Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, from the first run of sap to the last maple taffy, communities across our region are coming together to celebrate one of Canada's oldest and sweetest traditions. Whether it is Maple Mayhem at Muskoka Lakes Farm and Winery, the community spirit of the Parry Sound Maple Fest, the energy of the Muskoka Maple Festival in downtown Huntsville, the hands-on experiences of the Muskoka maple t…
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Madam Speaker, I do not know whether the new Crown corporations talk to the other Crown corporations, but the CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, is the first housing Crown corporation of the government, and it is talking about making sure we build between 430,000 and 500,000 homes a year for the next several years to restore affordability. However, instead of engaging CMHC to help …
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Mr. Speaker, I wonder if my colleague could comment a little more on the notion of building bureaucracy. There are now four federal housing agencies. Build Canada Homes is the third federal Crown corporation focused on housing. I wonder if the member might be able to predict how many Crown corporations it will take to build a home.
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Madam Speaker, I suppose the FCM can be forgiven for thinking that there may be some results coming from this government after 10 years, but the fact of the matter remains that the Liberals have created a fourth federal housing bureaucracy. There is the department; there is CMHC, a Crown corporation that has existed since just after the war; there is the Canada Lands Company, which is already deve…
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Madam Speaker, as usual, there is a fundamental flaw with that member's line of argument. I honestly do not understand what he is talking about. There is no question that the federal government has a role. I think I have talked about that many times. He is just not paying attention. That is fine. I do not really expect him to pay attention. The fact of the matter is that, as Conservatives, we woul…
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Madam Speaker, my colleague is a former deputy mayor of the city of Toronto, which is one of the most expensive cities in the country to build a home in. I am sure she is quite familiar with how much cost the local government and the city add to the cost of every new home. I am wondering if she might be able to speak to the cost of government, particularly at the local level, and if she sees a way…
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Madam Speaker, that is a very important point, and I probably should have spoken about it more in my speech. I listened to the minister, and I heard all about these new projects. They are all focused on rentals, and there is clearly no question that there is a need for rentals in Canada. It was the first Trudeau prime minister who cancelled the incentivization of building purpose-built rentals, an…
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Mr. Speaker, I noted that my hon. colleague mentioned some great things going on in the city of London. It is important for us to congratulate Mayor Morgan and his council for some of the things they have done to get housing built faster in that city. What they have focused on is streamlining the process, speeding up approvals and zoning as of right, so people do not have to go through the rezonin…
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Madam Speaker, just before my formal remarks, I would like to take one moment to mention that two weeks ago today, I was able to stand in the House and congratulate Megan Oldham from Parry Sound on a bronze medal win at the Olympics in Milan. I am excited to report that, a week ago today, I had the immense privilege of standing at the bottom of the hill and watching her win gold in the big air eve…
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his work with young people. He focuses a lot on youth employment and unemployment, as it were, and he is quite correct. I have talked to young people all across the country and in my own community, even before I came to this place. Young people hope to own a home. This is something my generation and previous generations simply took for granted. The real…
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I know him very well. I talk to him all the time.
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Madam Speaker, I will tell the member right now that, in fact, Quebec is one of the provinces that actually has done fairly well on housing. There is no question that partnerships between the federal level and the provincial level are important. I would simply argue that those partnerships should focus on getting provinces to reduce the burden of endless reviews and consultants' reports. We have t…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, it is a treat to rise today in the House to congratulate Megan Oldham on her incredible bronze medal performance at the Milan Olympics. Megan's achievement is the result of years of hard work, discipline, sacrifice and relentless effort, but the quiet determination it takes to compete on the world stage is what we saw. When Canadians watched Megan stand on the podium, they did not jus…
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Mr. Speaker, new home sales are down 45% in the GTA and 56% in Vancouver. Rebates do not matter to first-time homebuyers if no homes are getting built. Nearly half of young Canadians are now considering leaving their home communities because they cannot afford to stay. When will the minister listen to all the experts, the builders, the developers and the Conservatives, and remove the HST on all ne…
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Mr. Speaker, between 2011 and 2021, home ownership among 30- to 34-year-olds fell from 60% to 52%. From 2019 to 2024, for every 100 adults added to the Canadian population, only 12 homes intended for ownership were built. That is less than half the rate of the earlier decades. How does the Prime Minister expect young Canadians to ever buy their first home when his government keeps using the same o…
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Mr. Speaker, CTV reports that 35,000 households left the GTA last year because the cost of housing is simply too expensive. The Missing Middle Initiative reported yesterday that “Ontario's housing engine has stalled”. In the GTA, preconstruction sales for condos are down 89%, and for ground-oriented homes, they are down 65%. This means that starts have fallen off a cliff, and it means it is going …
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's fourth housing bureaucracy, Build Canada Homes, replaces Justin Trudeau's life-changing national housing strategy with less money and even bigger promises. We need 480,000 homes per year in the next 10 years to restore affordability, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer reports that Build Canada Homes will only build about 26,000 over the next five. So, why will t…
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for demonstrating that he does not understand the scale of the problem. In fact, the industry has told us over and over again that cutting the GST on all homes under $1.3 million is the only thing that will get the market moving again. It is not just us. Mike Moffatt, the Liberals' housing adviser, says the exact same thing. Why do they not listen to him?
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Mr. Speaker, budget 2025 was supposed to mark what we were told was going to be a generational shift in this country. That is what we were told. When it came to housing, the government promised something truly historic. In fact, the budget documents declared rather boldly, I might add, that budget 2025 was the most ambitious housing plan since the Second World War, backed by more than $11 billion …
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Mr. Speaker, it is clear to me that my hon. colleague understands the problem in housing. This is a guy who used to build homes, so he actually understands the cost of local government, the cost of delays of the local government and the cost of development charges. What the current federal Liberal government promised to do in the election campaign was to get development charges cut in half in citi…
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Mr. Speaker, I will be very clear that Conservatives do not believe in further unconditional grants to cities and provinces. We believe in funding infrastructure based on one result only, and that is the number of homes that get built. With regard to the days of just giving money and hoping for the best, that has clearly failed. That is from 10 years of Justin Trudeau. That is not what we need any…
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Mr. Speaker, what I am not surprised about from the member is that he seems to believe that everyone should live in government-owned homes. Conservatives believe that it is a right of Canadians to own their own home. We think the government should get out of the way and not try to own everything, not try to control everything. In fact, the example I gave is what we did right after the war. It was …
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, Tuesday's budget presented a $78.2-billion deficit, driving up prices and making life more expensive for families all across Canada. Food inflation is skyrocketing and made worse by the government's massive debts. This year, food bank visits in Canada hit 2.2 million. Ten years ago, in Parry Sound—Muskoka, an idyllic rural collection of small communities where neighbours take care of …
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Mr. Speaker, if spending money could solve the housing crisis, we would have a surplus right now. This is a government that named a housing minister who made housing taxes 141% more expensive in Vancouver and increased the price of homes by 149%. We are in a housing crisis now, and it is clear this guy does not get it. The experts are warning of 100,000 job losses in this sector. If the government…
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Mr. Speaker, the Toronto homebuilding industry released a scathing report on the government’s budget, warning of 100,000 job losses in the sector despite the Prime Minister's promising 500,000 new homes a year during the election. The government continues to refuse to implement our policy of cutting the GST on all new homes under $1.3 million. Now, housing starts have plummeted and developers are …
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Mr. Speaker, food bank visits have skyrocketed to 2.2 million this year. Home prices are 54% higher today than they were in October 2015. CTV reported this morning that a 76-year-old man in Prince Edward Island has been living in his car for the last two months because he cannot afford rent. The Prime Minister has told young Canadians that they need to sacrifice. The question is very simple: How m…
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Mr. Speaker, after 10 years of the government, Liberals friends and insiders have never had it so good. We just learned that the government's own housing agency doled out over $3.6 million in bonuses to all but one of their 86 executives. That is about $43,000 per executive. Meanwhile, rents have doubled, mortgage payments have doubled and home prices have doubled. I am just wondering if the minis…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, in April 1910, Teddy Roosevelt arrived in Paris on the heels of his Smithsonian-sponsored, year-long scientific expedition to East Africa. While he was there, he delivered his famous “Citizenship in a Republic” speech at the Sorbonne, made famous largely because of that stirring “man in the arena” passage. However, in his speech about the importance and the value of public participati…
Read full speech →Private Members' Business
Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague rhymed off a number of federal programs from the Liberal government that have existed for about 10 years. He talked about a whole bunch of different ones. One of them, of course, was the national housing strategy. If these programs have worked so well, why is the problem as bad as it is today? What does he hope to achieve with yet another national housing strategy?
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, the government's own housing agency reports that mortgage delinquencies are up, but the worst is yet to come. The CMHC estimates that interest rates for homes will continue to climb. About two million Canadians will renew their mortgages next year, and they will face new rates that are 3% higher than they were during the pandemic. The housing crisis in this country is quickly becoming…
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Mr. Speaker, after 10 years of the Liberals, experts are now warning of up to 100,000 job losses in the housing sector by 2027. Builders are laying off their trained staff, even though the Prime Minister promised to double housing construction. Housing starts have stalled completely in the GTA and the Lower Mainland, where the housing crisis is the worst. In Ajax, housing starts are down 100%. Bui…
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister promised to double homebuilding to 500,000 homes per year, but today, housing starts are down 13%. It is another broken Liberal promise. Yesterday, the Prime Minister introduced a fourth $13-billion housing bureaucracy to build, wait for it, 4,000 homes. What blocks homebuilding is government bureaucracy, red tape and taxes. Why does the Prime Minister believe that …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the government's announcement in Budget 2024, in which it outlined its intention to amend the Food and Drugs Act to grant the Minister of Health the authority to "rely on information or decisions from select foreign regulatory authorities in specific instances to satisfy requirements in the Food and Drugs Act or its regulations", since the enactment of this new authority: (a) how ma…
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With regard to the National Pharmacare Program: (a) what is the average cost since the program's inception, broken down by patient and year; (b) what is the projected average cost for each of the next five fiscal years, broken down by patient and year; (c) what is the total number of prescription drug claims submitted to date, including a breakdown by province; (d) what is the number of claims tha…
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With regard to the use of temporary foreign workers in the healthcare sector: (a) what is the total number of temporary foreign workers employed in healthcare-related occupations each year since 2015, broken down by (i) nurse aides, (ii) personal support workers, (iii) licensed practical nurses, (iv) physicians, (v) other job categories, and further broken down by province or territory, and by cou…
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Mr. Speaker, $13 billion for a fourth federal Ottawa housing bureaucracy to build 4,000 homes is not a solution. It is yet another Liberal boondoggle that will cost Canadians a fortune and will solve nothing. The Prime Minister said, “The core challenge present in the housing market is it’s just too hard to build.” It is hard to build because of government taxes and red tape. In Toronto and Vancou…
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Mr. Speaker, it sounds like more bureaucracy, and I will give an example of Ottawa bureaucracy. Here in the city of Ottawa, the federal government closed its training centre. Nine years later, it finally sold that training centre to its own federal housing developer at market price. Then it took the federal developer five years and 79 different reports at the city planning department to deal with …
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government's own housing agency has given up on the concept of housing affordability. It reported that Canada needs to build 480,000 homes a year to restore affordability, something TD Bank says is impossible. Earlier this week, the latest housing minister boasted that he was on pace for 280,000 starts this year, and he plans for 500,000 a year. In the GTA and the Lower Ma…
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Mr. Speaker, it does not just stop there. Hamilton got $93.5 million, and housing starts there are down 50%. Toronto got $471 million, and they are down 58% there. Guelph got $21.4 million, and housing starts there are down over a whopping 78%. The Liberal plan is to continue spending on city bureaucracies, and now they want to build a third federal housing bureaucracy. When will the government le…
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals' own housing agency's latest numbers on housing starts are out, and they are bad, particularly in cities that receive money from their housing accelerator fund. For example, Vancouver got $115 million and starts are down 10%; Kelowna got $31.5 million and starts are down 33%. On May 13, the latest housing minister claimed he wanted to build on the housing successes of the…
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Mr. Chair, can the minister tell this House how long it will take for his department to create this new federal agency that will be a developer?
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Mr. Chair, has the minister ever heard of the Canada Lands Company?
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Mr. Chair, when the minister was mayor of Vancouver, over his tenure, the city increased development charges by 141% in that time period. Does the minister agree that this made housing more expensive in Vancouver?
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Mr. Chair, does the minister realize that it currently takes about six years to dispose of federal lands to be developed into housing? What does he plan to do to speed that process up?
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Mr. Chair, Canada Lands is currently developing a number of residential housing projects, in Downsview Park, for example, in Toronto. Also here in Ottawa it has a number of projects on the go. Is the minister aware of those?
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Mr. Chair, does the minister recognize that the cost of development charges a city charges to a developer is passed on to the purchaser and, therefore, becomes part of the purchase price?
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Mr. Chair, I will help the minister. The average is about 25% of the cost of every new home in the GTA, 25% in government charges and fees. I will ask a similar question closer to home: Does the minister know the average cost of government on a new home in Vancouver?
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Mr. Chair, I recognize that municipalities need to invest in infrastructure. I was a mayor myself at one point and did the exact same thing. My question was this: Does the cost of government need to come down on the cost of a new home?
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Mr. Chair, I wonder if the minister could comment on a report from the Auditor General. A federal lands initiative of $200 million was given to CMHC to be spent at an increment of $20 million a year for 4,000 units. That has subsequently been transferred over to the Department of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, and only 309 units of the 4,000 have been built. Can the minister tell us how …
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Mr. Chair, I wonder if the minister could tell the House why he sees fit for the federal government to create a third federal housing agency to become a land developer, when it already owns one.
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