Poilievre announces his bold plan to bring homes you can afford by removing gatekeepers and red tape, fining big city governments that block new homes, giving bonuses to cities that free up land, and making transit funding dependent on getting more keys-in-doors.
After 8 years of Justin Trudeau, housing costs have doubled. Before Trudeau, it took 25 years to pay off a mortgage – now, it takes 25 years just to save for a down payment. Things have gotten so bad that some families are forced into 90-year mortgages that they will never pay off. Only in Canada has housing become so unaffordable so quickly. Toronto is ranked as the world's worst housing bubble, and Vancouver is the third most unaffordable housing market on earth, worse than New York City, London, England and Singapore — a tiny island with 2,000 times more people per square kilometre than Canada.
The problem? We aren’t building enough homes fast enough. We built fewer homes last year than we did in 1972 when our population was half the size. Homebuilding is way down again this year, and the CMHC expects it to remain this way for the foreseeable future.
This is happening because Justin Trudeau subsidizes government gatekeepers and red tape that prevents builders from getting shovels in the ground and our people into homes they can afford. The CD Howe Institute has shown that in Vancouver, gatekeepers and regulations add nearly $1.3 million to the cost of the average home. In Toronto, government adds $350,000. That means that over 60 percent of the price of a home in Vancouver is due to delays, fees, regulations and taxes.
The Trudeau government isn’t just protecting these gatekeepers; they are funding them with your hard-earned tax dollars. The bureaucrats at Trudeau's federal housing agency are slowing down financing for builders trying to construct affordable apartments. So what does Trudeau do? He gives them bonuses – almost $27,000,000 in 2022. In fact, as housing prices have doubled, the number of CMHC staffers taking six-figure annual salaries has grown by 27 percent. The leaders responsible for making housing unaffordable make nearly $700,000 a year.
Only common sense Conservatives have a plan to fix Trudeau’s housing crisis. That’s why today, Pierre Poilievre announced that he will be introducing the Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act, which will put keys in doors and people in homes through a mathematical formula that gives more money to municipalities that are building and meeting targets and takes money away from cities and gatekeepers that aren’t.
