More Liberal Bureaucracy Will Not Fix the Housing Crisis
April 1, 2025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ottawa, ON – The Carney-Trudeau Liberals have doubled rent, doubled mortgage payments and doubled the cost of a down payment after the Lost Liberal Decade.
The same government that can’t get passports out to Canadians or run websites efficiently, is now telling us that the solution to our housing crisis is to put their same failed government in charge of homebuilding. A Government that fails in building First Nations housing – a direct area of responsibility – now claims they can effectively get into the homebuilding business directly. Ottawa should be getting out of the way so our hardworking tradespeople can build, not pretending that bureaucrats in corner offices will fix this.
Mark Carney continues to support the same failed housing policies of Justin Trudeau, including rewarding local gatekeepers who block home building and raise housing taxes. He even brought back Trudeau’s former housing Minister, Sean Fraser, who is responsible for many of these failed Liberal policies. And as we learned from Blacklock’s Reporter just a couple weeks ago, Sean Fraser knew his plan to double homebuilding was a lie.
The Liberals’ failed policies worked for Mark Carney, whose assets in Brookfield rose in value as Canada’s housing shortage got worse. Brookfield bragged that the housing crisis represented a “sweet spot” for “opportunistic real estate strategies in order to take advantage of the stress in the market.”
Mark Carney’s new ‘plan’ also fails to say anything about homeownership. There is no mention anywhere in Mark Carney’s housing policy about homeowners or home ownership, something that reflects the ten years of the Lost Liberal Decade where home ownership has become out of reach for countless Canadians. This is perhaps not surprising given Brookfield’s landlord status, including their growing single-family home rental business.
The Liberals’ record on municipal housing taxes is nothing short of embarrassing. After giving Toronto $471 million, they increased housing taxes by more than $20,000. After giving Ottawa $176.3 million, Ottawa increased housing taxes by between 11 and 12 percent. And just a few months ago, they confirmed they would keep giving “Accelerator Fund” money to cities that increase housing taxes.
Carney even brought in Gregor Robertson as a handpicked candidate, the failed former mayor of Vancouver, who saw home prices increase by 149% and raised housing taxes by 141% in just ten years. In December 2008, the first month Gregor Robertson was mayor, the average price of a home in Vancouver was $477,500. When he left, buying that same house cost nearly $1.2 million.
Only Conservatives have a real plan to make housing affordable:
- We will axe the sales tax on new homes, saving families up to $65,000 on the purchase of a home and $3000 on yearly mortgage payments while spurring a massive new homebuilding boom.
- We will sell off 6000 federal buildings, thousands of acres of federal land to build new homes.
- We will incentivize municipalities to speed up permits, free up land, and cut housing taxes so homes can be built faster.
- We will bring more Boots, not Suits, backing 350,000 positions for trade schools and union halls to train red-seal apprentices to build homes, and we will bring back the $4000 apprenticeship grant that the Liberals plan to eliminate.
- We will unlock billions of dollars in the private sector by allowing anyone who reinvests in Canada to defer tax on capital gains to invest more in home building.
Only a new Conservative government will axe the sales tax on new homes for everyone, remove the gatekeepers who block home building and build homes that Canadians can afford, for a change.
