Brad Redekopp

It is an honour to be back in the House after summer. Welcome back, Mr. Speaker. I trust that you had a good summer, and if you will indulge me for a moment, I would like to welcome all of my colleagues back, on both sides of the House. I hope everybody had a great summer and was able to get back to their ridings and talk to a lot of people. I certainly had that opportunity. I heard a lot of stories from people, and unfortunately, people are still struggling. People are struggling with the cost of living and groceries and the high price of rent, gas, clothing and things like that. Safety is another thing I heard about a lot, such as crime, drug use and homelessness, and just struggling with the state of our economy in general. Youth are having such a hard time finding good-paying jobs, and raises are not keeping up with inflation. I am sure all of us heard these stories, including my Liberal colleagues on the other side. My goal when I am here representing the people of Saskatoon West is to save them money and make their lives better. When we look at legislation like Bill C-10, the lens I use is this. Would it help people in that way? Would it save people money? Would it make their lives more affordable and easier? We have a Conservative plan to restore the promise of an affordable, safe and independent Canada that saves people money, saves jobs, keeps people safe, fixes immigration and puts Canada first. I am curious about whether this bill would actually do any of these things. We are now at the third reading of Bill C-10, the commissioner for modern treaty implementation act. At this stage, the question is no longer whether the subject matters; of course it does. The implementation of modern treaties matters. The honour of the Crown matters. The relationship between Canada and indigenous peoples matters. The question is whether the mechanism in this bill would actually produce better results. Bill C-10 would create a new commissioner for modern treaty implementation and a supporting office. The commissioner would review and report on how federal institutions are implementing modern treaties. Supporters argue that an independent officer can shine a light on failures and give treaty partners another means of holding Ottawa accountable. I understand that argument, but when I spoke at second reading, I raised a basic concern that remains today, which is that identifying failure is not the same as correcting failure. Bill C-10 went to committee and was reported back to the House without any amendments, so the core questions remain. If a federal department is behind on a treaty obligation, what changes the next morning? If a minister has failed to meet an obligation, what requires action? If the same failure appears year after year, who is responsible for fixing it? Those are not arguments against accountability. They are questions about how accountability produces action. Bill C-10 is specifically about modern treaties. It is not a general solution to every challenge facing indigenous people in Canada, and we should not pretend that it is. I represent a riding where indigenous issues are not theoretical. According to the 2021 census, nearly 30,000 people in Saskatoon identified as indigenous, so the work we do here in Ottawa should make a real impact on the lives of people in Saskatoon. This debate also takes place at an important time of the year. On September 30, Canadians will mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day. It is a day to honour residential school survivors, their families and their communities. It is also a time to reflect on the lasting consequences of government policy toward indigenous peoples. For me, reconciliation has to include truth, respect and action. Truth means being honest about our history. Respect means listening seriously to indigenous people and respecting treaty commitments. Action means delivering tangible results, such as food and clothing people can afford, better housing, economic opportunities and jobs, access to education and treatment, strong local services and governments that keep their word. That brings me to something I saw first-hand this summer. I travelled to East Hastings Street in Vancouver. I visited Green Road Park in the Halifax region. I do not have to travel across the country to see the same human suffering. I can see the effects of addiction regularly around 20th Street in my own riding of Saskatoon West. What I saw this summer was not an abstract policy debate. I saw people living outside, caught in addiction. I saw communities struggling with disorder, poverty, mental illness and illicit drugs. I saw first-hand how illicit drugs can ravage individuals and destabilize communities. It reinforced for me just how vulnerable some off-reserve indigenous people can be when addiction, homelessness, mental illness and poverty collide. The evidence in my own city should concern every one of us. Saskatoon's 2025 point-in-time homelessness count identified 1,900 people experiencing homelessness, and of the people surveyed, 83% identified as indigenous. That is a staggering overrepresentation. We see similar vulnerability when we look at the toxic drug crisis in British Columbia. The First Nations Health Authority reported that although first nations people represented approximately 3.4% of British Columbia's population, they represented 16% of toxic drug poisoning deaths in 2025. Those numbers do not mean that every indigenous person experiencing homelessness suffers from addiction. They do not mean that every person suffering from addiction is homeless. We should not make assumptions like that about anybody or about who is involved. They do demonstrate that indigenous people are dramatically overrepresented among some of the most vulnerable Canadians living at the intersection of these crises. When we speak about reconciliation, that reality has to matter too. There is an important connection here to Bill C-10. Modern treaty implementation is important, but for an indigenous person sleeping outdoors in Saskatoon, Vancouver or Dartmouth, a new office in Ottawa is not a treatment bed. It is not affordable food or stable housing. It is not a counsellor or a job. It is difficult for me to see how a new bureaucracy in Ottawa would help put food on the table in Saskatoon or save an indigenous family money when they pay their rent. We must honour treaty commitments, and we must respond to the urgent human needs directly in front of us. My approach to addiction policy is that it should ultimately be oriented toward recovery. That does not mean pretending addiction is simple, because it is not. People have unique needs, and recovery can take time. Relapse can happen, but surely the goal should be to help people regain control of their lives and, wherever possible, escape destructive addiction. That is why the Conservatives have put forward proposals centred on treatment and recovery. Last election, the Conservative Party proposed federal funding to create 50,000 treatment opportunities for Canadians seeking recovery from addiction. Conservative MPs have also put legislation before Parliament aimed at making treatment a more meaningful part of the justice system. We introduced Bill C-231, which would give youth justice courts additional options to connect young people with problematic substance use treatment. We introduced Bill C-240, the offender rehabilitation act. That bill proposes additional rehabilitation and addiction treatment measures within the criminal justice and corrections systems. These proposals reflect an important distinction. We should distinguish between the person trapped in addiction and the criminal organization or trafficker who profits from that addiction. A person in the grip of addiction needs a path toward recovery. A dealer or organized criminal network deliberately trafficking fentanyl presents a different problem, requiring law enforcement and criminal accountability. Those are different situations, and government policy should be capable of recognizing the difference. It is good to see a shift to recovery-oriented solutions. That can mean intervention, when someone is in immediate danger, or detox, treatment and long-term recovery supports. I have seen examples of that recovery-oriented thinking right at home. The Saskatoon Tribal Council implemented a program that meets people on the streets and in encampments. The program is called Sawēyihtotān, which is a Cree word that means “to bless each other”. Staff provide wellness checks, food and cultural supports. They advocate for detox beds. They connect people with emergency shelters. The program provides pathways toward transitional and supportive sober housing. That is worth paying attention to. It does not write people off. It meets people where they are. Crucially, it also helps to move them somewhere better. To me, that is compassion with a destination. That same principle should inform how we think about reconciliation. The government should not measure success by how many structures it creates, how many reports it publishes or how much process it generates. We should measure whether people are actually better off. Are treaty commitments being fulfilled? Are people finding housing? Are young people finding opportunities? Are people trapped in addiction getting access to treatment? Are communities becoming safer? Are families being reunited? Those are outcomes Canadians can understand. The commissioner created by Bill C-10 may provide useful information. Reviews and performance audits may help Parliament identify where treaty implementation is failing, but the commissioner would not replace ministers. The commissioner would not implement treaties. The commissioner would not build housing, operate treatment centres or deliver the services that people depend on. Those responsibilities would remain with government and the institutions that already possess the authority to act. Were the commissioner to identify a problem, the responsible minister should have to answer plainly. What is the problem? Who is responsible? What is being done? When will it be fixed? That is meaningful accountability. As September 30 approaches, we should remember that reconciliation is not something Parliament completes by passing one bill. It is a continuing responsibility. It is found in whether treaty promises are honoured and whether governments listen. It is found in what happens on the ground, in places like 20th Street in Saskatoon West and in communities right across the country, where people are trying, every day, to build safer, healthier and more hopeful lives. That is a standard I will continue to apply to Bill C-10 and to the broader work of reconciliation.

Mr. Speaker, our position is very simple. We want action. That is the bottom line. My concern with the legislation is that it creates bureaucracy, investigations, reports and a whole lot of time spent looking into things. It does not solve problems. The Auditor General has already identified many problems that exist in Canada's system, in failures of the government and of the system we have now, and yet there has been no action by the government to actually fix those things. Our position is very simple. We want to see action.

Mr. Speaker, what the member has highlighted is something that we see over and over again from the government, and that is a whole lot of talk and a whole lot of lack of action. We could look at anything, including the youth jobs crisis, inflation, cost of living issues, the cost of rent and groceries, or our immigration system. There are so many different things we could look at. Time and time again we see a big fancy speech, a big promise and a big commitment to do this and this, but when we look for the action, the changes, the things that impact people on a daily basis, like boil water advisories, these kinds of things have not been dealt with by the government. Once again, we want to see some action. That is why it is difficult for us to get excited about creating more bureaucracy, because we know that bureaucracy impedes action. We want to see action.

Mr. Speaker, that is a brilliant way to pose the question. Of course, if the government was doing what it needed to, this commissioner would not be needed. What my colleague's question does is highlight the importance, again, of action and of actually solving problems. Oftentimes, positions like this bureaucratic commissioner are ways for the government to avoid having to deal with an actual problem. That is what we have seen time and time again. One hundred per cent, if the government was actually doing what it needed to do, we would not need to be going down this road. We would have solved problems for indigenous people in Canada many days ago.

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-287, An Act to amend the National Research Council Act. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to present my private member's bill, the housing cost transparency act. Canada is in a housing crisis. Families, young Canadians, renters and first-time buyers are watching the dream of home ownership slip further out of reach. Before entering politics, I worked as a home builder, and I know first-hand that every added cost, delay, compliance requirement and administrative burden eventually ends up in the final price of a home. The bill would require the National Research Council to publish clear housing cost and impact summaries for housing-related changes to the building codes. These summaries would show what a proposal does, what housing is affected, who pays, what benefits are expected and what assumptions are being made. It would also improve governance, transparency, public registry information and annual reporting. The system should have to show its work, because Canadians need homes, not hidden bureaucracy. (Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart to speak about a devastating fire in Hampton Village in Saskatoon West. In a matter of moments, four homes were destroyed, and 20 properties were damaged. Families lost the places where they had built their lives, raised their children and made their memories. One family also suffered the heartbreaking loss of their beloved dog Mocha. These are the kinds of tragedies that shake an entire community, but in the midst of this sadness, we have also seen the very best of Saskatoon West. Neighbours, friends, local businesses and complete strangers have stepped up to help those who lost so much. Businesses such as Da India Curry House and Sweets For My Sweets have held fundraisers to support the victims, showing what community compassion looks like in action. To the families affected, I say that Saskatoon stands with them. They are not alone. I thank everyone who has donated, volunteered, prayed or offered support. I thank them for reminding us that, even after great loss, hope, kindness and community spirit can be stronger than ever.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to speak today to this motion and, of course, Bill C-30, which underlies it. This is the spring economic update. There are billions of dollars of spending, there is new taxation and there are significant legislative changes. This programming motion that the Liberals are trying to ram through the House right now in the last week of sitting just demonstrates to me how poorly the government can manage work around here, in Ottawa. It is no surprise that all the disasters and messes are happening in the country, because the current government cannot even manage the House, let alone try to manage the country. Here we are now in this last-minute panic, and we would essentially eliminate debate. The finance committee would get 30 minutes to debate the bill. That is embarrassing. The committee is where questions get asked. The committee is where witnesses come to explain things. Very good things happen there. Sometimes errors are found. Furthermore, there would not be a report stage debate in the House, and there would be a very restricted third reading. Essentially, the normal operations of the House would be severely restricted in a last-minute attempt to do something the government could have been doing for the last couple of months. It is rather embarrassing. We need to make sure that ministers and officials are held accountable. We proposed some good amendments to let the committee do its work and to let MPs do their work, but of course they were rejected. A confident government would defend its work, but a weak government does not want to do that. The Liberals do not want to have questions asked; they want to avoid all that. As they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, it appears that they are evading accountability. That is not a good look, and Canadians can see that. The decisions that would be made in this bill would impact Canadians for decades. In fact, they would impact the grandchildren of members of the House. It is very significant. In the good old days, going back 10 or 15 years, a single-digit deficit was considered a big deal. Fast-forward to where we are now, and the previous prime minister, Justin Trudeau, kind of blew that up. Not only were there single-digit deficits and double-digit deficits, but there were triple-digit deficits. Now, deficits are much bigger, and it is very bad for our country. The last Trudeau deficit was $35 billion. The first deficit of the new Prime Minister, who supposedly has all kinds of economic knowledge, was double the Trudeau deficit. It was up at $78 billion, and now this economic update would reduce that slightly to $68 billion, or $65 billion or something like that. That is kind of like when a piece of furniture that should cost $2,000 is marked up to $5,000, and there is a big sale where it is knocked down to $4,000, and it is as if it were a big deal. However, the buyer is still paying double what they should have before. That is exactly what is happening here. The government cannot stop itself from spending money. Even when there is good news happening, such as when there is extra revenue from high oil prices, which benefits the government bank account, the Liberals still spend it. It is pretty ridiculous. Even by 2030-31, there is still going to be a deficit of over $50 billion, by their own estimate. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is an officer appointed by the government, a person whom the government trusts, tells us it is going to be even worse than the government is saying; the government is actually not telling us the truth, there are going to be deficits of over $70 billion, and it is going to continue like that for the foreseeable future. It is structural, permanent deficit spending. The PBO also said that there is a less than 1% chance that the Liberals will meet any of their fiscal anchors. This is not good for the country, because when governments borrow money, that creates a lot of demand in the system and means that there is less room for tax relief in the future and for additional spending on essential services. The debt charges this year will be just about $60 billion. To put that into perspective, the amount of money the federal government gives to the provinces for health care is $55 billion, so we are actually spending more on interest than what the government gives for health care. It is not hard to imagine that interest rates will go up a bit. It is also, then, not hard to imagine that the $58 billion in debt charges could increase significantly and very rapidly, which would put major stress on the government's budget and would lead to a circular problem, with more and more deficits and more and more interest. It is kind of like paying one's credit card bill but making only the minimum payment. That is essentially what the government is doing right now, and this adds inflationary pressures and causes high interest rates. Everybody understands how, when the government borrows money, inflation increases and interest rates stay higher. Of course, that impacts people directly with higher mortgage payments, higher rents and extra costs. Canadians are under severe pressure due to the cost of living. Inflation was up 2.8% in April, and it stays stubbornly high. Food inflation is even higher. It was up 4.4% in March. What that means is that people are eating less meat and fewer fruits and vegetables. Parents are sometimes skipping meals so their children can eat. Seniors may not be getting their prescriptions, and they may be turning off the heat or the air conditioning in the house. Higher interest rates mean that mortgage payments rise, and costs are passed through to customers as well through higher prices because businesses face all of these higher costs as well. Bill C‑30 would make this deficit permanent. There is no future where we can imagine the government eliminating a deficit. I want to talk for a minute about housing because it is a perfect illustration. Governments need to be thinking about cost. We do not need more announcements. The government is so good at making announcements and talking a big game, but actually delivering is not something that it knows how to do. What people need are homes that they can afford. Every delay, duplicated review and unnecessary requirement is ultimately paid by the buyer. One of the aspects where we see that is in the building code. Changes are looked at, but they are not actually costed. Particularly when we look at a multitude of changes happening at once and add them all up, it can be very significant. Would it not be nice if the government had to show its work, had to make looking at things from a cost perspective a core objective and had summaries that would tell Canadians what each cost would be? We could actually then decide if it made sense, if the benefit outweighed the cost. This is something very effective and relatively simple that the government could do. Most of this information is available. It is just not being used. At the same time, we could maintain strong standards of health and safety, and we could advance technology. If we were careful about costs through the building codes, which does not cost the government anything, it would actually help people. It would make housing more affordable, reducing the cost of houses. This would help first-time buyers, renters, small and mid-sized builders, families and new Canadians. It would help everybody. This would not cost the government any money. In fact, there could be less bureaucracy, and it could save money. That is something we could definitely use in our country and would be a simple way for the government to make life more affordable for all Canadians. I also want to talk about something that my leader talked about on the weekend. What if we were to cut the GST on used cars? Dealers charge GST on used cars. A car could be sold multiple times during its life, two, three, four times, and every single time, GST is charged, and the government makes money on that. We think that is unfair. The government should get the GST at the beginning, and that should be the end of it. I want to thank my colleague the member for Elgin—St. Thomas—London South for putting forward the private member's bill to eliminate the GST on used vehicles. It makes a lot of sense, and it could save about $1,800 on a typical vehicle purchase and would eliminate that double taxation. We have many practical ideas. I just gave two of them. One is the used car GST removal, and the other is on building codes. Of course, the government does not want to hear that, and that is why it is putting forward this motion to end debate. It does not want to hear any of our ideas. It just wants to ram this through and move on. That is the pattern we have seen for the last 11 years from the Liberal government. It likes to call itself a new government, but it has been around for 11 years. It is mostly the same people, doing the same things that got us into the mess that we are in. The Liberals seem to be ashamed and afraid, and that is why they are putting forward this motion today. I would urge the House not to pass this motion.

Mr. Speaker, it is just like a typical Liberal government to say that standard procedures and things that we do every day in the House are a waste of time. That is right on brand for that party. I would like the parliamentary secretary to answer the question of why it has taken so long to get this through. Why all of a sudden, on the third- or fourth-last day of Parliament, is there a panic, and it has to be done? There were weeks and months that this could have been done, and it has not been done. I think it is just a testament, as I said, to the inability of the government even to manage its own House, let alone to manage the country.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague highlights the value and importance of committee work, wherein questions can be asked, ideas can be brought to the government and the government has to defend these things. On the specific issue he raises, I think there are a lot of things with the government, like a lot of spending that happens, that is completely wasteful. We talk about consultants, we talk about all kinds of things, and we need to be going through and talking about these things. The government actually needs to be prioritizing spending. A lot of us joke that if we had a chance to get into the books, we could probably save billions and billions of dollars, and we could be using that money much more effectively.

Mr. Speaker, unemployment is a problem in our country, and as the member indicated, in his part of Ontario, it is a really significant problem. To me, this raises an important issue. Why is the government continuing to bring temporary foreign workers into this country? Why do we keep bringing more workers into this country? We have a lot of capacity for jobs. Our youth unemployment rates are even higher than the numbers he mentioned. They are up to close to 15%, yet the government is not putting forward programs to help with that. Instead, it is doing the easy solution, which is bringing in low-cost labour from overseas.

Mr. Speaker, the member raises a good point. As I was trying to say, the government introduces things and then gets sidetracked onto other things. Weeks and weeks go by, in this case a month or more, and then all of a sudden somebody wakes up one day and says, “Oh my goodness, we have to get this done or it is going to make us look bad.” It would make the government look bad, frankly, if we went into the summer recess without actually passing its spring economic statement. It took the government many months to pass its full budget, so I think it is, as I said, an embarrassment for the Liberals. It shows that they cannot manage their own House, let alone this country.

Mr. Speaker, after a decade of Liberal mismanagement, Canadians are paying the price. Under the Liberals, Canada is now the only G20 country in a recession, and families are feeling it at the kitchen table. Do members want proof? A recent United Way poll shows that 38% are struggling with food insecurity, with one in five saying that all the food in their home was eaten with no money left over to buy more; 40% are losing sleep over how to stretch their paycheque just to afford groceries; and 22% of Canadians are experiencing poverty themselves. Do members know who is not going hungry? It is our jet-setting Prime Minister; that it who. In just one year as Prime Minister, he spent almost a million taxpayer dollars on food for his private jet. That is enough money to feed 55 Canadian families for a full year. Regular Canadians are barely scraping by. While the Prime Minister eats five-star meals on his private jet, his Liberal recession is causing financial insecurity, stress and hunger for everyone else.

Madam Speaker, the government loves to create bureaucracy, and a good example is what is happening here today. I guess my question for the minister has to do with building codes. There are ways the government could simplify and get more housing built without spending money and creating more bureaucracies, but actually simplifying life and letting industry and other people get the job done for prices that people can afford. Has the minister ever talked to the Minister of Industry about building codes and how to get them simplified, and how to make sure people know what changes will cost, so Canadians can build more homes and have more affordable housing?

Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned taxes and costs from the government. The member has already spoken about that. The government has other tools. Instead of setting up a bureaucracy to spend and waste money, the government could be doing other things. One of the things that I would like the member's comments on is building codes. It has been estimated that the latest round of building codes created by the government agencies will potentially add $115,000 to the cost of an average house in Canada. I wonder if maybe changing the building codes or keeping in mind the cost of things that are happening in the building codes might be an even easier, simpler way to reduce the cost of housing in our country.

Mr. Speaker, the temporary foreign worker program suppresses wages, creates poor working conditions and kills entry-level jobs for our Canadian youth. Now, we have learned that the Liberals spent $1.6 billion over the last five years to administer the TFW program, and they lost $500 million in the process. Instead of issuing 215,000 new foreign work permits this year, the Liberals should immediately abolish the TFW program and replace it with a fair deal for young workers, food‑producing industries and regions with extremely low employment. When will the Liberal government abolish the expensive, wasteful and destructive temporary foreign worker program?

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals blew $500 million on the temporary foreign worker program in the last five years. Let us see who spent that money. That $500 million was spent while the current Minister of Justice had the file. That $500 million was spent while the current Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture was in the role. The current immigration minister is on track to spend even more. That is quite the list of captains on the IRCC Titanic. Will the Prime Minister admit that he has lost control and finally put someone in charge who will stop issuing new foreign work permits and abolish the temporary foreign worker program?

Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to speak on behalf of the people of Saskatoon West. I would like to advise members that I will be splitting my time. Bill C-31 is the second budget implementation act from the 2025 budget. If members are paying attention, that was passed back in November, so it was seven months ago that we talked about this. The government still has not learned how to get stuff through the House, but here we are. This budget is huge, technical and packed. Between the two implementation bills, there are well over 500 pages. Clearly, it is an omnibus bill. Clearly, things like this need to be studied. Things like this need to go to committee. They should not be rushed, but I fear that will not happen here. This will be rushed through by the government. I am sure of that. The question I have to ask when I am looking at this is, does this make life better for residents of Saskatoon West? I think the answer, looking at this, is no. There is not enough here to lower grocery costs, reduce home prices or make our streets safer. On the subject of balancing the budget, this does not even come close. In fact, if we look at the deficits run by former prime minister Trudeau, this budget has more than double the deficits that were run by the Trudeau government, which is unbelievable considering that, supposedly, our Prime Minister is this economic genius. It is hard to believe. Of course, everybody understands that more borrowing means more inflation, and the subject of that is in interest costs. Even in this budget, the interest costs paid by the federal government are going to exceed the amount of money we provide for health care in our country, and that is just a very bad thing. This budget has massive spending increases, and Canadians are worse off. Bill C-31 would bring more bureaucracy, more CRA powers, more complicated tax rules and more Ottawa control, but there are no real fixes for what I hear when I knock on doors. This past week, I was out talking to folks in the riding, and the things I heard about at the doors were lower food prices, affordable homes, safer streets, lower taxes and a government that stops wasting money. These are things I heard about over and over again. The budget, and Bill C-31 before us, would not address any of these things. It would not help the issues of the people in Saskatoon West. I am going to focus a bit on housing affordability. People need homes they can afford, and Ottawa has numerous failed bureaucratic programs. Bill C-31 tinkers with housing a bit. There was the elimination of the GST for first-time buyers, but members need to keep in mind that they are only 10% of all buyers. It is a very small fraction of homebuyers who would be impacted by that reduction of tax. I do not know why the Liberals did not take our advice and reduce it for all homes under $1.5 million for everybody. That would have actually made a difference. On the subject of first-time buyers, here is a fun fact: 39% of first-time buyers are over the age of 35, and that component is rising right now. Close to half of first-time buyers are 35 years old. Back in the day, at 35, people already had their family, so this is a very big concern, and that group is growing. The other thing this budget would do is create a massive new bureaucracy, a $13-billion bureaucracy, for housing. It is the fourth bureaucracy we have in our country for housing, and in my view, it is completely unnecessary. Really, this whole thing misses the point. As the budget tinkers with housing, the real problem is that houses are too expensive to buy and ultimately too expensive to build, because every level of government adds more costs, more delays, more rules, added fees and red tape, and this needs to change. I was a home builder for 11 years. I believe I built more homes than the Liberals ever did. My customers wanted homes that were safe, durable, efficient and well built. That is what they wanted, and that is what I delivered. Many home builders across the country deliver that all the time. How does this come to be? Well, part of it is building codes. Building codes are part of what drives the way that houses are built. In our country, we have the National Research Council, which is a federally funded agency that develops building codes. Its employees do research and come up with the different ideas for new changes and things that should be put into the building codes. Then they are offered to the provinces to adopt, because building codes are a provincial issue, but the federal government, through the National Research Council, develops these building codes, and that sounds like a good thing. However, there is a big problem in this, which is the special interest groups that are able to get their pet projects onto the agenda. Often, those end up in the building codes that we see because there is a lack of cost consideration when these codes are developed. We can have a million good ideas, but every good idea adds cost. In this case, the Canadian Home Builders' Association looked at the latest building codes, which are the 2025 building codes, did some math and tried to figure out the cost impact of these codes. It determined that the changes in the 2025 building codes were going to add $56,000 to the average house in Canada, and that is not all. It gets worse, because there are also energy upgrades that were specified. If we add those in, it adds another $60,000. The total of that is about $114,000 that it estimates. No province has yet adopted these building codes. In fact, the CHBA is suggesting to provinces that they do not adopt these building codes because there is so much confusion, frustration and added cost. The budget does nothing to address this core issue that is driving housing costs. Members can imagine adding $114,000 to the cost of an already expensive house in our country. It makes no sense. In my view, the problem is a lack of focus on costs in building codes. The government is good at putting what it calls a “lens” on things. Members may have heard the term “climate lens” or “gender lens”. What we are missing is a cost lens. We do not think about cost when we do things like this. Why not have clear cost-benefit information for the building codes, not to weaken building codes, block safety improvements, stop accessibility or tell technical experts how to do things but to simply tell builders to show their work and let the consumer decide? There is currently no explanation of what a change would cost, who would pay for it, what housing types would be affected, what benefits would be expected, what trade-offs there would be or what assumptions would be used. One small change may not seem like much, but many small changes stacked together is how we end up with $114,000 in changes from a building code. Of course, these costs get passed on to builders, but ultimately, they get passed on to and paid by the buyers and the renters, the people who use the housing. This matters in Saskatoon West. It matters whether it is downtown, in an older inner-city neighbourhood, in a rental-heavy area or in a newer subdivision. Housing challenges are different in each community because older areas face different problems. They might have aging infrastructure, irregular-sized lots, drainage, utilities, infill constraints, things like that. This budget missed the point on housing. What the budget tried to do was give people a little bit to help them deal with these very expensive costs of housing, but what it should have done is get to the source, the root of the problem, which is to lower housing costs and certainly to prevent these massive increases in costs from affecting the next houses that are built. That is what the budget should have done, and that is not what it did. I think the National Research Council needs to get serious about cost because every change it makes adds cost of one nature or another. How could we do this? We could have some sort of a housing cost and impact summary that, for every change, would explain what the proposal would do, what problem we are trying to solve, what housing types would be affected, the estimated cost for a typical house, who would be expected to bear that cost, what the benefits and drawbacks of this would be and what the implications would be on timelines of construction, complexity, administrative burden and things like that. Other information that would also be helpful would be a public registry of proposals showing who pushed for a particular change. It could include clear information about committee roles, members and affiliations, things that could be kept so that people could understand who was pushing this. Was this being pushed by a particular company? Did it have some kind of an agenda? That is very useful and helpful information. This is important because industry lobbyists and special interest groups push their products and desires onto Canadians through this system of building codes, and Canadians need to know that. We must keep in mind that the federal government does need to stay in its lane. This is a provincial jurisdiction area, so we have to make sure the federal government provides the information but allows the provinces to make those decisions. What did the government do? It tinkered with housing instead of actually solving the problem. It could have tackled the hidden costs and made better and more affordable homes. Bill C-31 is a missed opportunity for affordability. Conservatives will continue to put forward solutions so that homes can be affordable and built better. We do not necessarily have to add $114,000 of costs. We will continue to push hard for affordable housing in this country. Unfortunately, this budget and this bill missed the mark on that.