(Ottawa) The housing crisis affecting several regions of the country will worsen if the federal government does not quickly tighten the screws on municipalities that are slow to issue building permits for new housing, estimates the leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre.
To tackle this crisis, which risks causing an unprecedented number of homeless people across the country, the Conservative leader proposes that municipalities be required to step up the pace in issuing building permits .
According to him, the federal government must use the stick and the carrot to eliminate the long waiting times surrounding obtaining permits and stimulate construction.
Thus, municipalities that fail to increase the number of building permits by 15% per year should see their federal government funding for infrastructure cut. And those that exceed that target should get more funding.
“The housing crisis is getting worse. This crisis mainly hit Ontario and British Columbia in the past. Now, this crisis is also affecting Quebec. There really is an explosion in housing costs,” Mr. Poilievre said in an interview with The Press.
Municipalities that build more housing will get a big bonus. And I will penalize bureaucracies that prevent construction.
Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada
Poilievre credits this cost-of-living crisis in large part to the budgetary decisions of the Trudeau government, which continues to present budgets written in red ink. These deficit budgets fuel inflation, he said, and force the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates.
“We must act immediately”, says Poilievre
This crisis could also worsen further because of the immigration policies of the Liberals of Justin Trudeau, who plan to welcome a record number of 500,000 newcomers per year from 2025.
“The population is growing faster than the construction of new housing. Where are we going to house all these people? That’s fine, immigration. I support that. But we have to build enough housing to accommodate everyone. CMHC predicts that we will have a deficit of 3.5 million housing units by 2030. So we must act immediately. »
The crisis is such that Mr. Poilievre also proposes that the federal government sell at least 6,000 buildings it owns to convert them into housing.
The federal government has plenty of buildings that are empty. We can house people in these buildings.
Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada
Mr. Poilievre also believes that the federal government must prioritize the funding of public transit projects that include nearby housing projects.
“The data is staggering. It now takes 25 years for the average Torontonian to save enough down payment to buy a home. Previously, you could repay the entire mortgage during those 25 years. […] That does not make any sense. We have the largest territory of the G7 countries, by far. But housing in Vancouver and Toronto is now more expensive than in Singapore even though in Singapore there are more than 2,000 people per square kilometer,” the Conservative leader said.