Mr. Speaker, listening to the debate, as I have been, we would not know it, but there is a quiet but growing anxiety in the country. We can feel it in conversations around the community, with those who work in our offices, with the people one potentially goes to school with, with people on the pickleball court. We hear a pause before a young couple answers the question of when they are buying. We see the construction worker who is constantly checking the listings, the articles about litigation for those who were so close but just could not close on what they bought pre-construction.
The housing market in Canada is not just cooling. It is absolutely cracking for these people, for people who want to get into the housing market.
In Toronto, starts have fallen to 30-year lows. Last month, fewer than 300 homes and fewer than 100 condos sold in the entire city. That is nearly 90% below average, and 75% of people who do not own a home in that city believe they never will own a home.
Think about that. That is now a story in Canada. Three-quarters of people who do not own a home will have already given up on the idea that they will own a home. I repeated that because I want members to let that sink in. This is a country where the dream of home ownership has always been there and should continue to be there.
This is not a market correction. It is not a cycle. It is an entire generation losing faith in what their parents and grandparents, and those who came before them, had in this country. It is in moments like this, in a real crisis, that leadership and action actually matter.
When a person's house is on fire, they do not call the fire department for a literature review on combustion, and that is exactly what we are talking about. It is exactly what the government is doing with yet another piece of legislation on housing. The flames are obvious, the young people are locked out, the renters are squeezed, builders are stalled and jobs are disappearing. Now, imagine that, instead of water, the government arrives with a brand new set of clipboards. It announces a task force on flames. It creates an office of fire awareness. It holds a press conference about historic fire mitigation targets, but the house keeps burning.
For a while it sounded like the Liberals understood the urgency. For a while there was talk of a new government and a new plan. They promised the most ambitious housing plan in nearly a century. They used words like revolutionary, transformative and historic. Those are their words, but what did Canadians actually get? They got Bill C-20, which has nothing of what they said. It is just tinkering around the edges, more of the exact same thinking that got us to this point in the first place.
Do members want to know the headline feature of the bill? It is unbelievable. It is yet another housing bureaucracy, housing bureaucracy number four. What did the first three deliver? They doubled the price of homes. They doubled rent. They doubled mortgage costs, and they sent housing construction into an absolute tailspin. This year, we are supposed to, according to the government's own numbers, build 500,000 new homes just to keep up with demand. This new bureaucracy will add 5,000, which is a rounding error, at the cost of $13 billion, which is not a rounding error. That is $13 billion for a government that believes that if one studies a crisis long enough and writes enough reports and makes enough announcements, reality will somehow happen by press release.
Here is the truth. No one can live inside a housing accelerator. That was part of their first plan. No one raises their children in a federal task force. That was their second plan. No one calls bureaucracy home. Builders build homes. Workers build homes. Communities actually build homes. The government's job is to get out of the way rather than stand in it.
If the government is short on ideas, I will be happy to help. In fact, we are going to help it throughout this entire debate, and maybe there will be a bill that could come back to the House that would actually be supportable.
Those who get in the way cannot possibly be rewarded. Incentivize cities to actually build homes, not to do the paperwork. Sell federal land. Empty buildings, so that families can live in them. Cut the federal GST on new homes for everyone, up to $1.3 million, to get buyers buying and builders building. I know that they are thinking about that, because the plan they brought forward to cut GST for first-time homebuyers on new homes under $1 million is not working, and they know that. I invite the Liberals to go back to the drawing board. I do not really care how they do it. They just need to do it. It is not rocket science.
Clinging to ideology is a really powerful blindfold on the other side. The Liberals always just get halfway there. Sometimes we have to wonder if they are comfortable with this being the new reality, where those young people I talked about do not believe they will ever buy a home.
Maybe that is the entire plan. Maybe the plan is to give up on the dream of home ownership and have a permanent class of renters forever. The only problem is that it is not the Canadian promise. It is not how we have lived for generations. It is not how anybody wants to live. The Canadian promise was very, very simple. People work hard, they save, they play by the rules and they build a life. They do not rent that life forever.
The answer to the crisis today is that it was created by too much government interference. Certainly, we are seeing that today, but it cannot be another study or another agency. Every month that they wait with the same plan over and over again, another young person believes that the dream is not for them.
Again, maybe that is the plan. A country where people stop believing they can build a future is a country that is headed in the wrong direction. It is a country that gets hollowed out by the fact that the youngest, smartest people in our society, who really want to attain the dream that was promised to them, end up looking elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the bill that we have in front of us proves that the government still does not understand. Canadians do not need another government program that sounds good in a press release and fails in reality. The bill would not do the very things that the current government itself admitted it needed to do at the beginning of its term. A year later, we are here with yet another announcement of another federal bureaucracy run by another insider.
People need homes. We need supply. They need costs to come down. It is really not that complicated. Builders are telling the government the exact same thing regarding what is required: Get out of the way, cut taxes, cut red tape and let them build. Bill C-20, unfortunately, would do none of that.
Conservatives believe that there is a solution to the housing crisis, but it is not bigger government. It is more homes. Until the government understands that basic fact, Canadians keep paying the price. Over the course of the last 10 years and a year of the pretend new government, with all of the same ministers sitting in the front benches and all of the same people piping in on the same exact policy, we have seen housing prices double, rent double and a payment on a mortgage double, and now we see an absolute stalling of new construction in housing.
The Liberals know the problem. They have admitted the problem. In fact, the fix that they put forward before this piece of legislation was part of the problem. Now, I know they are thinking about announcing a wider GST cut, but we continue to hear about that over and over again, and it never happens. I do not know why they did not put that in this piece of legislation. At least there would be a piece of it that we could support: a full-on GST cut for homes under $1.3 million for everyone, no matter what. They would have to do a few other things, but we could at least support that measure. Hopefully, the government will revise this legislation to include some of our suggestions on lowering development charges, cutting red tape and lowering the cost of housing, so that young people one day will be able to afford a home in this country.
