Mr. Speaker, I would like to welcome the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby—Maillardville and congratulate him on his maiden intervention.
The government will begin by focusing on affordability. That is why the first item we tabled was the middle-class tax cut the hon. member referred to, a tax cut that will save up to $840 per year for every two-earner taxpaying family in the country. Up to 22 million Canadians will benefit from this measure.
Rightly, the focus of the question was on housing and housing affordability. The first and most immediate thing we can do is cut the GST on homes for first-time buyers, saving up to $50,000 on the purchase of a home.
Ultimately, fixing the housing crisis requires a dramatic increase in housing supply. That is why we need to catalyze major investment in housing. We will do that through the creation of “build Canada homes”, which will focus first on deeply affordable housing, a sector that has been neglected for decades. I recall the record of the former member for Carleton, which was that he built six deeply affordable homes during his time.
I will end with this: Fundamentally, we will rely on the private sector to build affordable homes, including by supplying $25 billion in direct financing to private developers to build the housing the country needs.