Imagine you woke up yesterday as Justin Trudeau: you’re exhausted; you can’t believe it’s Monday again; you want to call in sick; but you remember that Pierre really wants your job; so you feel around the bed for your phone, open an eye, and open your email:
Jagmeet [URGENT] I urgently urge you to change your mind on Israel
The Delhi Mail 10 reasons Trudeau loves terrorism and cocaine
Sean Re: Hi Sean … any update on our plan to fix the housing crisis?
Pierre Fwd: Poll finds most Canadians think Trudeau should resign
Unknown [EXTERNAL] Hey, fuck you!
Which one would you open? If I had to pick: Housing. Why? Because Trudeau can’t fix the Middle East. Nor can he make India behave like a democracy. But building more homes? That’s a problem the Canadian government can actually do something about.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ve utterly failed so far. As Poilievre’s Conservatives love to point out, the average home price in Canada has nearly doubled in the eight years since Trudeau took office – and the average rent has more than doubled.
Why the housing crisis has occurred is absolutely clear: Canada’s population has been booming – but Canadian home building hasn’t. Between 2016 and 2022, Canada’s population grew by 2.4 million people – but only 1.6 million new homes were built in the same period.
Who we should blame for the housing crisis is muddier: municipal governments control project approvals and some zoning; provincial governments control more zoning and some funding; and the federal government controls more funding and taxes; to say nothing of regulatory frameworks, labour availability, material costs, and more.
Not that these nuances have prevented Poilievre from laying all of the blame on Trudeau. Nor did Trudeau help his own case when he truthfully if tactlessly told reporters in August that “housing isn’t a primary responsibility of the federal government.”
By September, he was singing a different tune. After replacing the Liberal MP responsible for the housing file, Trudeau confessed to reporters that he “should have” and “could have” done more to address Canada’s housing crisis before it got so bad.
So far, housing minister Sean Fraser is doing a good job. His plan to solve Canada’s housing crisis is to “make the math work for builders,” “change the way cities build homes,” “build more social housing” and “scale up innovation in home building.”
To do that, Fraser has been tweaking the Housing Accelerator Fund to reward ambitious proposals from municipalities that: speed up project approvals; re-zone to allow for midrise apartments and laneway suites; and remove fees levied on new home construction. He also said he’s considering crackdowns on Airbnb and empty investment properties.
Moreover, Fraser said to expect more measures to improve housing affordability in the government’s forthcoming fall economic and fiscal update – as well as additional actions in the coming months: “I’m not going to wait and hold out for some magic date…. As soon as policy is ready, we need to implement it so that it will have the intended impact.”
These all sound like worthy incremental improvements. But Fraser didn’t say the one thing I really wanted to hear. What I really wanted to hear is something Trudeau told reporters last month: “the prices of homes have become far too high” and “cannot continue to go up.”
He almost said the unsayable thing: Trudeau almost admitted that what Canada really needs is a housing crash. It may be true… but try telling it to a Millennial with some absurd mortgage – or better yet, a Boomer whose retirement plan is to sell their home for some absurd profit.
It would be political suicide. So politicians don’t do it. But that doesn’t change the fact that housing prices need to fall if we want home ownership to once again be within the reach of Canada’s middle class.
Plus it doesn’t look like the prime minister can survive another election anyway. So Trudeau may not be the hero Canada wants… but maybe he can be the villain Canada needs?