Mr. Speaker, Canada is in a housing crisis. This does not come as a surprise to anyone in this place, and it certainly does not come as a surprise to Canadians who are looking for a home or a place to live, be it a first-time home purchase or simply shelter.
We can agree that there is a crisis, but how do we solve it? The government has made some proposals and has some ideas on how best to address it. The Build Canada Homes act would, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, cost about $219 million in operating costs. That would be the administrative price of this bureaucracy. This is not the Liberal government's first iteration of a housing bureaucracy, but it is its latest one.
Housing starts are projected to fall sharply. The government promised 500,000 homes per year, but it is not fixing the real barriers, which is why we are going to continue to see a decline or insufficient growth in housing starts.
There are a few different ways we would propose, as Conservatives, to address this. For market housing, we obviously have a supply-side challenge, and we need to unlock that. The private sector is going to be the biggest driver in building homes. We need to recognize that and do what government should be doing, which is getting out of the way and reducing the burdens. Removing taxes, such as the GST on new homes, and tying federal infrastructure funding to municipalities to permit more housing are part of an approach that would absolutely lead to faster project approvals and easing prices for homebuyers.
We also need non-market housing. Private developers are not going to be the ones to solely fill this need, but supportive housing, indigenous housing and housing for people experiencing homelessness need to be addressed, and need to be addressed urgently. However, this federal bureaucracy, and that number again is $219 million in operating costs that the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said it would cost, would take money away from the approaches that work and that we advocate for.
We come at this from a point of agreeing with the government that there is a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis and an addictions crisis, but there is not a crisis in the creation of too few bureaucracies by the government.
What happens when government provides funding to the people who need it without creating a new bureaucracy? A good example of that is in my community, where I advocated for supportive housing. There was a municipal building that was a former administration building for the water pollution control plant. Along with my provincial counterpart, MPP Steve Clark, we encouraged the local government to free that up for supportive housing, which it did in partnership with the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville. They pursued a service provider and project funding that would house the homeless and help to treat those suffering from addiction, giving them the tools to get well, to get off drugs if they were suffering from addiction, giving them skills for employment and helping them find market housing and a job. Once they graduated through, a new space would be opened up for someone else.
The Pathways supportive housing project in Brockville, which is being administered at that site by the John Howard Society, is a great example of funding that can come from government. It is $850,000 to operate that program, and it is going to change the lives of dozens of people every year by getting them off the street, getting them off drugs and helping them to get jobs, to get into market housing and to reunite with their families. This is incredible. This is the way.
The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness administered these funds. This comes from a government program. It comes from the homelessness reduction innovation fund. Are the parameters of this program perfect? No, no government program is, but when we are comparing investment where it is needed, $850,000 is going to help dozens of the most vulnerable people every year in one community. Let us take that in terms of the value for investment against, and I keep looking down to make sure I get the number right from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, $219 million in operating costs alone for this latest bureaucracy. We agree on what the problem is. We agree on some of the ways to solve it, but where we disagree is the expenditure on another bureaucracy. This is one of those things.
How quickly we can build homes in this country can also be addressed by expanding skilled trades participation and continuing to unlock private investment so builders can deliver homes faster and at greater scale. I had the privilege to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces, and I was a tradesman. I was a telecommunications lineman, so I got to work with all kinds of construction trades. It was a tremendous opportunity for me. I got to work with the greatest Canadians I have ever encountered.
My experience in meeting with the building trades in my community is that the hard-working men and women who build stuff, who fix stuff, are the folks who make it is easy to see the investment bring a great return. If we want to find ways for all levels of government to work together, we need to be partnering with them, investing in our skilled trades, recognizing their credentials uniformly across the country and giving them fair tax treatment, as fair or fairer than CEOs who are able to write off their travel. What are we doing to encourage people to enter our building trades?
We have had this housing shortage for years, and we have seen the supply challenge for years. However, we have also seen the creation of new housing bureaucracies over that same period of time, and the problem has not been solved. We agree there is a problem, but where we disagree is on the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars for the creation of a new bureaucracy.
We can agree on investment in the areas where it matters most. Cutting taxes and removing the GST for first-time homebuyers will get the job done. Let us find ways we can work together to help Canadians without the creation of another bureaucracy, which will only drive up inflation through higher taxes but will not do anything to meaningfully address the housing crisis we find ourselves in here in Canada.