Finance committee  Good morning. The CFAA represents the owners and managers of close to one million private rental homes across Canada. The need for the reforms we propose arises from the current divergence in the tax treatment of homeowners from the tax treatment of renters. Some of the policie

Finance committee  Absolutely, it should be extended to renters. I would say that the mechanism should extend it to the rental owners, because they will be the ones putting in the money to do the renovations, which then benefit the renters. The renters will have improved rental accommodation, which

Finance committee  Good morning. My name is John Dickie. The CFAA represents the owners and managers of close to one million rental homes across Canada through seventeen local and provincial associations. One of our members is the Saskatchewan Rental Housing Industry Association, which you'll hea

Finance committee  The question, as I understand it, is how can we get all these benefits from a session that only costs $450 million--and as a deferral at that? The answer is that people are operating at the margin. In other words, there's a decision on whether to sell or not. When they sell, some

Finance committee  If I understand the question, the point is that the current tax system advantages the person who buys. There are some advantages to that. We have a very high home ownership rate. Among businesses, if someone owns their premises there may be some advantages to that in terms of the

Finance committee  Let me try to explain what has been said. When one looks at a renter, it's clear you have income from outside and then you pay out rent, and that's a living expense. With a homeowner the situation is a little bit different. A homeowner has cash income and then, by virtue of ownin

Finance committee  Well, understand that we're not saying that these things should be taxed. Frankly, you'd have a revolution on your hands. What we're saying is that there should be recognition that this is a benefit that is received, and it's a valuable benefit that equates to real money. So when

Finance committee  Well, society actually would be better served, at the point we're at, if more people were renters, because renters, when they become unemployed, will look for a job wherever there's a job and then will move to take it. Homeowners look for a job within commuting distance of their

Finance committee  That's what we're saying should have been possible to do, but it was not in the program design. If you were a homeowner, you could spend your $10,000 and get $1,350 back, off your taxes. However, a landlord could not do that, so—

Finance committee  That's correct. So there was no incentive for the landlord to do that. You might say we're not trying to give landlords more profit, but the issue is if that you reduce the cost to landlords of doing repairs, they're more likely to do them. That will improve the rental standards

Finance committee  Again, is it the point for the system to provide subsidies based on the values, so that if you have an expensive home you get a lot of subsidy? Normally, the answer would be no. Assuming that away, I would say that the point you're making has some validity, but the discrepancy i

Finance committee  Many of those programs are also available to homeowners, and we have taken into account some of those. What the study does not address—I'll be quite frank with you, and we have it in written material—is the money that goes to social housing. In our view, social housing is essenti

Finance committee  Thank you, Monsieur Carrier. The position of our federation is that there should be much more attention paid to direct subsidies to tenants rather than construction, because the situation we have is that low-income people, in the vast bulk of cases now, are housed. They are hous

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, thank you very much for inviting us to this committee, and thank you to all the committee members. You have our written submission, but I will speak more broadly than that submission, leaving that submission as one example of a broader theme. The Canadian Federation

Natural Resources committee  Yes. Now, our tenants are not all teenagers—some of them are 18, 19, and 20 years old—but by the same token, any of us, if we are faced with a free good, will tend to waste it. We want to use submetering. We want to use it for electricity. We also want to use it for heat. But u