what matters, which is getting more homes built so every Canadian has a safe place to live. Canada has beaten the housing crisis before, but budget 2025 does not even come close to the ambition required for the scale of the problem today.
I would encourage the finance minister to look back in our history to the work of another era, at a time when Canada recognized the scale of the crisis in housing and took bold action to meet the challenge head-on. I would encourage the Minister of Housing to understand the scale of the crisis today and that it does call for bold, sweeping action. I wish he understood that his proposals tinker around the edges of the real root cause of the problems in the housing crisis. He is waiting to see if they work, and that time is over. I wish he understood that without bold action, today's housing crisis is quickly becoming a housing catastrophe.
Budget 2025 does not meet the moment. It fails an entire generation of young Canadians who dream of achieving what their parents and their grandparents simply took for granted. We have done it before. We can do it again. We must do it again.
