Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, new home sales are down 45% in the GTA and 56% in Vancouver. Rebates do not matter to first-time homebuyers if no homes are getting built. Nearly half of young Canadians are now considering leaving their home communities because they cannot afford to stay. When will the minister listen to all the experts, the builders, the developers and the Conservatives, and remove the HST on all ne…
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Mr. Speaker, between 2011 and 2021, home ownership among 30- to 34-year-olds fell from 60% to 52%. From 2019 to 2024, for every 100 adults added to the Canadian population, only 12 homes intended for ownership were built. That is less than half the rate of the earlier decades. How does the Prime Minister expect young Canadians to ever buy their first home when his government keeps using the same o…
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's fourth housing bureaucracy, Build Canada Homes, replaces Justin Trudeau's life-changing national housing strategy with less money and even bigger promises. We need 480,000 homes per year in the next 10 years to restore affordability, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer reports that Build Canada Homes will only build about 26,000 over the next five. So, why will t…
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Mr. Speaker, CTV reports that 35,000 households left the GTA last year because the cost of housing is simply too expensive. The Missing Middle Initiative reported yesterday that “Ontario's housing engine has stalled”. In the GTA, preconstruction sales for condos are down 89%, and for ground-oriented homes, they are down 65%. This means that starts have fallen off a cliff, and it means it is going …
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Mr. Speaker, after 10 years of the government, Liberals friends and insiders have never had it so good. We just learned that the government's own housing agency doled out over $3.6 million in bonuses to all but one of their 86 executives. That is about $43,000 per executive. Meanwhile, rents have doubled, mortgage payments have doubled and home prices have doubled. I am just wondering if the minis…
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Mr. Speaker, food bank visits have skyrocketed to 2.2 million this year. Home prices are 54% higher today than they were in October 2015. CTV reported this morning that a 76-year-old man in Prince Edward Island has been living in his car for the last two months because he cannot afford rent. The Prime Minister has told young Canadians that they need to sacrifice. The question is very simple: How m…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague rhymed off a number of federal programs from the Liberal government that have existed for about 10 years. He talked about a whole bunch of different ones. One of them, of course, was the national housing strategy. If these programs have worked so well, why is the problem as bad as it is today? What does he hope to achieve with yet another national housing strategy?
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, in April 1910, Teddy Roosevelt arrived in Paris on the heels of his Smithsonian-sponsored, year-long scientific expedition to East Africa. While he was there, he delivered his famous “Citizenship in a Republic” speech at the Sorbonne, made famous largely because of that stirring “man in the arena” passage. However, in his speech about the importance and the value of public participati…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the government's own housing agency reports that mortgage delinquencies are up, but the worst is yet to come. The CMHC estimates that interest rates for homes will continue to climb. About two million Canadians will renew their mortgages next year, and they will face new rates that are 3% higher than they were during the pandemic. The housing crisis in this country is quickly becoming…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, after 10 years of the Liberals, experts are now warning of up to 100,000 job losses in the housing sector by 2027. Builders are laying off their trained staff, even though the Prime Minister promised to double housing construction. Housing starts have stalled completely in the GTA and the Lower Mainland, where the housing crisis is the worst. In Ajax, housing starts are down 100%. Bui…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the use of temporary foreign workers in the healthcare sector: (a) what is the total number of temporary foreign workers employed in healthcare-related occupations each year since 2015, broken down by (i) nurse aides, (ii) personal support workers, (iii) licensed practical nurses, (iv) physicians, (v) other job categories, and further broken down by province or territory, and by cou…
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Mr. Speaker, $13 billion for a fourth federal Ottawa housing bureaucracy to build 4,000 homes is not a solution. It is yet another Liberal boondoggle that will cost Canadians a fortune and will solve nothing. The Prime Minister said, “The core challenge present in the housing market is it’s just too hard to build.” It is hard to build because of government taxes and red tape. In Toronto and Vancou…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the National Pharmacare Program: (a) what is the average cost since the program's inception, broken down by patient and year; (b) what is the projected average cost for each of the next five fiscal years, broken down by patient and year; (c) what is the total number of prescription drug claims submitted to date, including a breakdown by province; (d) what is the number of claims tha…
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister promised to double homebuilding to 500,000 homes per year, but today, housing starts are down 13%. It is another broken Liberal promise. Yesterday, the Prime Minister introduced a fourth $13-billion housing bureaucracy to build, wait for it, 4,000 homes. What blocks homebuilding is government bureaucracy, red tape and taxes. Why does the Prime Minister believe that …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the government's announcement in Budget 2024, in which it outlined its intention to amend the Food and Drugs Act to grant the Minister of Health the authority to "rely on information or decisions from select foreign regulatory authorities in specific instances to satisfy requirements in the Food and Drugs Act or its regulations", since the enactment of this new authority: (a) how ma…
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government's own housing agency has given up on the concept of housing affordability. It reported that Canada needs to build 480,000 homes a year to restore affordability, something TD Bank says is impossible. Earlier this week, the latest housing minister boasted that he was on pace for 280,000 starts this year, and he plans for 500,000 a year. In the GTA and the Lower Ma…
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Mr. Speaker, it sounds like more bureaucracy, and I will give an example of Ottawa bureaucracy. Here in the city of Ottawa, the federal government closed its training centre. Nine years later, it finally sold that training centre to its own federal housing developer at market price. Then it took the federal developer five years and 79 different reports at the city planning department to deal with …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, the minister told the House in one of the earlier questioning rounds that “it is time to build”. This is what I am wondering: If, in fact, he believes it is time to build, why not have the agency he already owns, which is already building, build more instead of creating more bureaucracy?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, I wonder if the minister could tell the House why he sees fit for the federal government to create a third federal housing agency to become a land developer, when it already owns one.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, is the minister aware that the Canada Lands Company does not just own the CN Tower and the port of Montreal but in fact is a land developer and is wholly owned by the federal government?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, does the minister realize that it currently takes about six years to dispose of federal lands to be developed into housing? What does he plan to do to speed that process up?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, has the minister ever heard of the Canada Lands Company?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, can the minister tell this House how long it will take for his department to create this new federal agency that will be a developer?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, the minister talks about partnering with mayors. One of the challenges, of course, that the Canada Lands Company has in trying to get more homes built is dealing with municipal planning departments. It takes them years to get things approved. What does he plan to do to solve that problem?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, the government gave $478 million of its housing accelerator funding to the City of Toronto, which turned around and increased its development charges by 42%, making housing more expensive. Will the minister ask for the money back?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, I wonder if the minister could comment on a report from the Auditor General. A federal lands initiative of $200 million was given to CMHC to be spent at an increment of $20 million a year for 4,000 units. That has subsequently been transferred over to the Department of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, and only 309 units of the 4,000 have been built. Can the minister tell us how …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, Canada Lands is currently developing a number of residential housing projects, in Downsview Park, for example, in Toronto. Also here in Ottawa it has a number of projects on the go. Is the minister aware of those?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I heard the member speak about the supply side of housing and the importance of that. He bragged about the government's various different programs. I wonder if he would acknowledge, though, that one of the key flaws in the government's housing accelerator program is that in the larger centres that were getting huge sums of money, those cities were also increasing the cost to build hom…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, Canadians are being crushed by the housing crisis. The Liberals' own internal documents admit that housing now eats up 52% of household income. Mortgage delinquencies are at a record high. Families cannot keep up, young people cannot get in and the Liberal government will not show us a plan. A budget is a plan. While Canadians suffer, the Liberals refuse to present a budget that will …
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Mr. Speaker, here is what we know. We know that Toronto and Vancouver are two of the most unaffordable cities in the world. We know that the cost to construct a residential building in Canada has increased by 58% in the last five years. We know that the latest housing minister increased homebuilding taxes by 141% while he was mayor of Vancouver. We also know that TD Bank has declared that the gove…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, all across Canada, government charges account for more than 30% of the cost of a new home. These taxes block homebuilding and drive up prices for all Canadians. Conservatives offered a plan right here in the House to axe the federal sales tax on new homes under $1 million. This would have saved Canadians up to $50,000 on the price of a new home and would ignite the construction of mor…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands should probably be quiet, so he can actually hear the answer. It is a fact that municipalities take too long to get things approved and that they keep raising charges at the local level. When I was a mayor in Huntsville, yes, I made sure that we kept things moving along and we made sure development—
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I guess there was not really a question, but the language around that is designed to identify areas in this country where it is particularly expensive and slow to get homes built. Our point in this discussion is that, right now, governments make too much money on housing. They charge too much and, at the local level, they take far too long to approve the development of new housing. …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, in many cases they are. The fact of the matter is municipalities charge way too much and take too long.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I am sorry; I did not really understand what the question was. I was listening, but I did not quite catch the program the member was speaking of specifically, so I cannot answer the question. I am happy to talk about it, but I do not know what she was saying.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, when I was a mayor, we got things done because I moved applications along and did not wait for the NIMBYs to delay things. We made things happen. Now we need to make things happen even faster because the crisis is worse today than it has been in generations in this country, and doing things the old way, as the government likes to do, is not going to work.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, before I begin, I just want to take a moment at the top to acknowledge the good folks of Parry Sound—Muskoka, particularly on the south end of Muskoka, who have endured a pretty brutal welcome to winter. It is my first opportunity to do this in this place. Not last week, but the weekend before, the area of Gravenhurst received just over five feet of snow in two days. It was a pretty…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, I think that display is precisely what Canadians are sick and tired of after nine years of a smug Liberal government that is not open and transparent by default. In fact, the Liberals' constant message is that they know best. They will tell us what we should think and do. They say to just ignore the Conservatives and the will of this place; the Liberals know best. That is the real mes…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague from Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan was a legendary mayor in his own right, and he is absolutely right. There is example after example. Unfortunately, I only had 20 minutes to speak, so I could not give every example of Liberal corruption over the last nine years, but it goes on and on and on. The cover-ups are piling on top of each other, over and over again, because…
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague, a former mayor himself, for the question. The situation here is that we were in week three or four, whatever it was, and the Liberals' line of argument was that we should send this to committee. Of course they want to send it to committee. Canadians should know that this is all part of their grand scheme to keep things covered up. Committee is a grea…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, that is a lovely set of remarks there, and I appreciate my colleague from Winnipeg South Centre's comment. I have added a new word to my vocabulary, and I appreciate that very much. Much like my colleague from Calgary Shepard, I clearly need to use more Yiddish in my expressions around here; I will attempt to do so.
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, it is a bit remarkable that we are still here, four weeks later, and still quite delayed. I can hear some rumbling from some of my colleagues in the backbenches of the Liberal Party. I understand their frustration. They are frustrated because, of course, we are still waiting for the Liberal government to deliver documents that the majority of members—
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, there is a very simple answer to that question. I, like the member, have spoken to the chief of police many times in my community and never told him what to do. The interesting thing about this, of course, is that the member did not ask the question just to get that answer. That is the simple answer. He asked that question to suggest that what we are trying to do is wrong. The fact of…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, my colleagues across the way are clearly very frustrated that we are still in this situation, but they know full well the reason we are still here is that a majority of members of the House, the people's House, have demanded documents. It is the unassailable right of this place to demand documents from the executive. The Speaker even ruled in favour of the demand that was brought fo…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, I will tell members about screaming hypocrisy. It is in the fact that the Liberals could release the names. The leader of the official opposition has said to the Prime Minister very clearly to show us the names. He can release the names; he can go ahead and do it. If there is something we need to hear, they can tell us, but they will not do that because that is not a good political ga…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, after nine years of this NDP-Liberal government, we know it is not worth the cost of housing. In fact, its record is so bad that 80% of young Canadians believe that home ownership is only for the very rich. Conservatives would axe the federal sales tax on new homes sold for under a million dollars, which would save Canadians up to $50,000, or $2,200 a year, in mortgage payments. The C…
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Mr. Speaker, when I was on council, we actually cut development charges by 50%. I also knew, as a mayor, that if we get bureaucracy out of the way, we get more homes built. These guys do not understand that. All they are doing is funding the bureaucracy. Since the minister has given billions of dollars to cities all across this country, they have raised development charges and housing starts have …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, members have heard our leader talk about the Conservative plan to hold local gatekeepers to account. Part of what he talks about is making sure that any transit infrastructure investments made by a federal government led by the Conservative party would in fact be held until there are results on the ground and we actually rezone properly and increase the density around transit. This is…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I can confirm for my hon. colleague that when I was on municipal council and before I was the mayor of Huntsville, I co-chaired the development of a women's shelter and helped get a men's shelter built. I did all kinds of work on affordable housing, and I did not block housing. In fact, I was the mayor and was the chair of the planning committee that made things happen. We approved de…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Perth—Wellington mentioned that I had a chance to visit his constituency over the course of the summer for a couple of days. It was a great honour to meet the folks in his community who are working hard to address homelessness and affordability. Of course, it is shocking to see the number of homeless encampments that exist not just in big cities but also in smaller c…
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