The federal Conservatives have finally offered a peek into their plans to alleviate the current housing shortages being experienced across most of the nation. The plan is simple. Reward municipalities that increase housing builds by 15 percent and fine those that do not.
There is a simple flaw in that approach. Municipalities are not housing contractors and most do not build housing—the funding they receive from the provinces barely covers the cost of maintaining existing social housing stock.
Like their provincial cousins, the federal Conservatives are busy laying blame for the housing shortage on the governing Liberals and aiming their sights on the property taxpayer as a solution.
To be fair, the Conservative housing plan has other legs. Their plan includes building one million homes over three years. Converting 15 percent of federal government property into housing, “creating” an Indigenous housing strategy and tackling money laundering and foreign investors.
But the old adage “all’s fair in love and war” has long included politics and it has done little to improve our governance. The Canadian Constitution cites its goals as “peace, order and good government.” It has a division of powers. That division puts the responsibility for housing squarely in the provincial theatre.
That would be the level of government in Ontario where the premier has embraced his inner NIMBY and ruled out a plan to allow fourplexes to be built “as of right.” As of right means bypassing municipal approval (the level of government most susceptible to NIMBYism) and will allow four-unit housing to be built in residential neighbourhoods. Several fourplexes have been built on the Island.
Instead of creating policies that would encourage affordable housing, Premier Ford wants more single-family housing built, even though that housing has demonstrably proven to be hugely unaffordable for so many younger families.
Instead, Premier Doug Ford’s usual approach to “helping” municipalities is to download ever-increasing amounts of responsibilities onto municipalities (read property taxpayers) and not providing enough money to cover the cost. This is a strategy aimed at “encouraging” efficiencies. He, too, has been known to blame municipal “red tape” for the crisis.
A good portion of the roll of “red tape” Premier Ford is aiming at is where municipalities insist that subdivision developers shoulder the cost of increased infrastructure to service the new housing, rather than those costs
being foisted onto the backs of the existing ratepayers. All this while the province has recently brought forward the largest budget in Ontario history.
So, the federal government is being blamed for the housing crisis, even though it is not their constitutional responsibility—or at least being blamed for not doing enough to “fix” the provincial responsibility. The Ontario government (led by the Progressive Conservatives) points its finger at both the feds and the municipalities while the man-who-would-be prime minister is doing the same while busily creating snappy sound bites on social media.
It is long past time the province rolls up its fiscal sleeves and takes responsibility (along with real action) to tackle the crisis, rather than pointing at its sibling levels of government.
The housing continuum begins with social housing and that is one area the province could take real and immediate action to alleviate the current situation. With more of the province’s poorest properly housed, affordable housing in the next tier opens up. That allows younger families to have more cash to set aside to access a starter home in the next tier and so on up the ladder.
With pressure alleviated from below, the amount of housing available in the upper tiers should stabilize—because that’s how the invisible hand of the market is supposed to work.
That approach, endorsed by housing policy experts, won’t line the pockets of large land developers who attend strategic weddings, gifts in hand, so it is unlikely to be route that meets muster with the current masters of Queen’s Park, but it makes simple (if not “common”) sense.
