Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-20, the badly misnamed Build Canada Homes act.
Before getting into some of the problems with Build Canada Homes, let me just outline the very real housing crisis that this country faces. After 10 years of the Liberals, housing costs have doubled. In fact, housing costs are now 50% higher than they are in the U.S. Consequently, many young Canadians cannot afford a new home. The aspiration of home ownership has become unattainable, something that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. The Liberals have literally priced an entire generation of Canadians out of the market.
What is the root of the problem? The root of the problem overall is one of supply. The reason housing is expensive is that we are not building enough of it. We are not building enough homes fast enough. Indeed, we are building fewer homes today than we were in 1972, at a time when Canada had half the population we have today.
According to CMHC, Canada needs to build anywhere from 430,000 to half a million new homes for a sustained period, year upon year, to restore affordability. We are nowhere near that mark. In fact, in 2025, new housing starts languished at 259,000, and according to CMHC data, the trajectory is not a positive one. The projection from CMHC is that new housing starts are trending downward year upon year, falling to a mere 212,000 new housing starts in 2028, which is less than half the number of new homes needed to restore affordability.
We enter into Build Canada Homes, which is the Prime Minister's brainchild to solve Canada's housing crisis. What is Build Canada Homes? Well, it is about getting the federal government into the business of building homes. It would establish a Crown corporation wherein the federal government would act as a real estate developer for affordable housing.
The overriding problem with Build Canada Homes conceptually is that it seeks to solve a problem that does not exist. In Canada, we are not lacking real estate developers. We have plenty of real estate developers, but that is what Build Canada Homes is. It is about the federal government acting as a real estate developer.
The real problems that we face when it comes to housing are layer upon layer of red tape, regulation, development charges and taxes, which have discouraged builders from building. Indeed, if one looks at building permits in Canada, we rank 34 out of the 35 OECD countries. It takes, on average, 250 days for a building permit to be issued in Canada. By comparison, for a residential building permit in the U.S., the time is, on average, a month, and in some cases, they are issued in the span of a week.
The source of the layers of red tape and regulation largely falls at the municipal level with big city mayors and councils that have acted as gatekeepers. These local gatekeepers have created some of the most unaffordable, most expensive housing markets in the world. Vancouver is the most extreme example, being the third-most unaffordable housing market in the world, but other cities, such as Toronto, are not far behind. According to analysis from the C.D. Howe Institute, gatekeepers, with their red tape and regulation, have added $1.3 million to the cost of the average home in Vancouver and $350,000 in Toronto.
Given that, is it any wonder that we are not building the homes that we need and that we have a supply issue that has resulted in housing being very expensive, pushing Canadians right out of the market? In the face of that, the solution, intuitively, is to get the gatekeepers out of the way to let builders build. To that end, Conservatives have put forward a number of common-sense proposals.
For example, we proposed the building homes not bureaucracy act. Under this proposed legislation, federal infrastructure dollars would, in part, be tied to the building of new homes to municipalities, so that municipalities that sped up permitting and increased the housing supply would receive a building bonus, whereas those municipalities that insisted on being gatekeepers would see a similar percentage or the same percentage of federal infrastructure dollars withheld.
However, we did not stop there. We are calling for the cutting of the GST on all new homes. That would save the average family $65,000 on the purchase of a new home. The Liberals promised something similar during the election campaign. What they delivered instead is to take the GST off new homes for first-time homebuyers. The problem with that, of course, is that very few first-time homebuyers purchase a brand-new home, meaning that the Liberals' GST cut helps very few purchasers.
Conservatives have also called for the government to take action to reduce development charges. This is something that the Prime Minister campaigned on. In fact, the Prime Minister quite correctly noted that taxes can contribute to 30% of the cost of a new home. When it comes to actually doing something about it, we have not seen action from the Prime Minister, just talk.
Conservatives have proposed taking the capital gains tax off reinvestments in Canada, including reinvestments in housing, which would help unlock billions of dollars in Canada's home building sector. In contrast, what are the Liberals offering? They are offering Build Canada Homes, which does nothing to address the underlying cost factors that have stifled supply, resulting in housing being unaffordable due to a lack of supply.
Now, what will Build Canada Homes do? One thing it will certainly do is build a big, fat new bureaucracy, a $13-billion bureaucracy, but what it will not do is build new homes. In fact, according to analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Build Canada Homes will build approximately 5,000 new units per year. That is 1% of the half million new units that we need to restore affordability. This is the brainchild of the Prime Minister, his solution to the housing crisis. He said during the election that he would accelerate housing at speeds not seen in generations. He has put forward a bureaucracy that will build 5,000 new homes.
As I noted at the beginning of my speech, Build Canada Homes is badly misnamed because it will not build new homes. It will build bureaucracy. We do not need bureaucracy. We need to get gatekeepers out of the way and let builders build the homes that Canadians need.