Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to address two general subject areas, if time permits.
For the first of these, I will make some observations about how this budget and the general direction the government has taken over the 10 years it has been in power have caused us to drift away from the goal of Canada being a financially egalitarian society, in which all people have a fair shot at doing well and those who are less well off are taken care of through our welfare state.
As the second part, I will talk specifically about issues relating to the cost of housing, especially as it affects younger people, which obviously is one of the key areas in which issues of affordability and equity are problematic.
The stated goal of Canada's welfare state has always been to redistribute wealth from wealthier Canadians to Canadians who have less. From its very start in the 1920s and 1930s, the goal of wealth redistribution from rich to poor has been supported by a broad national consensus, and all parties. Over the years, Canadians have sometimes complained that taxes were too high or that too much of the redistributed wealth was being used up in bureaucratic churn, but no major political actor has ever suggested a return to the old days when tax rates were very low and the poor received no public assistance whatsoever. However, recent public policy shifts of the last 10 years, and particularly this budget, have caused the welfare state to drift away from this widely supported redistribution from rich to poor and toward something entirely different.
Increasingly, the policy choices of the Canadian government and to some degree of governments at all levels, but particularly of this government, have had the practical impact of transferring wealth not to the poorest, but rather to parts of the population that are already well off. I could give a very long list of both federal and provincial policy, and municipal policy as well, quite frankly. However, let me just give one example that is held up by the Liberal government as being a touchstone of how much they want to help those in need.
This is their publicly funded child care program, introduced last year, which promises to offer significantly more affordable child care to everyone, in principle, but in practice, the program is available, for the most part, only to people who live in larger population centres that are closer to where the regulated day care spaces are located. This creates the following problem: State-subsidized child care spaces are available to urbanites, who are on average wealthier, but not to rural Canadians, who are on average less wealthy.
Similarly, subsidized child care is unavailable for children of shift workers, who are almost always less wealthy, so on the whole, this is a transfer that misses those who need it the most and provides it to those who need it the least. That is not to say that it is not an important policy goal. It is to say that this is a very poor mechanism by which to help those who are parents and who are not wealthy.
Likewise, the programs to give incentives to individuals to purchase zero-emission vehicles are great for those who are in a position to purchase a vehicle at all and who are in a position, because they are urbanites, to be close to where they can recharge their vehicle with ease before the battery runs out. It is of no use at all to someone in a rural area. It is of no use at all to someone who is less well off, but it transfers taxes that were collected from everybody to a certain segment of the population that, in practice, does not need it, rather than to those who need it the most.
Let me turn to the issue of housing. Everybody knows the cost of housing has soared over the past few years, but it seems to me that something should be said to the generally well-off people in this room, those of us who are wealthier, those of us who are older, someone who is a boomer or a generation Xer like me. If that person bought a house a decade ago, two decades ago or three decades ago, the price of housing can be looked at dispassionately. In fact, it is a question that, on the whole, has made us better off.
Prices are high and that is tough for some other people, but for us homeowners, things are actually pretty good. The house that each one of us bought, which seemed expensive at the time, is now worth twice as much or more, and that is when I take into account inflation. If I look at the nominal price, the growth is even greater. For many people of my generation, the resale value of that mortgage-paid house is the foundation of what promises to be a very comfortable retirement.
However, if someone does not own a house, as is the case for most young people, things look and feel entirely different. When I was 25, in 1990, it was possible for me to rent a small, fully detached three-bedroom house in a pleasant neighbourhood in Ottawa for $850 a month, which is $1,840 in 2025 dollars.
Recently, out of curiosity, I took a look online to see how much it would cost to do this now. A comparable home in a comparable location would be about 50% more to rent than it was then. As a result, for 49% of Canadians under the age of 25, just paying the cost of rent consumes half their income, according to a survey conducted earlier this year.
We could just shrug at that and say that maybe it is a bit much for a 25-year-old to expect to live in a three-bedroom house, although nobody thought that in 1990, when I was 25. However, the fact is that most people that age are now living in shared rooms or in apartments far smaller than what I once enjoyed, and the survey shows that the average rent for people in this age range is about $1,400 and that they are living in very small spaces.
It is not just the very young who have this problem. Thirty-four per cent of renters of all ages are paying more than half their income in rent. It is also a problem not just in the big cities; a substantial percentage of residents in Lanark County, in the riding I represent, also pay more for rent than for all other expenditures combined.
Given these facts, it seems hard to deny that in order for most young people to become financially secure, they have to escape the high cost of renting, which means buying a home. However, to state the obvious, it is nearly impossible for them to save up for a down payment for a house, the price of which has skyrocketed, when the high cost of rent is soaking up so much of their income.
This inevitably leads inevitably to some depressing news. StatsCan reports that after 10 years of Liberal government, the percentage of people under the age of 30 who own their own home has fallen by a third. The statistics are for 2011 and 2021; nothing more recent is available, but they make the point that by now, home ownership numbers among the young are falling and appear to be falling with increasing speed.
This produces an even more alarming statistic: While the average income in Canada for people in the bottom half of wage earners has gone up by 250% since 1982, mostly due to inflation, the cost of housing of all sorts has gone up more than three times as much. Housing prices are rising much faster than wages. That means that there is now a divide. It is generational in nature, and it is divided between urban and rural. It is divided in a way where we see the dream of social equity and the dream of prosperity disappearing for a substantial part of the population.
That is why we had the results we did in the last election. Poll-by-poll results are available, so we can look at them. We can see very clearly that, in my own riding, the people who are the least well off were voting for the Conservative Party and against the government. That appears to be a pattern that was true across the country. The people who are the most well off, who enjoy home ownership, who enjoy high-paying wages and who enjoy the benefits of a system that transfers, essentially, to the wealthy, voted Liberal.
I think we have to step back and think about what we can do as a country to make sure the divide ends. The Liberals should have a partisan interest in this. They should, for their own sake, be worrying about and trying to stop the enormous and growing social divide. This is a crisis that is transforming the nature of our society. I think, if it is not dealt with, the Canada our children will have when they are my age will be far worse, quite frankly, than the one we inherited from our parents. That is a great shame.
The budget could have dealt with the issue. Instead, more spending has been piled on and more debt is being accumulated, which will be paid for by the next generation. When the Liberals use the term “generational budget”, I can only think they are talking about a concept known as generational debt, which is what they are imposing on our children, who will pay more taxes into a system that transfers money away from them and structures policy to make sure they cannot move ahead. It is a great shame.
All I can do is hope that, on this basis, the House will reject the budget implementation act when it comes to a vote.