Madam Speaker, back in the spring, I asked the housing minister an important question. I pointed out to him that what has happened under the government over the last 10 years is that Canada has become a country where there are just two kinds of families: families that already own real estate and families that have given up hope of ever owning real estate. That is because for young people today, the only path to home ownership is their parents: their parents' ability to share their equity, to give them large amounts of money for down payments and/or to co-sign for loans. A generation of Canadians has given up on home ownership, and that is what the government has presided over.
The minister himself is, of course, a homeowner and a real estate investor. He was also the mayor of Vancouver when it was one of our most unaffordable cities and one of the most unaffordable places on this entire planet. The response we got was not very helpful.
The government has presided over real estate prices doubling and rents doubling, while productivity and per capita GDP have remained unchanged over a 10-year period. People's ability to cover the cost of living, including housing, is no better than it was 10 years ago, while rents and prices have doubled.
It was not the housing minister who responded; it was the House leader, and in his response, he made vague claims of building hundreds of thousands of homes. Since that response and since the commitments the Liberals made during the election about housing construction, pre-sales of the homes in Canada's two most expensive markets, Vancouver and Toronto, have utterly collapsed.
We heard about this at the finance committee. Pre-sales on condominium properties in Toronto are down 93% year over year. Think about that for a minute. When pre-sales collapse with a 93% drop, future housing starts are going to collapse. Without pre-sales today, there will be no financing and no construction in the years ahead.
We are being set up right now in our most stressed housing markets for an utter collapse of housing construction at a time when Canadians cannot afford homes and need access to housing. We are in a market where sellers and builders cannot sell at the current cost of material and at current prices. They cannot build and make a profit. However, buyers cannot afford the prices in existing markets.
We certainly need far more homes for supply, but the only way we are going to get out of this jam is to unleash the Canadian economy and have productivity increase. When it comes to productivity, we are at the bottom of the G7 and the bottom of the OECD. Until we unleash the Canadian economy by getting rid of all the laws the Liberals have passed to prevent oil and gas development, for example, or by getting major projects built that can allow us to get our energy to market, we are not going to have the productivity to grow into the unaffordable housing market that has come in under the last 10 years of the government.