Trudeau on housing: "It's not a primary federal responsibility"

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's September 2022 announcement marking the start of construction of the Senakw rental housing project in Vancouver. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

How much of a role should the Government of Canada have in fixing the national housing affordability crisis?

On Monday, during an affordable housing announcement in Hamilton, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested the federal government has a role to play in housing, but at the end of the day it comes down to the individual provincial and municipal governments.

“But I’ll be blunt as well,” answered the Prime Minister when asked by a reporter, before continuing, “Housing isn’t primarily a federal responsibility. It’s not something we have direct carriage of, but it’s something we can and must help with.”

“It’s not just the federal government that can solve this,” he added.

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However, there is now ever-increasing attention over the impact of the federal government’s continued highly elevated immigration targets.

On the one hand, the greater volume of immigrants is intended to help address Canada’s immense labour shortage and help protect long-term economic growth. But on the other hand, it is further exacerbating housing affordability, with the pace of new supply not increasing to meet real heightened demand, especially in the already expensive and heated markets of Metro Vancouver and Greater Toronto.

Following the elevated numbers of 2021 and 2022, the immigration targets moving forward are 465,000 in 2023, 485,000 in 2024, and 500,000 in 2025. By 2025, under the new targets, over 60% of the admissions of new permanent residents will be within the economic class.

Trudeau suggested the municipal and provincial governments need to step up on addressing housing issues in their communities.

Municipal governments, in particular, have control over the pace of new housing supply generated, given that they oversee building application reviews and approvals, policies such as land use and zoning, regulations that determine the cost of building housing, and have a better grasp of the needs of local communities.

As well, provincial governments can not only help support affordable housing projects, but also steer zoning and other municipal policy changes. This is already the case with the provincial governments of British Columbia and Ontario, which are overriding the jurisdiction of municipal governments’ zoning powers to permit more density. The BC provincial government, for example, is also rolling out new housing supply quotas for municipal governments to meet.

In response to rising instances of newcomers who arrived to Canada as refugees becoming homeless due to the high cost of housing and living, Trudeau also said the municipal and provincial governments should do more.

“When it comes to settling asylum seekers, municipalities and provinces have the larger part of the responsibility of that. It is unacceptable in a country like Canada that vulnerable refugees have to sleep in the streets,” said the Prime Minister.

Between 2023 and 2025, the federal government has a goal of accepting a total of 225,000 over the three-year period, which accounts for about 15% of the overall immigration total.

Trudeau also blamed the former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government’s role in the housing crisis, asserting Harper’s tenure, which lasted for a decade ending in 2014, put housing on the back-burner of federal priorities, and that current Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was part of Harper administration.

Under the federal Liberals, the federal government has a $82-billion National Housing Strategy over 10 years between 2018 and 2028. To date, nearly $34 billion has been spent on catalyzing new housing or protecting existing affordable housing. This includes a rapid housing strategy to address homelessness.

Poilievre fired back in response.

“I don’t even need to respond,” said Poilievre during a press conference. “When I was housing minister, housing cost half of what it does now. We didn’t have people living in tent cities.”

“He might brag that his policy is more expensive to taxpayers, but it doesn’t make it a success. Failing is bad, but failing expensively is worst. We will do neither. When I’m Prime Minister, we will succeed at a lower cost to homebuyers and taxpayers.”

The federal government historically had a major role in housing, particularly in directly funding affordable housing, with its investments peaking in the 1970s. Cuts to the federal housing program began with the Conservative government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the middle of the 1980s, but the most significant cuts took place in austerity changes of the early 1990s during the Liberals’ previous tenure under Jean Chretien, with Paul Martin as the federal finance minister at the time.

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