The Speech from the Throne that opened the latest session of the federal Parliament this past Tuesday was vague, as speeches from the throne always are—even vaguer than campaign pitches. Given that, it’s worth noting that housing was mentioned more often than the other focus areas of our congregation.
There were six references to housing and seven to homes, including three references to affordable homes—but there was no mention of non-profit, co-op, community, social or rental housing. Nor any mention of homelessness or evictions. The 13 housing references compare with nine mentions of Indigenous, four of rights, three of affordable, two mentions of climate change and immigration, one of the environment, and no mentions of gender, women, equity, justice, racism, or poverty. Even health care wasn’t mentioned.
All of the housing commitments were part of the Liberal’s recent election platform:
- “a series of measures to help double the rate of home building while creating an entirely new housing industry.”
- create Build Canada Homes which will “accelerate the development of new affordable housing. It will invest in the growth of the prefabricated and modular housing industry.
- “provide significant financing to affordable home builders. The Government will make the housing market work better, including by cutting municipal development charges in half for all multi-unit housing. The Government will drive supply up to bring housing costs down.
- “cut the GST on homes at or under $1 million for first-time homebuyers, delivering savings of up to $50,000. And it will lower the GST on homes between $1 million and $1.5 million.”
There are urgent housing needs that the new federal government hasn’t mentioned and which it needs to commit to:
- measures to reduce speculation that drives up housing and land prices—too many of the dollars “invested” in housing are buying existing housing including rentals and raising prices and rents rather than building new units;
- commitments to fund the desperately needed doubling or tripling of the supply of non-profit and co-operative housing;
- rent control or other measures to protect tenants from soaring rents and profit-driven evictions. (Rent control is a provincial responsibility but the federal government can use fund conditions to leverage such measures, as it is doing to force reductions in development fees on new housing. The federal government also imposed rent controls during the Second World War.
We encourage you to send an email to mark.carney@parl.gc.ca and simply say, Mr. Prime Minister, Along with your government’s other housing commitments, your government needs to explicitly commit to funding to double or triple the supply of non-profit and co-operative housing, in line with the commitment you made when you were running for Liberal leader. A similar message, without the reference to the leadership campaign, should be sent to local MPs. See the list of addresses here.