“If you think Canada’s Housing Plan is ambitious, that’s because it is,” says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Ambitious? No, it’s delusional.
Through Budget 2024, the feds say its housing plan will build two million net new homes on top of the 1.87 million homes expected to be built by 2031.Yet, it conveniently shifts the burden of the remaining 800,000 homes to provincial, territorial, and municipal governments. They’re passing the buck. Collaboration is important, yes, but expecting them to deliver nearly half of the proposed homes is - cute.
Housing development is filled with bureaucracy and restrictive zoning regulations that simply urging governments to "step up" and "take action" is not a plan. It's a cop-out.
The housing plan is not even a band-aid to the problem it claims to address – the housing crisis; nor does it give younger Canadians a fair shot to a middle-class lifestyle. It looks more like an attempt to minimize the housing bubble by building more homes and reducing demand, which is bound to fail. It does not address the core issues of the national inflation rate and the rising cost of living. How could you even dream of buying a home if you have no disposable income?
If pricing and the rate of inflation today somehow miraculously remains the same for the next decade, people then would have more purchasing power compared to today even if house pricing seemingly appears the same. But even that is wishful thinking.
So, what’s the answer? “Just build more houses” relative to supply and demand is always the answer. But in a capitalistic society, that only applies to aggressive government housing, immune to the market via lower interest rates.
But the housing plan is leveraging publicly owned lands for housing development, so isn’t that a plus? No, because they’re not restricting it to non-market housing development.
The only positive I see from the housing plan is the federal government’s proposal of strengthening the Canadian Mortgage Charter. But that remains to be seen.
