Madam Speaker, there is a rumour spreading. It has been around a while, but it lingers. People thought that by now this rumour would be dead, but unfortunately, it still lives on. In almost every corner of Canada, we hear the three big words: Canada feels broken. Why? Why does Canada feel broken? Once we start asking that question, we will get many answers, but at the core of all those things, I see one issue that affects almost every neighbourhood across this country: a housing crisis.
Housing conditions have changed dramatically in recent years. Cost has risen faster than wages. Demand has increased. Supply has not kept pace, and young Canadians are feeling the pressure more than any generation before them. Housing is not just about shelter. It is about economic stability. It is about mental health. It is about whether young people can make a wooden box into a home. Young Canadians are not asking for guarantees or handouts; they are asking for fairness. They want to work. They want to contribute. They want the same opportunities as the generations before them. They want to own a home.
In my province, we face the highest unemployment rate in the country. Add that to rising rents, rising home prices and limited supply, and young people are being forced into impossible choices. Some are staying with their parents. Some are even staying with their grandparents. These are grown men and women, oftentimes older than me, working full-time, yet still having to face these unfavourable choices.
I went to university. I got a degree in civil engineering. Even with a degree that offered great employment like that, in order to afford a home, I still had to work two jobs. I would work week on, week off at a gold mine. On my weeks off, I would work with a consulting company in the oil and gas sector. These are the consequences of the inflationary Liberal decade. Us young people have to work twice as hard to get the same things our parents had.
We are seeing even greater consequences of the lost Liberal decade. Youth shelters are full. Housing wait-lists are growing. Homelessness, once unthinkable at this scale, is now a reality in communities across my province and this country. Over the summer, I was able to have a tour of the Salvation Army homeless shelter in St. John's. I spoke with a few young men in the cafeteria. I heard their stories. They started out not much different than we did.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, they lost hope, and when hope was lost, they searched for something to fill that void. Like many young people, especially young men, they turned to drugs. Why did they lose this hope? As the inquisitive young man that I am, I asked workers at the facility that exact question. A young lady working there came up to me and said, “All these men, they just hit their breaking point. We see these kinds of surges when the economy gets bad. They lose their jobs, which causes stress. They often lose their wives and their families too, and they end up here.” How heartbreaking.
Her statement stuck with me because what we do here in Ottawa does not just affect our economy. It does not just affect unemployment, and it does not just affect housing stats. It affects real people, real Canadians, people who are hurting and looking for hope. Now these men are homeless. They have no jobs, and it is like a dog chasing its tail. Last night, as I was writing this speech, I came up with a revolutionary idea. What if we started building more homes to create more jobs for these young men and to give families homes to live in? I think that is an idea we can all get behind. The question is, how?
Economics 101 is a lesson on supply and demand. As supply increases, the demand decreases. This means that the more homes we have in Canada, the lower the demand will be, and prices will begin stabilizing to make houses more affordable for all Canadians. The solution seems simple: build more homes. Unfortunately, nobody in this country seems to be doing that. Why? Canada has an abundance of land, we have record high unemployment, and we have young families ready to move in. Once we start talking to developers, though, they will quickly tell us it is often the government's fault.
Developers spend years and thousands of dollars trying to acquire the land, the permits, the developmental fees and the approvals, oftentimes having to work with three levels of government. Once again, the developers want our government and bureaucrats to simply get out of the way, but the Liberal government wants to do the opposite. The Liberals now want to introduce a new bill so they would be directly involved in maintaining the illusion that they are trying to put out the fire they started.
This is not the first time that the Liberals have done this. In 2017, they launched a national housing strategy that was 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 over $115 billion to build 170,000 homes. That works out to $676,000 per home. The money was wasted on bureaucracy.
Can members imagine how many homes we could have built if the Liberals had worked with the Conservatives to remove the GST on new home builds? Taking off GST would have instantly saved 5%, which would have encouraged thousands of Canadians to build new homes right across this country. By partnering with Canadians, we could have stretched our dollar and built 95% more homes with that same dollar.
Instead of letting Canadians keep their own money, the Liberals want to keep taxing things such as housing, which they call a human right. Then they give that money to corporations and landlords to build homes, not for young people to own, but to rent. “Own nothing and be happy” is the slogan of the Liberals' plan for their new world order.
Young people do not want to rent their whole lives; they want to own a home, a place where they can paint their kids' bedrooms and build a fence for their dog. They want to own a home that builds equity toward retirement and gives them pride and hope for the future. This cannot be done by building rentals; it is achieved by letting the free market do its thing.
For generations, we had a system. Young people would buy a small starter home from a middle-aged family. This allowed them to build equity and their careers. When it was time to have kids, they could sell off their starter home to another young family and afford to build their new family home, perhaps even their dream home. Once their new home was built and their family raised, couples often decided to sell their home to the next generation as they downsized for retirement. Using their equity from the sale, they could build a small home for retirement. Once their lives came to an end, the family would sell off the property so that a young couple could start their journey on this housing cycle. Hakuna matata, it was the circle of life.
When bureaucrats got in the way, they damaged the whole cycle. It became too difficult for people to build new homes and move up the housing ladder, so they just stayed. No homes were built, the demand grew and prices skyrocketed.
Give a man a fish and he is thankful; give five men a fish and the whole village wants one. That is the problem with handouts: Everybody gets in line with their hand out. Investors no longer want to build homes with their own money because they are in line, waiting to see if they will win the Liberal lottery. Even in housing, instead of making housing incentives that would encourage all Canadians to build homes, the Liberals want to pick winners and losers.
Last year, the Liberal government announced that it wanted to build programs similar to the one described in this bill to build modular homes. Is it a coincidence that, when our Prime Minister was the chair of Brookfield, it acquired a modular home company called Modulaire Group? I think Canadians are curious, and even anxious, to see how much Modulaire, Brookfield and our Prime Minister will financially benefit from the programs in this bill.
It is time to build homes and hope. It is time to be more focused on getting our hammers up instead of our elbows.