Kerry-Lynne Findlay

[The Economy, June 21st, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, more than 265,000 jobs were lost in the past two months. In April, the number of Canadians receiving regular employment insurance was up nearly 10% overall, but up more than 22% for women. Women in South Surrey—White Rock who had jobs do not want EI; they want to work.

Does the Prime Minister accept any responsibility for these job losses?

[Business of Supply, June 17th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I find the reaction on the other side of the floor just extraordinary. I thank my colleague for her passionate comments. This is not just a historical matter. It is a current matter, as is clearly shown by this latest golfing excursion.

The last time I looked, the current government had been in power for almost six years. This minister has had his portfolio and his mandates for that same amount of time. Could the member comment on the fact that this is not just a historical matter, but a current matter?

[Petitions, June 14th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to present a petition from constituents concerned about forced organ harvesting. I think we all agree this horrific practice must be stopped.

I thank my colleagues, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan and Senator Salma Ataullahjan, for their advocacy on this issue, including Bill S-204, recently tabled in the House. The bill would create a new Criminal Code offence for trafficking human organs, while also amending the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to prohibit entry into Canada of any permanent resident or foreign national who is believed to have engaged in this abhorrent practice.

Let us do the right thing and promptly pass this important legislation. Lives hang in the balance.

[Housing, June 10th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, for many families in my riding, the dream of home ownership is just that: a dream. The Liberals' answer is the first-time home buyers' incentive, but it has been a failure and few Canadians are using it. The worst part is the latest idea to raise the program's max home price to $722,000. This is completely tone deaf, and will obviously change nothing for my community.

Do the Liberals know how much the average home in South Surrey and White Rock costs?

[Privilege, June 10th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I refer you to Speaker Milliken's ruling from October 18, 2006, where he defines the issue of concise. It has nothing to do with length.

Speaker Milliken stated:

It is apparent to me from the examples cited above that the interpretation of the term concise in Standing Order 39(2) has evolved since this rule was first adopted. It is no longer interpreted to mean short or brief but rather comprehensible.

I would argue this definition of concise should apply across the board to all proceedings and to this question of privilege. I have been listening, and the material being presented is relevant and comprehensible to the matters before the House. It is my submission that the member should be allowed to finish his submission.

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I agree with my colleague. This is something that has run away in Canada. It is something we need to take hold of and deal with. We should not have the places where Canadians work just be vacation destinations for people from around the world.

We need to have it tied to our incomes, because we are Canadians, earning money in Canada and paying taxes by Canadian law. That should mean something in terms of affordability of housing.

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, it is always good to talk with other members of Parliament from British Columbia. The only place where housing is less accessible than the Lower Mainland in B.C. is the Okanagan, where the member is from. It is a beautiful place to live, but a lot of people simply cannot afford to live there.

Yes, we agree that there needs to be more spending, more targeted spending and more detail put into how we help get past this crisis. We cannot just talk about there being one.

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, part of what we can do, as I said in my speech, is end the consultation and actually take action on foreign ownership and vacant housing, and on how it is used. However, more so, we need to increase supply. As I mentioned, we have the lowest housing unit per capita rate in the G7. That is shameful.

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, last time I looked, the Liberals were the ones forming the government. They have been in charge for five and a half years, and they are the ones who put forward a budget, not us.

We are saying that they have not spent enough time and attention in that budget on affordable housing in Canada. It is a crisis. It is a problem. It is what people really care about. They should please pay attention. We need more action and less talk.

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, the reality in my riding of South Surrey—White Rock is that the dream of working hard, saving up, taking out a mortgage and buying a home to raise a family has become completely unrealistic. It has gone from challenging, but hopeful, to impossible.

A constituent of mine recently sent me a listing in White Rock. It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms and was 1,600 square feet. It was a modest place to raise a family, built in the 1960s. It sold in December 2020 for just over $900,000. Now it is listed for more than $1.25 million. If it sells at asking, and most right now are selling over asking, that is a 23% increase in a matter of months.

How about the South Surrey home that was sold in February for $1 million and then listed again in April 2021 for $1.35 million? No, this is not an issue that arose overnight. I recently saw a small home listed in White Rock for $750,000. It sold in 2015 for less than half that. Housing prices should not double in a six-year period.

The average dwelling in my riding now costs about $900,000. In the Fraser Valley, average prices have risen 20% year over year, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. What are normal Canadians, who earn Canadian incomes and pay Canadian tax rates, to do? For first-time buyers, the dream of home ownership has become a nightmare.

The Liberals' latest answer is to increase the qualifying interest rate across Canada for insured mortgages. Now it will be even harder for Canadian families to qualify. According to James Laird, president of CanWise Financial and co-founder of Ratehub.ca, this will decrease the value of the mortgage a family could afford by roughly 5%. Then we add on the B.C. property purchase tax of 2% on the first $100,000, and 1% on every $100,000 after that. That money goes into the provincial general revenues and is simply lost to the buyer.

Will this increase in the qualifying rate for mortgages cool a red-hot housing market? We see no sign of that. Does it make first-time home ownership more feasible? Absolutely not. It is designed to make it harder to get a mortgage. What it does do, by diminishing buying power, is chill new developments. Developers are the first to realize they might not be able to sell as many units under the new mortgage rules. The rising cost of lumber does not help either.

What we really need to do is increase supply. It is economics 101. Price is largely determined by two things: supply and demand. Of all G7 nations, despite our vast geography and comparatively low population, Canada has the fewest housing units per capita. One way to increase supply is to slow the rampant speculative foreign buying that is distorting our housing supply and squeezing Canadian families right out of the market.

Data for 2019 from the Canadian housing statistics program showed more than 6% of properties in B.C. were owned, at least in part, by a non-resident of Canada. That number is even higher in Vancouver, rising to 11.6% of condominiums there. At first, the government was, and has been, dismissive of this issue, calling those who raised it xenophobic. B.C. workers simply are not able to live in Vancouver. It is seen by many now as a vacation destination.

The parliamentary secretary for housing has said that Canada has become “a very safe market for foreign investment”, adding, “but...not a great market for Canadians looking for choices around housing”.

The latest Liberal budget, the first in over two years, promises to address foreign buying through a consultation on a tax that would apply to foreign buyers. The Surrey family of four forced into an endless cycle of renting because of a skyrocketing real estate market do not want consultation. They want affordable housing. They want to join the middle class. How many times have we heard this Prime Minister's phrase, “the middle class and those wanting to join it”? Seriously, we need a little less talk and a little more action, please.

How else can the government increase supply for prospective Canadian homeowners? It is through policies that encourage building more homes. The Liberal government needs to incentivize home construction and slash through the endless red tape. We need to make it easier to get shovels in the ground, and build. The complex web of bureaucracy that must be navigated to build in this country is extremely costly and time consuming.

The C.D. Howe Institute estimates that red tape and regulations add more than $600,000 on average to the cost of a new home in Vancouver. This is staggering. Sure, much of this is municipal and provincial, but we, in this federal legislature, have a role to play.

A highlight of my parliamentary career was being awarded the Golden Scissors Award from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in 2015, an award for slicing through red tape. The government needs to get its scissors out to start clipping away, and it needs to challenge its regional counterparts to do the same.

Enhancing transit is another key part of the equation. Better, faster transit that reaches further beyond existing boundaries would create a whole new world of possibility for residential real estate development, allowing more commuters to live in areas beyond the downtown cores.

In the Lower Mainland, we need SkyTrain expansions to Langley and South Surrey. We have been waiting far too long for the replacement of the George Massey tunnel, a key artery along Highway 99 that serves commuters from White Rock, Surrey, Delta and more. There were 85,000 commuters a day in 2019. With only four total lanes of traffic, that means constant congestion.

Plans for an expansion were first announced 15 years ago. It is past time to allocate the funds and work with local governments to get these projects done. Better transit infrastructure encourages growth, development and home ownership. Let us unlock this new supply.

The Liberals’ infrastructure plan simply is not working. Their Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was established to disburse $35 billion to infrastructure projects over 11 years, has completed a grand total of zero projects in four years. The independent Parliamentary Budget Officer recently said that the Infrastructure Bank is likely to fall short of its mandate, predicting only $15.9 billion of the $35 billion will be spent by 2028.

Speaking of over-promising and underperforming, the Liberals’ first-time home buyer incentive is also failing. The shared equity mortgage program offered first-time buyers 5% on existing homes and up to 10% on new constructions, resulting in lower monthly mortgage payments, but with the catch the government owns that 5% to 10% of the home, to be repaid to the government after 25 years or when the property is sold.

Let us say a family in White Rock decides to purchase that two-bed, two-bath I mentioned earlier at the $1.25-million price tag. Using this 5% incentive would effectively be a loan of $62,500. Wait a minute, I was carried away with the promise of this program for a moment. This family actually could not qualify for this program at all because the limits on the program are such that it is not available. In other words, it is completely unworkable in my riding all together. Despite the fact that such a program could result in usurious repayment rates, it is irrelevant in my riding anyway.

Canadians were told the shared equity mortgage program would help 20,000 Canadians buy a home in the first six months. Instead, it has served fewer than 6,000 over seven months. Again, the Liberals over-promised and under-delivered. Two years in, and there is less than one-tenth of the Liberals’ promised uptake.

Canadians are not using the program because it is a bad deal. Home ownership is critical to ensuring lasting prosperity and financial stability of the middle class. Conservatives know this. Let us address speculative foreign ownership, cut through the bureaucracy, encourage new builds, increase supply and make the dream of home ownership a reality.

I listened to the Liberals all day during this debate brag about spending $27 billion on housing, so why is the supply of new builds, rentals and upgrades still a crisis? I guess they have not actually been in charge for the last five and a half years. They talk more about former prime minister Harper than Conservatives do, and today, they even reached back 30 years to former prime minister Mulroney.

We are here in 2021 to address 2021 and future Canadian issues, not to gaze back into history. This is why my colleagues and I have put forth this motion today. We are tired of the inaction, the waste, the talking points and the rapid decline of affordable housing in this country, particularly in ridings like mine.

Why not put all that profligate spending into something Canadians actually care about, such as affordable rentals, home ownership and infrastructure to support both? We need a lot less talk and a lot more action.