Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to come back to the need to urgently act on the housing crisis. I would like the parliamentary secretary to understand why I am coming back to it.
First of all, it is because the number of people living unsheltered in my community has tripled in the last three years, going from just over 300 people to over 1,000. Also, homes continue to become less affordable. Dating back to 2005, for example, it used to be that house prices were three times the average median income. If we fast-forward to today, homes are eight times as much, which is completely out of reach for the average person, while the wait-list for an affordable one-bedroom unit is now almost eight years long.
The housing crisis will continue to define my community, as it already has, whether it is a young person who is unsure if they will ever be able to move out of their parents' place, a senior living on a fixed income or a health care worker. A nurse I spoke with a few weeks ago said they were not sure if they would be able to continue living in our community at all.
It is clear that across all levels of government, we need urgent action. At the federal level, we need to invest at the rates that are required to build the units we need, while also addressing the underlying conditions that have led us to this crisis. The fact is that homes should be places for people to live and not commodities for corporate investors to profiteer from. If a corporate investor wants to make a bunch of money, they should invest in the stock market, not do it on the backs of low-income folks in my community.
Multiple studies show that one very reasonable measure that would help is removing the existing tax exemptions for one type of corporate investor: real estate investment trusts. Back in 1996, REITs did not own any rental units across the country. Today, they own nearly 200,000 units. In fact, although institutional investors across the country do not fully disclose the number of units, we know it is somewhere between 20% to 30% of the purpose-built rental housing stock.
In my community and across the country, what we are seeing is these real estate investment trusts buy up affordable units, quickly raise rents and then make it more difficult for renters to afford a place to call home. These corporate investors are in it not for what they can contribute, but for what they can take out, with the largest return possible. It seems pretty reasonable to tax them appropriately and invest the funds in affordable housing.
That is exactly what a motion I put forward in the House, Motion No. 71, would do. When I last raised this motion with the Minister of Housing, the reply I got was that the governing party needed to study it more.
Well, the good news is that the studies have already been done. One was done by the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate, which recommended this. There was another study by The Shift, which was in its directives. Locally, in my community, a study was also done by the Social Development Centre Waterloo Region. As a result, groups across the country, including Citizens for Public Justice, Canada Without Poverty, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in its proposed alternative federal budget and the National Right to Housing Network, are making this same recommendation. They recommend to remove this tax exemption from real estate investment trusts and, in the words of the motion, to put the funds toward affordable units.
Knowing that the studies have already been done and knowing that civil societies are recommending this change, will it be in the fall economic statement tomorrow? If not, why not?
