Moffatt: Advice for Mark Carney
How should Carney implement the Liberal housing plan?
Mike Moffatt, Eight Pieces of Housing Advice to the Prime Minister, April 2025:
Dear Prime Minister,
Congratulations on your historic victory. Now, the hard work of addressing the housing crisis and implementing the Liberal housing platform begins.
Having worked with you on the Blueprint for More and Better Housing, I am aware that you have a deep understanding of the housing file. However, as your former co-author, I cannot resist the opportunity to offer you some friendly advice.
Here are eight key considerations to keep in mind as your team undertakes this vital work.
I thought the first recommendation was particularly interesting: focus on a limited number of big changes, instead of continuously tinkering.
1. Be the opposite of Trump and create policy stability
The constant chaos and uncertainty surrounding tariff policy are causing investment to plummet in the United States, as it is impossible to plan for the future under such an environment.
While Canada won’t be conducting policy through press conference musings, there is a real risk that policy uncertainty will cause a drag on housing investment in Canada. I believe it already has, with constant changes to development charges, the point systems in programs like MLI Select make it challenging for developers to plan for the future.
Your government will need to make big changes. But it would also have to avoid the temptation to keep tinkering. Instead of making a series of hundreds of small changes, select a small number of housing priorities, focus all your housing attention on those, be transparent, and leave everything else alone.
Moffatt’s other suggestions:
2. Anticipate possible sources of failure. This includes municipal restrictions, barriers to capital, and programs that are too narrowly targeted.
3. Improve housing data.
4. Get the details right on the MURB program.
5. Push municipalities to reform building codes, zoning, and approvals. One path forward would be to define a National Zoning Code, and require municipalities to have zoning that’s consistent with the national code.
6. Push municipalities to reform development charges, especially in Ontario.
7. Revisit the GST cut for new owner-occupied housing. It shouldn’t just be for first-time homebuyers.
8. Be careful with countervailing tariffs on imports from the US.
More
Previous posts from Moffatt’s Missing Middle Initiative on the GST cut for owner-occupied housing, development charges, and countervailing tariffs. There’s some discussion of MURB in the pre-election post on the Liberal housing plan.
With a new cabinet in place, it’s on to the business of governing. Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell in the Globe and Mail. Their advice seems sensible: have a limited agenda; delegate authority; emphasize speed and results; focus on a few changes instead of reorganizing the public service; be fiscally prudent.
If Carney does decide to reorganize the public service, Michael Wernick has advice: It’s Your Public Service Now.
Prime Minister Carney unveils major cabinet overhaul with two dozen new faces. John Paul Tasker, CBC News. Gregor Robertson (mayor of Vancouver from 2008 to 2018) is the minister for housing and infrastructure, taking over from Nate Erskine-Smith.