Poilievre takes another swipe at Eby
"Fire the municipal gatekeepers. No, not like that!"
I don’t want Pierre Poilievre to win next year’s election. I think his temperament (“always be attacking”) is a weakness for a leader, and I think his small-government ideas are mostly wrong (Canada’s population is aging and we’ll need to spend more on health care, so I think tax cuts are a bad idea; I trust the Bank of Canada more than crypto; we can’t ignore climate change).
But that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong about everything.
Poilievre’s supply diagnosis: municipal gatekeepers
Back in April 2022, during the CPC leadership race, Poilievre blamed municipal gatekeepers for sky-high housing prices, using a teardown in East Vancouver as an example. (It appears to be a double-sized lot near Norquay Park, assessed at $3M; from the video, it sounds like the owner was trying to sell for $5M.)
On the supply side, I think this diagnosis is basically sound. To summarize the main findings of the MacPhail Report, the reason that Metro Vancouver doesn’t build enough housing is that municipalities regulate new multifamily housing like it’s a nuclear power plant, and tax it like it’s a gold mine.
On the demand side, I thought his diagnosis was a bit strange. He talks about monetary policy (again fixated on the Bank of Canada), but not about either Covid and the surge in people working from home and needing more space, or post-Covid population growth (especially international students, with Ontario exploiting them in large numbers to subsidize the post-secondary education system). But on the supply side, he was pointing in the right direction.
Now he blames David Eby
As of last week, though, Poilievre has been blaming David Eby, which I would argue is completely wrong. David Eby has 'worst housing record of any politician on Earth,' Pierre Poilievre says. Iain Burns, Kelowna Now.
Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has blasted David Eby, saying BC’s premier “has probably the worst housing record of any politician on Earth.”
He made the remarks while attacking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s record on housing costs.
The leader of the opposition was in Kitchener, Ont., where he said the average two-bedroom home costs more than “a castle in Sweden on a lake.”
“Yesterday, [Trudeau] joined with the NDP premier from BC, who has probably the worst housing record of any politician on Earth,” Poilievre said.
As a pro-housing person, regardless of party, I thought Poilievre was basically correct to point the finger at municipal gatekeepers. But now he's blaming Eby, who's overriding those same gatekeepers!
David Eby's government just passed a raft of provincial legislation to require municipalities to update their bylaws to allow multiplexes and transit-oriented development by June 30.
Meanwhile Doug Ford has had a very similar set of recommendations sitting on his desk for the last two years, and has done basically nothing.
This suggests that Poilievre is primarily interested in using the housing shortage in an opportunistic way, as a stick to beat his opponents with. Eby is NDP, there’s a provincial election coming up, and Poilievre wants the conservative opposition to do well. So Poilievre is attacking Eby on housing, even though Eby’s doing exactly what Poilievre promises to do, and what Ford is failing to do: getting the municipal gatekeepers out of the way.
We need more density to make better use of land
Besides Poilievre’s silence on Doug Ford's inaction, I have yet to see him talk about multiplexes at all. In places with lots of jobs and limited land, like the city of Vancouver, land will be expensive (as in the April 2022 video). So you would expect to see multiplexes and apartment buildings, making more efficient use of the land.
Poilievre’s diagnosis seems to go something like this:
A detached house in East Vancouver used to be affordable on a single income.
Municipal red tape and high fees have made houses unaffordable.
Remove the red tape and the fees, and detached houses will be affordable again.
Maybe journalists should ask him about this. Because the diagnosis from economists is more like this:
Land in Vancouver is limited by ocean and mountains. There’s lots of jobs here, so demand is high.
Allowing more height and density (multiplexes, apartment buildings) would reduce the cost of land per square foot of floor space. The problem is, municipal governments make this very difficult, even for small apartment buildings (“it’s easier to elect a pope”). So we get detached houses (which require a lot of land and are thus very expensive) and high-rises, with nothing in between.
In other words, we can make homes in Vancouver less expensive, but they’re going to be higher-density. They’re not going to be detached houses, as the video seems to suggest.
Pointe-Claire and the “most improved student” policy
A couple weeks ago, Poilievre held a press conference in Pointe-Claire, a suburb of Montreal, to criticize the blocking of a project. The mayor of Pointe-Claire counter-attacked: Pointe-Claire mayor responds to Pierre Poilievre's housing accusations, Stephane Blais, Canadian Press, February 16.
Mario Polese cites this project as an example of opposition to new housing. How to contain NIMBYism to get more affordable housing built, November 2023.
Last year, the Montreal suburban municipality of Pointe-Claire froze a residential project of two 25-storey rental buildings and a 20-storey tower for seniors to be built on the site of a parking lot adjoining a major shopping centre and future light rail station. This was by all indications an ideal project: no green space sacrificed, near public transit, good for seniors.
Yet, the project is not moving ahead. Why? Because in the words of Pointe-Claire’s mayor, newly elected on an anti-densification platform, that is what citizens want: “My vision is the vision of the citizens, it’s that simple . . . People want a suburb, not a downtown.”
As a pro-housing Liberal, I know it's tempting for Liberals to assume that whatever Poilievre says must be wrong-headed and unreasonable. But not in this case!
That said, Pointe-Claire does illustrate a weakness of Poilievre’s housing policy, requiring large cities to build 15% more housing each year: it’s basically a “most improved student” policy. A city which has built very little can easily meet this target. A city which is already building a lot will find it much more difficult.
Pointe-Claire demonstrates the nonsense in Poilievre’s housing formula. Campbell Clark, Globe and Mail, February 19.
Mr. Poilievre proposes to withhold federal infrastructure and gas-tax money from “high-cost cities” that don’t increase home building by 15 per cent each year, and provide bonuses to those that do. Smaller municipalities won’t be affected, but if they beat the annual growth target, they would be eligible for bonus payments from a $100-million fund.
The beauty, Mr. Poilievre suggested Thursday, is that it works “mathematically.” In fact, that is a design flaw.
Just look at Pointe-Claire. In 2022, 629 housing units were completed there, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. (2023 figures, on which Mr. Poilievre’s bill is based, are not yet available.) To exceed a 15-per-cent growth target, the city would have to have 724 built the following year.
But only one unit was completed in neighbouring Kirkland in 2022, according to the CMHC, so to grow at the rate that qualifies for Mr. Poilievre’s bonus, they’d only have to build two homes the following year. Nearby Baie d’Urfe would need four. Closer to downtown, ritzy Westmount would have to complete seven.
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British Columbia just took first place in pro-housing policy. Danny Oleksiuk, Sightline, February 2023. “In just one month in 2023, British Columbia legalized fourplexes, allowed apartment buildings up to 20 stories near all transit stations, eliminated public hearings for plan-compliant buildings, ended parking requirements in transit-oriented districts, and announced that it is considering single-stair reform.” Meanwhile, the Doug Ford government in Ontario has been messing around with the Greenbelt and having it blow up in its face.
Great analysis !