Adam Vaughan

[Housing, June 17th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, the national housing strategy responds to every single one of the issues just raised by the member for Vancouver East. I am very proud to be part of a government that, for the first time in about 25 years, has returned leadership on the federal stage to the national government and has delivered a $72-billion national housing strategy, which is building in all sectors and in all parts of the spectrum of the housing challenges that this country faces.

The member dismisses the rapid housing initiative as not being an important initiative. However, the rapid housing initiative, in the last six months, has spent $1 billion to acquire close to 5,000 units of housing. We have just invested in the last budget, which is about to be voted on by this Parliament, another $1.5 billion to further extend that program. This program allows non-profits, cities, housing providers across the country and primarily indigenous housing providers, who have been a beneficiary of the last round of funding, to acquire those distressed properties. It was precisely in response to calls from the former UN rapporteur on housing and from different housing activists across the country that we built this program.

We have also taken the reaching home program from $50 million a year to $500 million a year to make sure that when we purchase these buildings, we end up with a program that also provides supports for people who are homeless, and makes sure that the housing works for them. On top of that, in the recent budget, we have also added $315 million in rent supports.

When the member opposite complains about the housing that we are building inside the market rental program and the co-investment fund and says that they are coming online at the wrong price point, she fails to understand that when we build housing we buy labour in the market, we buy land in the market and we buy supplies in the market. The only way to make it affordable, and deeply affordable, is to provide subsidies. That is why our program does all three things that a national housing strategy should do: It builds housing, repairs housing and subsidizes housing.

I will take the member back to her campaign platform and the commitment to build 500,000 units of housing. However, if members read the small print, it required cities to come up with one-third of the money. Now, if we take the national housing strategy's rapid housing initiative, $1 billion created 5,000 units of housing. To create 500,000 units, we would need about $100 billion based on the current price point. Asking cities at this time to come up with $33.3 billion to fund housing is an astonishing demand to make on cities when she knows they cannot afford that. What is really amazing is that she has absolutely no plan to subsidize to make that housing affordable, and no plan in her party platform to actually repair and maintain the housing that is going to be acquired through this fund. The NDP makes all kinds of grandiose statements and expects everybody else to pay for them, and when their programs do not get support, sits back and complains about the housing we do provide.

The national housing strategy has provided hundreds of thousands of new investments right across the country to provide housing that is both new and repaired and brought back online, and is subsidized into affordability. We are not done yet, there is more to come, there is more to do, and we are committed to making sure that we deliver on all of these fronts.

The $72-billion national housing strategy is the start. We are not finished yet. We have announced $40 billion, there was already $72 billion and there is more on the way, because we are committed to making sure that Canadians achieve their right to housing, as we have legislated. We are the first government in the history of this country to legislate the right to housing.

[Questions on the Order Paper, June 16th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada is committed to providing Canadian families with access to high-quality, affordable, flexible and inclusive child care. Budget 2021 has committed up to $30 billion over five years, with $8.3 billion every year, permanently, to build a high-quality, affordable, and accessible early learning and child care system across Canada. This funding will work towards cutting child care fees by 50% on average by the end of 2022, and achieving $10/day child care on average by 2026.

In response to (a), the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development contracted R.A. Malatest & Associates Ltd. to conduct an evaluation and analysis of the British Columbia universal child care prototype sites or $10-per-day child care pilot. This evaluation was funded by the provincial government. ESDC was not provided with an official copy of the report prior to its release.

In response to (b), (c), (d), and (e), the full report is publicly available on the Government of British Columbia’s website.

[Housing, June 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, this government has been acting since the day we took office in 2015. A $72-billion investment into the housing sector delivers market rental solutions to families so they can rent cheaper and therefore save to get into the housing market. Our first-time homebuyer program has helped more than 10,000 Canadians acquire their first property.

Our move to end chronic homelessness, as I said, has delivered 4,770 units of housing in the last six months, which is almost exactly what the Conservatives did over the last two years in office. We did it while also maintaining subsidies for co-ops, also building new housing, also repairing housing and also making sure that the Reaching Home dollars more than doubled and in fact are now at half a billion dollars a year for the next three years.

Our government's record on housing is clear. The Conservatives lack leadership—

[Housing, June 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I will note that the Conservative member who asked that question has proposed taxing primary residences and changing the capital gains tax. That was alerted to the House in debate earlier this week. It is an astonishing reversal of position for the Conservatives.

We have done a number of different things, for example, the tax on vacant homes and offshore ownership, in terms of beneficial ownership and new rules around disclosure to help fight money laundering, as well as our $72-billion national housing strategy. To put this in perspective, in the last six months, through the rapid housing initiative, we have secured and built more homes than the previous Conservative government did in its last two years—

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I have worked very hard with my colleague to try to realize better results in Saskatoon, in particular with the Saskatoon Tribal Council and Chief Arcand. It was disappointing that other projects scored higher and therefore received funding. I assure the member that with rapid housing 2.0 on the horizon, I have already been in conversation with Mayor Charlie Clark, as well as the tribal chief, to make sure that we tend to Saskatoon's challenges.

I was a little concerned about the member's call for sort of a gutting or removal of what he would call “red tape” in the Canada building code.

First of all, the Canada building code is not enforced in Saskatchewan; it has a Saskatchewan building code. It can adopt the Canadian one.

Does the member really believe that watering down housing standards is a way to make housing safer and more secure?

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, the Conservative motion would not spend one dollar on housing. The Conservative motion is a postcard of ideas that actually would not accomplish much of anything in any of the areas they want to speak about.

The member opposite talks about the desire to build transit. The way capital budgets are constructed at the municipal level is that the development charges are the driver of the capital programs. In other words, when we add new housing, there is a cost involved in delivering the roads, the transit, the schools and the libraries. Everything in the city that a house requires to be functional is leveraged off of those development charges, yet what the Conservatives are proposing is not only to gut that system, but to also cut the funding that is the federal contribution to transit.

How do we build a subway with nothing but tax cuts and budget cuts?

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member for Carleton has spoken more about housing today than he did the entire time he was the minister responsible for CMHC, which is maybe a good thing. However, much of what he said makes absolutely no sense.

I would like the member opposite to answer a very serious question. When the Conservatives decided to go after income trusts in their first mandate, and Jim Flaherty undermined the Conservative commitment to not trust income trusts, the one thing he did not touch was the real estate income trusts, or REITs.

Why did the Conservatives pour jet fuel on the fire and allow the REITs to become the dominant player in the investment side of the real estate industry? What was the thinking behind not curtailing the power that REITs have and the impact they are now having on speculative house prices?

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, if the Conservatives' climate plan was a pamphlet, this set of policies is a postcard. It is astonishing.

I really wish that the Conservatives would make these speeches at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities because, when they talk about gutting municipal regulation and gutting the rules and the planning criteria around housing, what they are talking about is eliminating the planning that is done to make sure we build the right kind of housing in the right places to the right standards to house Canadians safely and affordably in communities that are functional.

When they talk about gutting the development charges attached to new construction builds, what they are talking about is taking away the libraries, the schools, the roads, the clean water and all of the infrastructure that makes a house viable in a community.

The Conservatives do not have a policy. They have a bunch of slogans. It is like listening to people talk about the weather. They are finally talking about housing, but they do not actually have a plan to do anything about supply, cost, affordability, security or how it gets done. In fact, all they want to do is attack municipalities. If they delivered this speech at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities last week, they would have been laughed out of the room.

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, it will be interesting to see how the real estate sector responds to the Conservatives talking about changing the tax regime for primary residences. I look forward to the Conservative attack ads by this particular member in the next campaign. I assure members, Liberals are not changing the tax code as it relates to primary residences, but we now know the Conservatives are considering it.

It is also nice to hear them talk about FINTRAC, an organization and police unit that the Conservatives did not fund and did not staff. We are now funding it, but the member opposite voted against that funding. She also voted against the budget to strengthen beneficial ownership measures in this year's budget, but now she seems to have changed her mind. She does like to criss-cross on issues and political parties from time to time.

What I find most interesting about the member opposite is she often advocates for the subway on Yonge Street, which the municipalities of York Region are paying for with development charges, the development charges that this particular motion threatens to strip away.

How would the cities contribute to infrastructure that builds good, strong communities if development charges were wiped out as the Conservative Party is now proposing to do for municipalities from coast to coast to coast? How does she build a subway with tax cuts?

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, that speech was riddled with so many contradictions. I almost hope the Conservatives do not get into power ever again, because their housing policy would move in every direction except forward.

One of the big complaints from the member opposite is that the stress test creates a barrier to entry for first-time buyers, but he also complains that low interest rates are a problem. The stress test increases interest rates to take risk out of the market and make sure that home purchasers have a secure mortgage in order to move forward. His response is to get rid of that and drop interest rates, even though he thinks interest rates are too low.

Then he goes on to say that the first-time home buyer incentive has not helped people. However, it has helped 10,000 people acquire housing. We can add that to all the other programs. Yes, we can say 10,000 is small and shake our heads, but there is also 12,000 in the rental construction financing initiative, and the co-investment fund has almost 15,000 units of housing. When we total it all up, close to a million different investments have been made by this government to help Canadians secure housing, whether it is for renting or ownership.

I have a question for the member opposite. He talks about what his government would not do. One thing he just said he disagrees with was the imposition of a price on carbon. Is this yet another contradiction that he is willing to address—