Poilievre's housing bill would do surprisingly little

Paul Wells takes a close look

Paul Wells is a veteran observer of Canadian politics who’s always worth reading. He doesn’t just criticize politicians for getting things wrong - he has a surprising amount of empathy for the challenges they face.

A couple weeks ago he took a close look at the private members’ bill on housing introduced by Pierre Poilievre, C-356.

Bill C-356 was a private members’ bill, and therefore doomed from the start. I see it was defeated at second reading in May. But it was the first bill Poilievre had sponsored in the House in a decade, since he attempted some Electoral Act changes as a minister in Stephen Harper’s government in 2013. So theoretically he took C-356 seriously, and we should take it as his most ambitious statement in a decade on how Canada should be governed.

The proposal is that specified high-cost cities (in BC: Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey, and Richmond) will be required to increase their housing completions by 15% each year, starting from the 2023-2024 fiscal year (April 2023 to March 2024) as a baseline. If they do not, the infrastructure funding that they receive from the Canada Community-Building Fund and from the municipal GST rebate will be reduced accordingly: if they only meet half their target, they get half the funding.

Wells points out that there’s a number of issues:

• The targets are quite ambitious.

• Municipal governments have limited control over housing completions, since homes which are being built today were based on past economic conditions, housing policies, and approvals from years ago.

• The funding at stake is relatively small. He looks at a couple examples, Barrie and Calgary. In Barrie, the infrastructure payments are about $7,600 per housing completion; in Calgary, they’re about $3,700. This is about 1.5-3% of total revenue.

• The federal government doesn’t actually make payments directly to municipalities from the Canada Community-Building Fund. It pays the provinces, which then distribute the funds.

Here’s the website for the CCBF for Ontario, which is administered by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. It includes a link to the federal-provincial agreement that governs the program. The agreement, renewed in 2024, begins with the complete text of the original agreement, which was drawn up while Stephen Harper was the prime minister of Canada and Pierre Poilievre was in his cabinet. It says the feds send the CCBF to the province, not to cities (except for Toronto) and adds for emphasis: “Canada respects the jurisdiction of provinces and territories over municipal institutions.”

This is true for every province.

Poilievre, like many politicians, has a high opinion of his own abilities. Wells points out that his self-image and the evidence from this bill are at odds:

To sum up: Here’s a guy who doesn’t know what’s in federal-provincial agreements that began when he was a cabinet minister. He doesn’t know what makes a builder decide to build. He doesn’t know how big numbers are in relation to other numbers. And he demonstrated all of this in the only bill he has sent to Parliament in a decade in opposition. And every time he talks about this file, he calls other people incompetent.

To be fair, I think it’s reasonable to say that municipal gatekeepers are a huge part of the problem, and that the federal and provincial governments should use conditional funding to push them to unlock more housing. (Back in 2018, the Broadway Subway funding agreement with the federal and BC governments explicitly required the city of Vancouver to allow more housing along the Broadway corridor.) But the specifics of Poilievre’s housing proposal seem half-baked. And I think he may be underestimating the challenge of municipal finances, and the importance of tax incentives like waiving GST/HST on new rental housing and allowing accelerated depreciation.

A government that doesn’t do much

At this point, it looks like Poilievre’s housing plan is to set unrealistic targets for big cities only, and to cut federal funding for cities which fail to meet those targets. That's basically it.

It’s interesting to consider what he doesn’t support. He doesn't support the GST/HST waiver for new market rental housing, which helps to offset the headwinds from increased construction costs. He thinks the Housing Accelerator Fund, which Sean Fraser is using as a combined carrot and stick to persuade municipal governments everywhere to cut red tape, is a “travelling circus.” He thinks governments should get out of homebuilding. He's also attacking David Eby and the BC NDP government, when they’re overriding municipal gatekeepers and taking an “all of the above” approach to housing.

More generally, I think the common theme in Poilievre's approach is that he thinks the government shouldn’t do much. Given the challenges ahead of us - the terrible post-Covid housing shortage, an aging population requiring more healthcare spending, a more unpredictable and dangerous world - this seems like a questionable approach to me. (Others may disagree, of course.)

On climate policy, this seems clear.

Poilievre doesn't believe in federal support for local journalism, and he's planning to shut down the CBC.

He’s promised to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada. He appears to have bought into the gold-bug / crypto-enthusiast view that active monetary policy is a mistake.

On military spending, he’s not committed to the target of 2% of GDP.

Nor is he committed to keeping more recent social programs - child care, dental care, pharmacare.

Is there any area where he's planning to do more rather than less?

More

• Archive of Paul Wells’ columns at Maclean’s, where he wrote for 19 years. If you’re concerned about Wells having some kind of partisan bias, see his post-election column from 2021: The broken triumph of Justin Trudeau.

• Paul Wells’ Substack.

• The Conservatives talk tough on housing—but even their plans are far too timid. Steve Lafleur, The Hub, August 2023. Now that Covid has caused housing scarcity to spill over from the GTA and Metro Vancouver, we need to double housing starts everywhere, not just in the largest cities.

• Previously: Poilievre takes another swipe at Eby, comparison to current federal policy. For more coherent policy proposals, see the National Housing Accord and the Blueprint for More and Better Housing. At the provincial level, a summary of BC’s housing policies.