(Ottawa) Housing, housing, housing: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to hit this crucial nail for the popularity of his Liberal government in anticipation of the budget, which will be tabled on April 16, and in anticipation of the next election, scheduled for October 2025.
While in Calgary, Mr. Trudeau announced on Friday a series of new investments totaling some $600 million which will be included in the next budget, always with the aim of building more housing more quickly.
Thus, the next budget will launch another fund, the Fund for Innovation and Technology in Residential Construction, with an envelope of $50 million. The goal of this new fund is to increase, market and promote the adoption of construction technologies and materials that would enable the rapid construction of modular and prefabricated homes.
Ottawa maintains that this fund will mobilize an additional tranche of 150 million in additional investments from the private sector and provinces and municipalities. The federal pot will be led by Canada’s Next Generation Manufacturing, a cluster recognized for its innovation.
The Prime Minister also confirmed that the various regional development agencies will be granted an additional $50 million to finance innovative housing projects that use new practices such as solid wood construction, robotics, 3D printing and automation.
Also, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will confirm in her next budget another investment of $500 million to support rental housing projects. This will again be an investment in the form of a low-cost loan which should favor new rental projects which use “innovative” construction techniques which are used by manufacturers of prefabricated houses and modular houses.
Finally, the Trudeau government will take advantage of the budget to adequately finance the launch of a new catalog of housing designs. We will release $11.6 million for this catalog which could offer up to 50 new standardized housing concepts. Provinces and municipalities will be encouraged to use this new catalog which should simplify and accelerate the project approval process.
By confirming this range of new measures, the Trudeau government is hopeful of “mobilizing the housing, construction and building materials sectors, as well as unions, experts and other stakeholders” in order to provide the country with a real industrial policy for the construction of housing that is similar to the efforts that were made after the Second World War to find housing for returning soldiers.
“We are changing the way we build housing in Canada,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His government wants to make it “easier and more profitable to build more housing, faster.”
In recent days, the Trudeau government has demonstrated its intention to take out the checkbook to tackle the housing crisis plaguing the country.
Mr. Trudeau and his ministers notably announced a supplement of $15 billion to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, a new Canadian Housing Infrastructure Fund, with an envelope of $6 billion, a new Canadian Rent Protection Fund, worth $1.5 billion, as well as an additional $400 million to the Fund to Accelerate Housing Construction.