Madam Speaker, I have been here for almost nine months now, and this is at least the third time I have risen in the chamber to speak about housing.
I cannot believe how much hot air the Liberals put up in this place. It is almost enough to launch the Remax hot air balloon, yet availability and affordability of housing are going down across the country. The talking points are endless. The press conferences are polished. The announcements are flashy movie sets that are quickly deconstructed afterwards.
Back home in Newfoundland and Labrador, the tents are real, the wait-lists are real and homelessness is real. Hundreds of men, women and even children are experiencing homelessness in my province. Hundreds of youth are on the waiting list for emergency shelters, and the emergency shelters are full. That is not just a statistic. That is a failure, and that failure belongs to this government. After eight years, after billions announced, after strategy upon strategy, housing is less affordable, less attainable and less available than when the Liberals took office.
In my province, young families are not asking for luxury condos. They are asking for a modest starter home, a place to raise their kids and a place to build a life. Instead, they are competing against inflation, bureaucracy, gatekeeping and federal policies that drive up the cost of living and the cost of building at every single stage. The Liberals say they are investing, but if we invest billions and the homelessness rises, it is not investment. It is incompetence.
I have learned in my last nine months here in Ottawa that the Liberals love picking winners and losers. Their favourite movie must be Pinocchio, because all they want to do is to pull the strings in almost every aspect of Canadians' daily lives.
In my riding, we have business owners applying for federal funding to build low-income housing. That may sound great, but it creates so much bureaucracy, red tape and inequality. For example, two businessmen in neighbouring communities both apply for funding for, say, 10 units at nearly $50,000 a unit. Talk about an awesome gift from the feds. I am starting to think the Liberals like the colour red, because it reminds them that they can put on their coats and pretend to be Santa Claus.
However, here is the problem: One of those businessmen did not get funding, and now all 10 of those units are going to a neighbouring community, leaving none for that businessman and his community. Why did both applicants not get five units each? The transparency of these application processes is so low. Perhaps the only way to be accepted is to be a Liberal insider or a Liberal donor.
We Conservatives, time after time, have fought for transparency and fairness, one of the biggest being the Federal Accountability Act of 2006. We fight for policies and platforms that incentivize everybody equally, instead of picking winners and losers and only choosing a select few to get incentives. We want to work with provinces to reduce the GST on all new homes under $1.3 million. These are policies that benefit all Canadians: no applications, no selection processes and no favouritism.
We have lots of land in Canada. We have high unemployment and a huge demand for housing. When we ask home builders what the problem is, they always say that there is too much red tape and bureaucracy. Developers spend years and thousands of dollars trying to acquire land, permits, developmental fees and approvals, oftentimes having to deal with three levels of government. They want government and the bureaucracies to simply get out of the way, but the Liberal government wants to do the opposite. Every solution it proposes adds to the problem by creating more bureaucracy.
Justin Trudeau's government implemented the national housing strategy. It did not work. Home prices continued to soar at rates much higher than our neighbouring economy, the United States. The Liberals came back to the House, after campaigning in the election that they would be a completely different government, and decided they wanted to continue to do the same. This led to the creation of private member's bill, Bill C-227, which would create more red tape.
That was not enough. Now we are here today discussing Bill C-20, which once again builds more bureaucracy. If the Liberals are going to come into the House with their smoke and mirrors and repackage the same bills over and again, I have no choice but to give the same speech, but just in a different font.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to continue my speech, but I will be splitting my time with another member afterward.
The Liberals are introducing this new bill to give the illusion that they are directly involved in trying to put out the fire they started. In 2017, the Liberals launched the national housing strategy, administered by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. If they already have the solution, why do they need to repackage the same old plan? They spent $150 billion to build only 170,000 homes. That works out to $676,000 per home. The money was wasted on bureaucracy. Now they want to create a new Crown corporation to physically build the homes, creating even more involvement and more strings for them to pull. Here is the kicker: They already have a Crown corporation that does this.
All the bill does is merge the failed national housing strategy and the failed Canada Lands Company into one corporation. That is Liberal math: Take two failing things, put them together and pretend it works. In reality, it is like they are trying to build a motorcycle with two flat tires. Can members imagine how many homes could have been built if the Liberals had worked with the Conservatives to remove the GST on new home builds?
