Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak to today's motion. As will come as a surprise to nobody in this place, Canada is facing a housing crisis. It is not a recent housing crisis but, as time passes, it gets worse and worse.
My father used to offer an anecdote regularly, particularly when talking about the environmental crisis we are facing. He would talk about lily ponds. One of the features of the growth of lily pads is that they grow exponentially.
It starts with one and then, the next day, there are two and, the next day, there are four. The lesson, both for the environmental crisis, and I do not want to diminish that in any way, and also for the housing crisis and where we find ourselves in the housing crisis, is that the day before the entire pond is full of lily pads, it is only half full.
To a spectator who does not know anything about exponential rates of growth for lily pads on the lake, they might come by the lake and say, “There is a lot of lake there. There is lots of time. Certainly, the lily pads are coming in but it is not that bad. We still have half the lake.”
As I say, there is an important lesson when it comes to the environment and the climate crisis we are facing and the accelerating rate of change. It is also important to understand the housing crisis. We are now at the point where the lake is full. We do not have any more time to act. We have to start repairing the situation right away.
There is the sense of urgency. It is why, when we came back to the House after summer, we were pleased to see the government had an idea that it wanted to move forward with respect to housing, something new and tangible that New Democrats and many stakeholders have been calling for for a long time, which was to eliminate the GST on purpose-built rentals.
For our side, we wanted to see that done as part of a comprehensive housing strategy. We certainly do not agree that what the Liberals have called a national housing strategy since 2015 is that. It is clear that it is missing many components and that even the components that are there have not been effective in meeting the challenge that we face in Canada.
We were glad to see the government taking some good ideas from stakeholders and, indeed, from the NDP, saying that it is something that it wants to move forward on.
Our problem was that we knew, with respect to the changes to the Competition Act, that they were inadequate. We know this because our own leader, the member for Burnaby South, has done a lot of work on the Competition Act and proposed a suite of changes to the Competition Act right around the same time.
We wanted to see the changes proposed to the Competition Act and Bill C-56 take the stronger tone that our leader has taken. Our leader does not shy away from taking that tone when it comes to talking back to corporate Canada and letting it know that we see the role of government as requiring it to do right by Canadians, not exploiting its market position to gouge Canadians.
That is something we are not shy about and we believe the government should not be shy about it. It is why we run to form a government that is not shy about taking corporate greed to task.
In the meantime, we want to get as much done in that regard as we can, working with the Parliament that Canadians elected.
There was work to do on strengthening the Competition Act provision. When it came to housing, we wanted to see a more comprehensive strategy and more initiatives, particularly to focus on building more non-market units in Canada.
No matter how many market units are created, there are going to be a lot of people who cannot afford or cannot access those market units. When we build non-market units, whether that is in co-op housing or whether that is social housing, where rent is geared to income, or whether it is investing in projects alongside the private market, to ensure that there are at least some suites that have a below-market value, whatever the combination of those things is, we know that this also helps relieve pressure on the housing market.
There are people who are sacrificing their prescription drugs and food in order to pay market rent. When they get an option to be able to rent a home that meets the needs of their family and allows them to have money left over for essentials like food and medicine, that frees up market units for those who can afford them but may, nevertheless, be struggling to access them.
One glaring oversight in Bill C-56 was that it excluded, without any good reason, co-operative housing from getting a break on the GST for purpose-built rentals. That was something we definitely needed to fix, and we have received a commitment from the government to fix it at committee, along with some changes to strengthen the Competition Act.
All we have to do is look at the latest case of the Rogers-Shaw merger to know how frustrating it is for our Competition Bureau to do its job. It could not compel evidence from Rogers or Shaw, which would change here, as the Competition Bureau would be empowered to require certain kinds of evidence from the folks they are investigating. This would also mean that when the commissioner of competition believes a market study is required, the bureau would be able to embark upon it on its own initiative, something we think is very important. We also argued for tougher fines for companies that break the rules, and tougher fines not just generally but also for recidivist corporations that do not learn the lesson the first time. Those penalties would increase to deter companies from continuing to do things they know full well they should not be doing. The government has agreed to this suite of changes, and we will continue to press.
Another thing we think ought to have been included here in respect of the GST exemption were projects that had already received a commitment of some kind of funding through the various programs of the national housing strategy. We know that not enough projects are getting funded under that strategy as it is, but some of the ones that have been funded have been put on hold. Why? It is because of rising interest rates. That means for a project to proceed, people have to find more money. They either have to do that through private fundraising, which is very challenging to do at the best of times, or have to increase the amount from government grants in a project. They could benefit from the GST exemption as well, and we do not think they should be excluded just because a project started before September 14 of this year.
We think extending the GST rebate to non-profit housing projects that the government has already agreed to fund to make projects work, after a year of punishing interest rate increases, is a small thing the government can do to ensure that people out there in our communities, who are already doing great work to build housing that Canadians can afford, do not have work stymied by rising interest rates and can see something in their budget that makes it work. Removing the GST is the simplest way to do that.
The government will collect no GST from these projects if they do not move forward, because the business case is being ruined by rising interest rates. We think waiving the GST for projects that are otherwise not going ahead is a very low-cost way to ensure that the government delivers on promises it has already made by allocating funding to the projects that have stopped because of circumstances beyond their control. That is not a fight we are prepared to give up on. It is something we think should be happening, and we are going to continue to argue for it.
However, we are not insensitive to the fact that a lot of folks have announced that they want to move forward with new purpose-built rentals as a result of the GST rebate the government is offering in Bill C-56. We know that we are already well past the time to contemplate how to act. We know this is a demand that stakeholders in the housing industry, whether they advocate for market-based housing or non-market-based housing, have talked about as a way to pencil out projects, so it is something we need to move forward with.
There was an opportunity to move forward quicker if debate on the bill had collapsed, but of course it is not collapsing because no debate on bills is collapsing in this place. The official opposition sees to that daily, whether it is by moving motions to take time away from dealing with government business or by putting up speakers ad infinitum. It ensures that we need some kind of time allocation or closure just to get to the point of having a vote on a bill.
When we are talking about a crisis that is in full swing and the need to build more market housing and non-market housing, New Democrats are prepared to work with the government to move the bill through far more quickly than it has been. We will use the opportunity here to improve the bill, as we believe it is our duty to do.
We would go further if we could, but there is only so far we can go with the Liberal government, apparently. However, we are willing to test how far we can go every day of the week and are going to keep fighting for the things we think are very important, including fighting for new announcements in the fall economic statement around housing that make more funding available for organizations that want to pursue non-market housing, and offering financing on better terms for those who want to build more rental housing in the market but are struggling to make projects work from a financial point of view because of rising interest rates.
That is a bit about why we think Bill C-56 is important, how New Democrats have worked hard in this place over the last couple of months to improve the bill, what we are going to continue to fight for and why we think, now that we have reached some agreement on improving the bill, it is important to move it forward. The contractors out there waiting to pick up the shovel and put it in the ground need the deal done on the GST and want to see it move ahead. We think it is important that it move ahead. We think it is important those units come to market and Canadians have the opportunity to rent them. We want to see them come to market in sufficient volume so there is a lowering of their price.
We know that is going to take time, but delay will not help. We have been delaying already for too long, certainly for eight years under the current government, which is after 10 years of delay and no meaningful action in the housing market from the previous government, and even longer before then, going back to the mid-nineties, when the national housing strategy was cancelled and we saw the federal government completely walk away from building social housing units in Canada. That is when the first lily pad started hitting the pond, so to speak, and it has taken us 30 years to see the pond fill, with really no more time to wait to enact important solutions.
Is there more the government can do? Absolutely. We want to see it get rid of the special tax treatment that real estate investment trusts enjoy. We want to see it take action to make sure that non-profits with experience and a great track record of delivering non-market housing in our communities have access to capital so that when buildings with low rents come on the market, they have an opportunity to bid on those buildings and have the money to close a deal successfully to make that happen. The term of art for that is a non-profit acquisition fund. It is a fancy term, but all it means is making sure the non-profit housing providers in our communities, which are already doing a great job, have the opportunity to run low-rent apartment blocks when the current owners do not want to do it anymore, instead of having a corporate landlord come in, superficially renovate the building, kick everyone else out and invite tenants with higher incomes to rent suites that were formerly homes for Canadians who cannot afford luxury rent prices.
Those are some of the things we think the government ought to be doing. We are not going to get them all done in one bill, but we managed to improve what is in this bill, and we think it should hurry along so we can bring more units to market.
