When Mark Carney says it’s time to build, he clearly means it. Yes, the Liberal leader’s housing policy includes promises to cut the GST for new builds and reduce the regulatory red tape and development fees that have helped drive up housing costs in Canada. And yes, it includes $25 billion in financial support for what it describes as “innovative prefabricated home builders in Canada … using Canadian technologies and resources like mass timber and softwood lumber,” along with an additional $10 billion in low-cost financing for affordable home builders.
But the biggest component of Carney’s plan — and the biggest contrast to Pierre Poilievre’s own ideas on housing — is the direct involvement of the federal government in building homes. A new agency called Build Canada Homes would act as a developer of affordable housing, including on lands owned by the federal government. Even at the peak of previous federal involvement in the housing market, whether it was the co-operative housing boom of the 1970s or the post-war buildout of the late 1940s, the federal government never got this directly involved.
Then again, the housing crisis has never been as dire in Canada as it is right now. As TVO’s John Michael McGrath noted in
his analysis of the Carney plan, “given the way
housing starts have plummeted in Ontario in the last year there’s undeniably demand for a government (any government, but the feds will do) to step in and jump-start the housing sector.”
Doing it by emphasizing the role of prefabricated home builders has the added advantage of supporting Canadian manufacturers at a time when they’re under threat from America. As Carney
wrote in an op-ed last March, “scaling up factory-built housing could speed up construction times, reduce costs and fast-track climate-smart features. Other housing construction innovations, such as low-carbon concrete and mass timber, are potential game-changers, and Canada’s resource industry can take the lead.”
Conservatives are, of course, deeply horrified by the prospect of a federal government doing more than just sending cheques to the provinces. Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington described Carney’s policy as “communism”, suggesting that it would “destroy the Canadian dream of owning a home and solidify the end of the middle class.” Jesse Kline, his colleague at the National Post, managed to reference both North Korea and the Soviet Union in his own
predictably hysterical response.
The Financial Post’s Terence Corcoran, meanwhile, wrote that “the scope of the housing policy plans suggest a Carney Liberal government would become one of the most aggressive interventionist regimes in Canadian history, even beyond the scale set during world wars.” He might not want to threaten young Canadians with a good time here. After years of watching federal and provincial elected officials either do nothing about the housing crisis or just tinker at the margins, they might welcome a more activist and interventionist approach.
Here, yet again, Poilievre and his proxies may be badly misreading the public mood. In fairness, his previous prescription for eliminating so-called “gatekeepers” was correct, given the role municipalities and local homeowners consistently play in opposing increased housing density. But the Liberal government has implemented most of that prescription already through its
Housing Accelerator Fund and the incentives it offers communities that embrace ambitious homebuilding targets. Poilievre, meanwhile, has been oddly silent in the face of anti-density NIMBYism coming mostly from
his own ranks — and even members of his own caucus.
Both Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney want to see more housing get built. There's one key difference: while Poilievre sees yet another opportunity for cutting taxes and regulations, Carney wants to get the government more directly involved.
But in doubling down on tax cuts and regulatory relief, which is his preferred solution to almost every problem (including COVID-19), Poilievre is showing — yet again — that he can’t adapt to our changing circumstances. Re-running the same Thatcherite playbook that he’s been preaching from since he was a teenager won’t work in a world where the rules of economic engagement have been fundamentally altered. Cutting the GST on new builds over $1 million won’t help people who can’t afford anything at half that price, and eliminating capital gains on real estate investments doesn’t do much for people who don’t have any investments.
As to the “Soviet-style housing” that Postmedia pundits are pre-emptively turning their noses up at? I suspect most of them have never paid much attention to what social housing actually looks like in Canada. I happened to grow up in co-operative housing, none of which came even remotely close to being “Soviet-style”. They were vibrant places where people from diverse economic backgrounds came together and built deeply interconnected communities. One, in fact, was designed by a young Richard Henriquez, who would go on to become one of Canada’s most acclaimed architects.
That happened in large part because the federal government was willing to get involved, either by providing land or low-cost financing. With the housing crisis today now an order of magnitude (or two) bigger than it was in the 1970s, the scope for federal government involvement can and should expand accordingly. Mark Carney, at least, seems to get this.
