Canada’s housing market is a complex stew of political and economic ingredients that includes federal indifference, provincial mismanagement, local NIMBYism and global economic factors that include a pandemic. They have all conspired to drive up interest rates faster than at any point in decades, and put a long-simmering crisis into a rolling boil. But for Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre, it all comes down to just one factor: Justin Trudeau’s government.
Witness his latest video on the subject, one that blames Pierre Trudeau for the inflation crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s and suggests his son is responsible for the repeat that’s underway. In reality, the earlier spike was driven by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, and inflation continued to rise in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States long after they elected their own slogan-spewing conservative leaders. But facts and nuance are only occasional guests in Poilievre’s world.
Case in point: his assertion that Canada has the fewest houses per square kilometre of any country on Earth, and “with all that land, we should be able to easily build affordable homes for anyone who wants to have one.” This assumes an acre of land in the Lower Mainland or Greater Toronto Area is the same as one in Alert, Nunavut, or Churchill, Man., which is either deliberately deceptive or manifestly idiotic. After all, there are many reasons why people in Canada tend to congregate as close to the United States border as possible, including economic opportunity and personal comfort. But the inventory of desirable land available for housing that people will want to buy or rent in large numbers is actually a tiny fraction of our overall land mass, far smaller than what the United States has to work with. That helps explain, in part, why their housing market is so comparatively sane — and why a house in Buffalo, N.Y., might be cheaper than one in Niagara Falls.
His video also points out we’re building the same number of new homes today as we were 50 years ago, despite having a population that’s nearly twice as large. But if you look at the data, it quickly becomes clear it’s being gerrymandered (again) in Poilievre’s favour. The early 1970s were the high-water mark for home building in Canada, with 257,000 new units completed in 1974. By the early 1990s, that was down to less than 120,000, and it didn’t come close to meeting that mark until — ironically — Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were in office.
So why were we building so many homes in the 1970s and so few in the 1990s? Let’s give Poilievre the floor for a moment. “Why is that?” he asks in his video. “What is standing in the way? The answer, in a word, is government.” He was referring to government standing in the way of new construction. But the truth is, by abandoning the co-operative and social housing programs that led to the 1970s building boom, governments — both Liberal and Conservative, to be clear — have been standing in the way of additional housing supply for a long time now.
This is the key weakness in Poilievre’s otherwise winning housing message, and it’s one the Liberals must exploit if they want a chance of winning a fourth consecutive election. He’s right to pressure municipal governments and require them to increase building permits or lose some portion of their federal funding. He’s right that any new transit investments should be paired with pre-zoning and permitting of higher-density apartments around the stations. And he’s right to say more housing is part of the solution to Canada’s increasingly treacherous housing market.
But building the right kind of housing, in the right kinds of places, is even more important. Poilievre’s visions clearly makes more space for the kinds of communities he grew up in, ones that expand and extend the limits of our cities and lock their residents into the sort of car-dependent living that raises costs for both homeowners and taxpayers. “These neighbourhoods gave hope and opportunity to families that needed it most,” he says. “Families just like mine.” What he neglects to mention is that they also helped enrich the developers who built them — and who want to build new homes even further away from key infrastructure and services.
Rather than government getting “out of the way,” as Poilievre suggests, it needs to find ways to get back in the game. This is where the Liberals and New Democrats have to come in. We need an alternative to Poilievre’s dumbed-down approach that trades in half-truths and gerrymandered data. We need an optimistic vision of the future in which Canadians aren’t forced to choose between urban sprawl and economic survival. And we need solutions that target the real stress points in our housing ecosystem rather than cutting a blank cheque to politically connected developers.
We’ve already seen what that looks like in Ontario. For all of his talk about building new homes — and using the Greenbelt to do it — Doug Ford’s government has achieved exactly three of the 55 recommendations contained in the February 2022 report from his province’s Housing Affordability Task Force. That includes the easiest by far, which is to “set a goal for building 1.5 million new homes in 10 years.” The other two his government has completed are promoting the skilled trades and making secondary suites legal provincewide.
But Ford did manage to transfer more than $8 billion of wealth onto the balance sheets of a small number of developers, some of whom just happened to be donors to his Ontario PC Party. And that, in the end, is the more likely priority here for conservatives: not affordability or justice for younger Canadians but the elimination of anything that stands between home builders and their profits. Yes, the private sector has a major role to play in addressing the housing crisis, but it’s one that should be very carefully defined by governments. The sooner they get back into this game, the better off we’ll all be.
A Poilievre postscript
Because nearly 1,000 words isn’t enough to fully unpack the problems with Poilievre’s proposals, I wanted to dig into another argument he’s been making lately: that the rising cost of housing violates the “deal” we have in Canada. “We had a deal in this country when I grew up,” he said in a recent Conservative ad. “You get a job, you get a house by your 20s. That deal is broken.”
That was never the deal, though. Even in Calgary, where Poilievre grew up, the average first-time homebuyer in 1977 was over 30 years old. As Statistics Canada said in a 2000 report, “According to previously unpublished CMHC data for the Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver metropolitan areas, the average age of first-time homebuyers went up from 32.3 years to 36.2 years between 1977 and 2000.”
But let’s imagine Poilievre actually gets his way here. There’s no universe in which most people in their 20s will be able to buy a home in Toronto or Vancouver, if only because that was never really the case. But let’s pretend he can find a way to bring house prices back to 2015 levels. That would be the biggest housing market crash in Canadian history, and it wouldn’t be all that close. In Vancouver and Toronto, prices would have to drop by nearly 50 per cent, and the people hit hardest wouldn’t be Baby Boomers or others who won the housing lottery but Gen X and Gen Y homebuyers who just recently got into the market — probably with less down than they would have liked and more leverage than they’d ever dreamed.
The truth here is that there are no easy answers and no quick wins. There is no way to make housing significantly more affordable for new buyers without crippling millions of other Canadians in the process. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, but it does mean we should be very skeptical of anyone suggesting there’s a free lunch for present and potential homeowners here.
Let freedumb reign
With the trial of convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber underway, the circus is officially back in town. We’ve already seen a weirdly hagiographic piece by the Canadian Press on Ms. Lich’s role in the occupation of Ottawa, one that frames her in decidedly sympathetic terms. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of that sort of thing, either.
I have no strong sense of how this trial will ultimately end or whether Lich and Barber will be found guilty of their alleged crimes. Their return to the top of the news cycle reminds me of that famous line about the Watergate burglars from All the President’s Men: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” That strikes me as a pretty good description of what unfolded in Ottawa in February 2022. Whether that meets the test for criminality or not, as it did for Nixon’s co-conspirators, remains to be seen.
But the rest of us should be under no illusions here. No matter what the court finds, the people who found meaning in an illegal and politically illiterate blockade of the nation’s capital aren’t about to give this up and move on. They’ll spend the rest of their lives chasing the high they felt during those few weeks in 2022, when they were at the centre of our collective attention. We can only hope that their return to that spot is short-lived this time.
What The Wire has to say about Canadian politics
I’m one of those annoying people who will tell you that The Wire is the greatest piece of television ever made. I still rewatch old clips from time to time just to appreciate the beauty of David Simon’s writing and complexity of his characters in that series. And the conversation from Season 4 between gangster Omar Little and police officer Bunk Moreland stands out as one of my favourites.
The two had crossed paths before and shown an unusual level of respect for each other. After Omar explains that he never puts his gun on anyone who isn’t involved in “the game” (that is, the drug trade), Moreland summarizes his worldview with a famous phrase. “A man must have a code,” he says. “Oh, no doubt,” Omar replies.
But by Season 4, things have changed. After a shootout leaves one of Omar’s associates dead in the street, Moreland meets up with him to explain the violence has to stop. “Now all we got is bodies and predatory motherfu**ers like you. And out where that girl fell, I saw kids acting like Omar, calling you by name, glorifying your ass. Makes me sick, motherfu**er, how far we done fell.”
Why am I bringing all this up? Because some recent comments from Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre remind me that we’ve fallen nearly as far in the game of politics. During a recent bit of campaigning for Jamil Jivani, the new CPC candidate in Durham, Poilievre engaged on the door with a supporter who thought Justin Trudeau was ruining the country just like his father Pierre. “Well, they’re both Marxists,” Poilievre said.
It’s bad enough when political leaders let statements like this hang in the air unchallenged, either because they don’t want to disagree with a supporter or because they actually believe it. But to offer it up like this shows just how low Poilievre is willing to go in his ongoing quest to delegitimize and denigrate his political rival.
It wasn’t that long ago, remember, that Sen. John McCain gently corrected one of his own supporters on live television during a town hall when she suggested Barack Obama was “an Arab” and that Americans should be scared of him becoming president. “No, ma’am,” McCain said. “He’s a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”
Now, we have an Opposition leader not just tolerating this sort of partisan fearmongering but actively trading in it. It should go without saying that Trudeau isn’t a Marxist, or even particularly close to one. Just ask any actual Marxist out there, who tends to revile the Trudeau Liberals even more than Conservatives do. But to Bunk Moreland’s point, it makes me a little sick that we’ve fallen this far — and that Poilievre won’t pay a price for pushing us down even further into the muck.
Good News of the Week: The federal child-care program works
I have long been a believer in the economic and social benefits of subsidizing child care in this country. Now, as the data starts to roll in from the federal government’s new(ish) child-care program, it’s good to see that it’s confirming my priors here. A recent chart from the Business Council of Alberta shows a huge spike in the labour force participation rate of women with young children whose spouses are employed. These are people who would otherwise have tended to stay home, either because the cost of child care was too great or the economic opportunity associated with going back to work too small. But now, that math has been flipped on its head.
Some of this surge (from the low 70 per cent range to nearly 80 per cent) is surely due to the rising cost of living, which is affecting almost every household in Canada. But it’s another data point in support of the federal government’s signature program, one that has delivered thousands of dollars a month in savings to households with young kids. Given the virtual certainty it will be eliminated if Conservative government gets elected, the Liberals and their more co-operative provincial partners might want to do a better job of highlighting this.
Required reading: Natasha Bulowski cuts through the noise on wind and solar
Ever since it imposed its surprise moratorium on large-scale wind and solar energy development and declared war on Ottawa’s net-zero electricity targets, the UCP government in Alberta has been busy pushing out half-truths and straight-up lies about renewable energy. My colleague Natasha Bulowski did some excellent digging into one of its more epic nose-stretchers, which claimed that a recent alert from the Alberta Electric System Operator during a late-summer heat wave was due to wind power and its inherent unreliability.
“In the case of Monday’s power grid alert, the situation was a lot more complex than Smith made it out to be,” she wrote. “Low wind power was only one of many conditions that led to Alberta’s energy shortfall. Reduced gas generation and outages combined with issues with importing energy from B.C. played a larger role in the shortage.”
Ironically, it was the province’s natural gas-fired plants — the ones Smith says we need more of, ASAP — that failed to answer the call. And in some Alanis-level irony, it was the hot weather — you know, driven by climate change — that was responsible for this reduced gas-fired output. “During extremely hot weather,” Bulowski wrote, “the cooling ponds adjacent to natural gas facilities become warmer, and the water circulating through the plants can’t keep them cool enough to operate at optimal temperature, explained [AESO communications manager Leif] Sollid. To compensate, the plants have to operate at a reduced output or capacity.”
I have no doubt that we’ll keep seeing this sort of anti-wind and anti-solar agitprop from Smith’s government. But I’m glad we have someone like Natasha to keep her honest.
The Wrap
We’re well past 3,000 words here, and I was off most of last week on vacation, so I’ll call a stop to things here. As ever, please reach out if you have any questions or complaints, and share this newsletter as widely and warmly as you see fit.