Mr. Speaker, we are back in the House after what seems to be a long summer vacation for the Liberal government. We still have a youth unemployment crisis, which got worse. We have chaos in our immigration system, which got worse. We have crime and lawlessness in our streets, which got worse.
The Prime Minister promised Canadians a new direction, a change in leadership, whatever it was. Instead, they got the same ideas from the same old ministers and the same predictable platitudes, which are, frankly, coming up short on results.
Before the Liberals took the summer off, I asked a question about Canadian housing. I am going to talk about the market for a second, as we saw what was going on over the summer: Buyers cannot buy and sellers cannot sell. That should be indicative of a massive policy failure.
If someone wants to own a home in Vancouver right now, it is going to cost them an average of 13.5 times their income. In Toronto, it is 10 times their income. At the same time, housing construction is down. It is down by 50% in the GTA, and it is down 13% right across the country. This is a government that promised us the most ambitious housing plan since World War II, but it is going to miss its targets this year by 50%.
It is easy to see how all of this is happening. The lofty rhetoric we hear is not really lining up with what the government is actually doing.
The person put in charge of housing in this country raised home building taxes by 141% while he was in Vancouver as mayor, and he let home prices skyrocket by 149%. That was my question. The minister is rewarding the municipalities following in the footsteps of generous handouts for cities that refuse to get new housing built. We have seen a continuation of that over the summer, and he is preserving the high-tax red tape bureaucracy in Ottawa that stops progress and keeps prices high.
In fact, what the government is doing since I have asked this question is building a $13-billion corporation led by a former NIMBY deputy mayor from Toronto who was responsible for keeping the private sector out of the tendering process in that city. At the very same time, the immigration minister is opening the doors to this country, pulling out a rubber stamp and adding about 20% more to the cost of a home.
Let us break down what this all means and why I asked my question, which was not answered. Forget owning a home. A person needs to make $46 an hour just to rent an apartment in Vancouver, and $42 an hour in Toronto. We know most jobs are not like that and do not pay that. This means half of young Canadians will now spend over 50% of their income on housing. It means 27% of homeless Canadians are now over the age of 50. What all of that means is that nobody is immune to the 10 years of housing hell that the Liberal government has created.
I really hope the parliamentary secretary was in training camp this summer because it is going to take a lot of flexibility and verbal gymnastics to explain why this failure was so big and why it is getting bigger.