The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Your Turn -- Your questions to the Housing Minister, Sean Fraser

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

You wanted to ask questions of the Housing Minister, he agreed and you delivered. Dozens and dozens of questions poured in about immigration, affordability, mortgages, construction and a lot more. We ask as many as we can in this special episode of Your Turn. Even the Random Ranter steps aside to give you more time!

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Thursday, your turn. And this day, we have the Minister of Housing here to answer your questions on your turn. That's coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto today with a kind of a different episode of your turn. First of all, no random ranter today because we're devoting the whole time to your questions for the Minister of Housing. You've had a lot of questions about housing in the last little while,

so we thought the easiest way to deal with this is to ask the Minister of Housing on to answer your questions. So that's what's happening on today's program. The Minister of Housing, Sean Fraser, he's from Central Nova, they're riding in Nova Scotia with a bit of history to Central Nova, and he'll talk about that during this program. But mainly it's your questions about housing, and there are lots of them. So let's, why don't we get right to it. The Minister of Housing, Sean Fraser. Minister, it's good of you to join us for this. There have been a lot of questions. They're good questions.

So let's get right at them. There were quite a few questions that dealt on this subject as it relates to housing, and you can probably guess what it is. Here's the first version from Cole Christie in Calgary. In late March, Statistics Canada reported that Canada's population reached 41 million nine months after reaching 40 million. One million people in nine months is roughly 3,800 a day, and coincidentally, this is the population of the small prairie town where I grew up, a town which also provided a full hospital, water treatment, waste services, utilities, shopping, postal, etc., etc.

Here's his question. Are we seriously going to be able to build at a rate to adequately provide the services for everyone if current immigration targets continue? A full town every day, is that what it's going to be? Minister? Look, thanks. This is a really important question. And I think we've got to make sure that we're achieving different goals at the same time. And one includes the need to continue to welcome essential workers into our economy. We rely on our immigration system for our healthcare professionals. We rely on them for the people who are going to fill essential roles in sectors that have been absolutely hammered by the pandemic. And we have a long term demographic challenge.

50 years ago, we had seven workers for every retiree. And today, the number is closer to three. And that pulls into consideration. Do we have sustainable social services and pension plans that will protect us? But we have to make sure that we have the absorptive capacity to make sure people who come here have a place to live. So the answer to the question is yes, but it's because we're making changes to both the housing output and the number of people who are coming to the country. My view is that we can continue to welcome significant numbers of people as permanent residents and give communities several years of planning so they can actually

accommodate the population growth they're seeing. But we've had real challenges and we've needed to correct course on temporary residency programs, which historically aren't set at a level by the federal government, but have responded to demand by institutions and by employers. Coming out of the pandemic, we saw record demand with businesses who had labour shortages, with institutions who had two years of people that weren't able to come to Canada. And now Minister Miller has picked up where we left off to make some changes to the temporary side of the immigration system to help on not just the supply side with building more homes, but the demand side to put some guardrails around the ability for communities to welcome the number of people who are coming. So I think we can do it, but it

requires us to look at both the supply and demand side. When you say a significant number, have you got a number in mind? The expectation, and this was in the federal budget just released this week, is that we're going to see a reduction in temporary residency of about 600,000 people. This is largely through the international student program, which certain institutions were exploiting. And it's also through some other temporary programs, including the temporary foreign workers program that doesn't need the same leeway today that it did as we came out of the pandemic. And we're going to monitor this closely and make sure that we're looking at both sides of the equation. All right. Patrick Morocco from Saint-Romain, Quebec. That's northwest of Quebec City.

With hindsight being 2020, do you think you could have done anything differently when you were immigration minister a little more than a year ago that would help with your position as housing minister? The answer is yes. And for the most part, the big things we tackled when I was in that position, I remain very proud of the work we've done to make good on our commitment to Afghans that fought with the Canadian Armed Forces, the work we did to open our borders to Ukrainians who were fleeing a desperate war, and the work we did to open our borders to Ukrainians who were fleeing a desperate war, and the work we did to help employers find the labor that they needed when we were dealing with a labor shortage. There was one issue that I was working on that wasn't able to finish before the cabinet shuffle moved me to a different position. And that was dealing with some of the international

student numbers that were coming in. This is something that we became aware of before the shuffle happened. And I think if I could do one thing over, it would be to try a different approach because we started trying to negotiate this largely with the province of Ontario, and we didn't make progress. And we lost a number of months where I thought we could negotiate a solution because provinces have primary jurisdiction over which institutions have access to the program. And it wasn't until a few months before the shuffle that we started talking about the cap on the program that Minister Miller has now implemented. And with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to pick this out. But at the time, pursuing a negotiation rather than coming down to deal with the problem through a decision taken unilaterally by the federal government, potentially could have saved

us a few months. But I did think at the time that the right thing to do, notwithstanding the different pressures we faced around multiple cohorts landing at once, the challenge of welcoming Ukrainians, and the need to address the labor shortage, I thought a negotiated resolution would have been best, but we weren't able to achieve it. And in retrospect, the right thing Ukrainians and the need to address the labour shortage. I thought a negotiated resolution would have been best, but we weren't able to achieve it. And in retrospect, the right thing to do would have been to move more quickly on the cap. But that was the first conversation I had with Minister Miller and he's been able to, I think, very adeptly handle the file since the transition and is putting us in a position where we're better able to manage the volume of newcomers who we

still want to welcome and support, but in numbers that communities can better accommodate. All right. We had several questions along these lines. Who's going to build all the new housing? You touched on this a little bit in your first answer. Jen Dennis from Baysville, Ontario, it's in the Muskokas, north of Toronto, writes, we have a very serious shortage of construction laborers, from carpenters to drywall, concrete, and trades like plumbing, electrical, and heating. The government has completely ignored this primary component of the new housing industry. They can allot as many millions of dollars as they like to housing initiatives,

but without people in the construction trades, there will be no one to build this new housing. Is she right or wrong? Well, right in the sense that we need to address the labor force if we're going to solve the problem. But I would politely disagree that this hasn't been part of the plan. This is central to it. We have measures that are going to reduce the cost of building. We have measures that are going to make it easier to build homes. But one of the two main challenges that we're going to run into is really whether we have the productive capacity within the Canadian workforce to build the homes if we have a perfect policy framework on everything else. And today, we don't. We need to do a number of things if we're going to get to the place where we need to be. The budget actually includes major investments and training for the skilled trades.

It includes a number of different measures that are designed to better recognize the credentials of people who are already in Canada that were trained elsewhere. It includes measures that are going to make it easier for somebody from Atlanta, Canada to help build homes in Ontario or Alberta. But importantly, we can't just assume that even if we can scale up the Canadian home building workforce, that we're going to be able to achieve a very ambitious goal if we don't also change the way that we build homes. So we've got significant investments designed to incentivize the expansions of home building factories and new tools around a home design catalog that we're going to align with the design, manufacture, finance, and municipal pre-approval so we can incentivize the mass production of homes,

like other countries are leading on. And if we can scale up both the Canadian workforce through traditional construction methods and spur innovation by building more homes and factories, my sense is we can dramatically increase the number of homes that the Canadian economy can produce each year. And the success or failure of the plan will very much depend on our ability to grow the productivity of the home building workforce, including by expanding the workforce itself and finding new ways to build homes. But you know, as well as I do, that you can track this back through years, decades at

times of this problem of moving people around the country, the tradespeople, and whether their qualifications are accepted in different parts of the country, whether they come from overseas or whether they're from inside Canada. Do you seriously think that those issues can be corrected this time? There's been progress that's been made already. Whether you can get a perfect system where there are zero barriers is a separate question. I think we can make meaningful progress, but I'm always reticent to project as a federal cabinet minister, what needs to come out of conversations that happen as between provinces and the Federation.

There's more than one cook in the kitchen here. And not just on this issue, but on many of the issues that touch on housing, we need everybody rowing in the same direction. And sometimes the conversations go well, sometimes they become challenging. There's things we can do around labor mobility tax credits. There's things we can do to work with provinces to better align standards for qualification. But we need provinces to come to the table on this as well. So I think we can continue to make progress. I think we can make it easier. But this entire journey includes a number of different policies that will always have room to improve. But this is one where I think we can make meaningful progress that will help.

It's not a silver bullet, but it's going to make a meaningful difference. All right. Affordability, a catchphrase that we've heard so much about in the last year. This question comes from a lot of different angles. Don Dietrich asked this from Regina. I wonder if helping people buy houses drives up prices until the supply and demand of Canadian housing comes back into balance. Won't every program aimed at helping people buy houses get absorbed into housing price increases? This is a good point. It has the potential to and the degree to which it has that impact

depends on the design of the program. So overwhelmingly, the measures included in the plan focus on building more homes because supply is a hurdle we must clear if we're going to solve the housing crisis. I do think that we need to have some measures put in place because I don't think it's fair to leave an entire generation priced out of the housing market without opportunities to overcome significantly higher prices that they're facing today compared to a generation before. Sometimes we put protections in place to allow us to provide savings opportunities on a tax-free basis and other measures that help restrict the impact

it will have on the demand side of the equation. Just an example, we recently moved forward with a change allowing first-time home buyers to amortize a new purchase over 30 years instead of 25 to reduce the monthly mortgage cost a person pays. But we've limited that for now to new builds. If you're only dealing with a policy that's going to impact buildings that otherwise would not have been built, then you're limiting the impact of that increased demand on existing supply. So it can actually drive a little bit more supply if you restrict it in that way. But there are other measures we put in place to help people save up for a down payment that could potentially increase the number of people who

are shopping in the same pool. And you have to be careful if you're going to do something on the demand side of the equation to make sure that you're focusing disproportionately on the supply. So there's a number of different pieces of the puzzle that need to fit together. My sense is we've struck the right balance, but it's a cold comfort. If I talk to somebody who's 28 years old, trying to think of getting into the market for the first time to say, you know what, we're going to build more homes and you're going to have to wait a number of years before one's available for you. I think we should give people an opportunity to save up for that down payment, reduce the

monthly cost of a mortgage as we address the supply challenge. So we're trying to strike the right balance and do as much as we can, particularly on the supply, while we create new savings opportunities for young people in particular. Well, that example is a part of the next question. Carolyn Black from Waterloo, Ontario writes, My daughter is 23, working very hard and is being super responsible. Graduating this year with a master's degree, no school debt has saved enough for what should be a down payment for a

home. Yet it's impossible for her to buy any sort of home without significant assistance from the bank of mom and dad. It feels like if my daughter can't achieve home ownership on her own, few will be able to. Is it time the younger generation set aside their belief that homeownership is a rite of passage? Absolutely not. I don't think it is reasonable nor fair for the federal government to tell a generation of Canadians that they don't deserve the same opportunities of generations who came before them. But I appreciate why people may feel that way now. And a big part of the reason that's driving the rapid change in approach to housing over the past six months is a core belief that every

generation deserves a fair chance at success. The kinds of things that we're trying to do, in addition to building more homes, and different kinds of homes, by the way. Some will be bigger apartment buildings near urban cores, but others will be different kinds of homes that will allow more small multiplexes that might be good starter homes for people, potentially more condo buildings, depending on the zoning practices that cities put up. And there will still be single family homes, but they might not be in downtown Toronto. One of the things that we're focused on

is creating a series of programs that meet people where they are at the different stages of saving up for that first home. There's new measures to help people build credit based on their rental history. There's new measures to help people save for a down payment through the first home savings account, which 750,000 people, disproportionately young people have now signed up for. Changes to the RRSP programs to allow you to withdraw

larger amounts and to delay paying it back. And then the amortization piece that we discussed. All of this also needs to happen as we implement measures that free up stock that is already existing in the market through different measures around short-term rentals, around foreign buyers, around mortgage fraud. If we do all of these things, we can put a downward pressure on the price of homes that exist today, and we create opportunities for people to save up for their own payment with reduced mortgage costs, which will create a pathway for more young people to get into the market. So homeownership is not for everybody, but if it's something you aspire to, we believe with reduced mortgage costs, which will create a pathway for more young people to get into the

market. So homeownership is not for everybody, but if it's something you aspire to, we believe that that's something that should be a possibility for the current generation who's seeking to get into the market. Okay. Well, let's look at the opposite end of this question, because it'll be interesting to see if you have the same answer for a married couple. Neil Douglas Fraser writes from Edmonton, my wife and I roughly make $150,000 a year, pay $2,200 a month for our two-bedroom rental suite, are paying back student loans, making car payments, utility bills, paying down credit cards, etc., etc., yet we're still pushed out of the housing market because banks won't approve a mortgage. It's very difficult to accept becoming lifelong renters.

If we're able to pay all of our bills on time, how are we not able to be approved for a mortgage that could most likely be cheaper than the amount of rent we pay? My question to you is how do you plan to make it more feasible for not only my wife and I, but millions of Canadians to get into the housing market? The individual facts of a specific borrower's relationship with their bank is not something I'm going to project on, but I hear stories like this all the time. There's a number of different things that we have to do,

and I think we've got to realize that housing costs don't exist in a silo. People live their lives where they're dealing with housing costs at the same time that the price of groceries has gone up, at the same time that the price of everything has gone up as a result of the inflation that the world has experienced over the past couple of years. When it comes to the measures around housing, you have to realize that it's all connected. So first of all, we have to bring more supply onto the market and free up supply that exists today. If we're going to put a downward pressure on the pricing that we've seen that will impact people who are seeking to get into the market, for people who are trying to get into the market as homeowners, there is a cognitive dissonance when you're dealing with a person who's clearly got the ability to pay rent, but won't be approved for

a mortgage, which could be actually the same or less than that rental payment. The different bottlenecks that we tend to see, and I'm not sure with respect to this particular listener, are establishing credit, saving up for a down payment, and being able to manage the monthly payments. For each of those bottlenecks that we've learned about through conversations with people who are living through these circumstances, we've decided to establish certain measures. So we're creating a new opportunity for that rental history to establish credit. We've got tax-free savings account for people to get into the housing markets and made changes to the RRSP home buyers plan

to make it easier for people who may be able to draw down on their RRSP savings to save up for the down payment. And then with the longer amortization period, the goal is to reduce the monthly mortgage costs. So it will depend on where the bottleneck is for these individual listeners. But we tried to base our programs not on the needs of the people who will administer the program, but the needs of the people who will use them based on the life circumstances that they're dealing with as they seek to get into the housing market. Okay. We've got lots more questions to go. So I'll ask you to try to be a little briefer on your answers. But I understand you're trying to get a lot in here. Still with affordability, John Pasternak in Swan River, Manitoba. How can you expect Canadians to be able to afford more

new housing when the base cost of materials alone has tripled since the pandemic? I don't know whether these are Swan River numbers or general numbers, but he says before COVID, the average price for new construction was an average of $144 a square foot, labor included. Now it's over $350. Look, this is a really good point. There's a number of different things that have gone up, materials, supplies, labor, land, interest, most of which is outside of the control of any one level of government. But there are things that are within the control of the federal government. So when I look at what we actually can impact, I look at a few key things. One is taxes. We can reduce taxes on home builders to reduce the

cost of home building to get more homes built. We've done this more specifically by removing the GST on new apartment construction and now moving forward with an accelerated capital cost allowance. The second thing that we can do is combat higher interest rates by using the federal government's borrowing power, which has the lowest interest rates in Canada, in exchange for commitments that builders who use the program will actually offer units at a cheaper price than they would in the market. And the third thing that we can do is reduce the cost of land in the input to the formula builders looking at by providing federal lands to home builders who are going to offer homes at prices that are more affordable. This is a sea change in approach, by the way,

on federal lands that we're moving forward with, where to better help enforce affordability requirements, we're not just going to sell it off to the highest builder, but we're going to enter into long-term leases in exchange for commitments around affordability that will help reduce the cost of living. So we have to focus on the things that are within our control if we're going to offset some of the increased costs that are outside of the control of the federal government. All right. Mike Town writes from Listerwell, Ontario. Define affordable. He says, in my neck of the woods, you need a household income of $120,000 plus to afford the typical house on the market in southwestern Ontario's small centres, let alone a typical house in a major urban centre.

So what does affordable mean to you? I think that everybody across the income spectrum should have housing options that they can pay for with 30% of their income. That's a goal of this housing plan, is to create space in the market where across income levels, you can find a place to live for 30% of your income. There is some confusion around the definition of affordable housing and people throw it around quite often. That's what I think should happen in the market. But there's going to be people who will never be able to afford a place to live due to life circumstances that may be beyond their control. And we need to build out non-market housing, social housing for low-income families because it's very expensive to ignore the challenges of people who can't afford a place

to live. But for people who are working, my view is you should be able to afford a place to live. And the housing plan sets a goal of trying to achieve a level of affordability where across income levels, you should have options to find a place to live at 30% of your income. Whether that's owning or renting? It'll be different options for different people. Somebody who's got their first job out of high school working a minimum wage is likely going to be able to have to find a place to rent. Somebody who's been working at a higher salary for a number of years will have options in the market. So it doesn't necessarily mean that every single person in Canada

will be able to own a home at every single part of their lives, but that should be a possibility for everybody at some point in their lives. But I think there should be, either to own or to rent, there should be an option in your community to find a place that you can afford. Cathy Needham in Shallow Lake, Ontario. That's on the Bruce Peninsula, a beautiful country up there near Owen Sound. Older Canadians were taught to buy a house, and when they retired, the proceeds from the sale of this home

would be an important part of their retirement funds. Young people are now saying that in order to purchase a home, the prices have to drop drastically. Who should take the economic hit? The retired person who followed the advice of the day or the young person starting out trying to pursue what seems to be an impossible goal? I don't know that I view it to be quite a zero-sum game. I do think we have to address fairness in the economy and we're looking how we're going to pay for some of these programs

in addition to the economic growth that Canada is experiencing, we are asking the wealthy to pay more. And when I say the wealthy, I'm talking about people who are on average with this capital gains measure we put in place earning $1.4 million a year disproportionately from their investments. When I actually look at the impact on the housing market, when I say it's not a zero-sum game, I mean to suggest if we're building a new apartment that's going to reduce the cost of living for a young person in Halifax, that doesn't necessarily impact the purchase price of a single-family home in Oakville. And it depends on what kinds of homes you're building where. But my belief is if we can build a rental stock to allow more people to save up for

a longer period of time by paying a lower rent, we're going to help that young person. And there may be downward pressures as a result of some of the measures we're putting in place around mortgage fraud, around short-term rentals, and around general supply. But I don't necessarily think that means that the bottom is going to automatically fall out of the market. There are other factors that go into the price of homes than federal government policy. But my belief is that if we grow supply enough, over time, we might not see home prices rise as fast as they have, and wages will start to catch up. City to city, market to market, you may see some prices come down. But if we're mirroring the

growth in supply in the rental market to allow more people to save up, it's not necessarily going to have that impact on the person who's been counting on selling that home for retirement. But by the way, most people who've seen significant growth in the value of their home, that investment has dramatically outperformed their expectations. In my home province of Nova Scotia, prices have doubled in just the last couple of years. That's not necessarily, if somebody's made a million dollars and the increased value on their home, I'm more concerned about the young person who's not able to get into the market than I am protecting a radical increase in price that no one was expecting to take place. I mean, you're still a pretty young guy. Have you had your own issues in your own life

dealing with housing costs, whether it's renting or buying or what have you? Yeah, look, I'm for at least a month and a half more. I'm still in my 30s. Whether it's me, my family, my friends, this issue has consumed everybody my age and younger. I feel fortunate that I lived in a couple of different cities around the world and Calgary for about five years. And when I came back home to my community, it's a community where historically housing prices are lower. But when I was coming out of school, my wife and I both studied for many years. And between us, we owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans.

And we were fortunate. We got good jobs. But we had to move away from our hometown to be able to find a job where we could pay down our student loans. And living in an urban environment for a guy who grew up in a rural community in Nova Scotia, the cost of housing was extreme to me. And it's been, I don't think, I'm not concerned about myself and this equation, but there remain people very close to me in my own family, within my own circle of friends, one in particular who just had her fourth baby and was just told that her rent's going up $1,200 a month because her landlord had to refinance his mortgage. They're talking about going back to work full-time when they've got a child a few months old, when they shouldn't be spending their time with their newest kid.

They shouldn't be worried about having to find a new place to live. Everyone I know, my age and younger, is being impacted in one way, shape, or form. And people are less often talking about the dream home they're going to own one day and more worried about whether they can keep the place that they have now. And that doesn't have to be what we accept for the generation of young people who just want to be able to have enough money to go out for a bite with their friends once in a while, afford groceries, keep a roof over their head. That seems like the very minimum that Canadians should expect in a country as wealthy

as Canada. I think we can deliver that. There's a lot of focus in your plan on young people, trying to find ways for them to get into the market. But here's a question about the older demographic. Albert Lynch writes from Suris, Manitoba. I think a lot of boomers like my wife and I are trying to stay in our homes as long as we can. In a couple of years, I can see a senior housing issue. What has to happen so that building seniors housing gets done? So there's a number of things that can happen.

And we've got some changes to our lending programs that are going to make it easier to build out seniors housing. But one of the things that I find really exciting is that if we actually build more seniors housing, we solve a very big problem around a lack of single family homes. And it's faster and cheaper to build seniors apartments than it is to build single family homes. But when somebody moves into a senior's apartment, they're usually vacating a larger home that will provide more home in the market than the senior's apartment they're moving into does. So what we can do to incentivize more seniors apartments includes a number of different things. One is some changes to our financing programs that make it

easier, but also working to modernize zoning practices that make it easier to build small to medium multi-residential apartments in communities that have the demand. So I actually think we're going to have a significant uptick in the number of apartments that are designed for seniors, but it's going to be driven not just by the demand of seniors who are seeking to move out of those family homes, but the cascading effect of the additional demand for single family homes of the next generation that comes behind them. So I think there's some unique things we can do, but it's going to require different levels of government working together, certainly.

All right. Question about another segment of society. It comes from Brian Hodgson in Nanaimo, BC. Why was there no mention of homelessness in this year's budget? Is there anything the federal government is planning to do to help mitigate the nationwide problem of homeless Canadian citizens?

There's an entire chapter of the housing plan dedicated to this very issue. We have a moral obligation to make sure that everyone in this country has a roof over their head. And right now, we, not just as a federal government, but as a society, are not satisfying that obligation and we need to do more. The thing that should convince everyone beyond the responsibility we have, it's in our own self-interest. The cost of ignoring homelessness is as great or greater than the cost of addressing it. When you deal with somebody who doesn't have a place to live, you're dealing with increased costs at the ER,

with mental health services, with law enforcement, with the courts, and people can't reach their economic potential. So even if you don't believe in the morality of the argument I'm making, believe in the economics of it. The budget and the housing plan include a few key measures. The first is a major increase in funding for affordable housing, because the cause of homelessness is not just mental health and addictions, a person's gender identity or sexual orientation, the community that they come from. It's a lack of affordable housing. Nobody chooses to be homeless. If there is a place

they can afford to go, the likelihood is they're going to find a place to go. But we need to also support communities to help people get there. There's major new investments to top up the Reaching Home program to help communities address homelessness. There's a new fund to support communities who commit to ending homelessness by adopting a housing first approach. And there's also a major new acquisition fund that is going to help nonprofits acquire housing that already exists. So we stop losing affordable housing that's already on the market. So this is one of the three main pillars of the housing plan is helping Canadians who cannot afford a place to live and eliminating homelessness. All right question from Ron Fisher in Moncton about who's getting federal money. Will you prioritize funding for co-op, not-for-profit,

municipal and other rental housing that will be truly affordable and can be built now. There are a lot of projects out there that are shovel-ready but lack grants and loan guarantees to get them off the ground, as opposed to corporate welfare for developers to maybe add some affordable housing. Absolutely. And my apologies, Peter. There's a vote in the House of Commons, and I've got to do it in real time while we do the interview. My apologies. I'm not just taking a selfie, I promise. this country. There was a 30-year period where governments failed to make investments in affordable housing, and no one party holds the moral high ground here. Conservatives and liberals both made the mistake. We're trying to fix that. We started in 2017, but we need to scale up. In addition to the multi-billion dollar investments we're putting towards affordable

housing that will be held by non-profits. We're also ramping up a new program for cooperative housing. We've also put $4 billion through the strategy to support indigenous housing needs in urban, rural, and northern environments, and additional $4 billion to address indigenous housing needs on reserve. When we actually take care of some of these massive challenges and put funding in place for nonprofits to prevent the loss of existing units that are at low cost, but in the market by converting them to nonprofit units, then we can actually grow the supply and stop losing the supply that exists. We will not solve the homelessness crisis in Canada if we don't solve the shortage of

affordable housing. And this is not just talk. These policies are backed by billions of dollars in investment to help build out the stock that we need. All right. Just got 10 minutes left, which will fly by. So keep that in mind. Worry about the quality of all the homes to be built.

Karen Somerville writes from Ottawa. Municipalities and provinces have a 20-plus year track record of not enforcing building codes. Code violations pose risk to occupants' health and safety. What will you and your government do to address this problem in the new construction you are funding? We're going to tie the eligibility for federal funding to adopting modern building code standards. So we continue to improve the eligibility for federal funding to adopting modern building code standards. So we continue to improve the building code, not just for health and safety, but also for efficiency, which produces the cost of living for the person and does right by the climate needs of our country and the planet. But we also can have better home designs that will allow us to build more kinds of homes

with an updated code. Some of the infrastructure funding that we're putting in place, we're saying to provincial governments and municipalities, if you actually want to tap into federal funding for housing, you have to meet certain minimum standards to make it easier to build homes and to build quality homes that people will be able to live in safely. Spencer Stinson from Blenheim, Ontario. A lot of Canadians, it seems, look at other countries and wonder if we'd be wise to adopt some of the ways they do things. The government seems to tout affordability as a key pillar of this plan, but I think many people are just as concerned with stability. As I'm sure the minister is aware,

the U.S. and the U.S. people can lock into a 30-year mortgage for a 30-year rate. No re-signing every five years. This is your funding for the entire term. Have you considered that? It's something that I've thought about. It's a fundamental change in the way that financial markets would deal with real estate in this country. And although it could potentially provide stability, you obviously could run the flip side risk on that equation of somebody locking into a much higher rate depending on the terms of their agreement with the financial institution.

But the other thing that concerns me a little bit is we have a very well-regulated banking sector in Canada, which I actually believe helped prevent some of the worst consequences of the changing dynamics if they're locked in on mortgages that they're not able to deal with. We've put a housing plan on the table that includes a number of measures around here, but we don't mean to suggest that this is all we will ever do. As we see the measures that prove to be successful, the measures that make housing more affordable for Canadians, we'll want to double down on those. But if there's areas we explore where we think we can do more, we're maintaining our ability to do more where necessary. So I'm going to continue to watch examples like this around the world to seek advice from folks about the potential risks or opportunities. So I haven't written this idea off altogether. But for now, we think we've put ourselves on a

fairly healthy track that will mitigate against sectoral risk of fundamentally changing the way that the financial sector deals with real estate in Canada. Well, here's one Canadian government's liberal and conservative have said no to since 1979 when it was on the Joe Clark promises in that campaign, but they were never able to actually make it happen. Why doesn't Canada, this is from Anthony Solomon in Montreal, why doesn't Canada follow the U.S. model where the interest paid on a mortgage is tax deductible? Well, I think there's better ways to meet the needs of low-income and middle-class Canadians. You've got to realize that a potential to implement that kind of a policy would be regressive by definition, because the higher the value of your home, the higher the total

interest you're paying, and likely, the more you are worth as a household and the more you're earning as a worker. So if we're going to use the tax system to deliver benefits for Canadians, I would prefer to target them to low and middle income households, rather than the giving more to the wealthiest Canadians. We've seen a series of boutique tax credits under the previous federal government that had a disproportionate benefit for the wealthiest households in Canada. And fundamentally, I think we should redirect

those same tax dollars in a way that supports people who have greater financial need. All right, Sherry Hertz from Toronto writes this. The government says it plans to repurpose federal office buildings for housing. Others have considered this option for extra space as more people are working remotely, but they have found it impractical as the infrastructure in these buildings is not suitable for residential needs, for example, limited plumbing systems, and the cost-benefit

ratio doesn't make sense. What makes these federal office buildings different? So keep in mind, it's not just federal office buildings, but federal lands we're going to pursue. But on the issue of office buildings, not every building is perfect for a conversion for residential purposes, but a lot of them are. And you can usually build more quickly and more cheaply through a conversion than you could with a demolition and a new build. So we are creating an inventory of the different buildings, the different lands that we have available, and we will develop a priority ranking essentially of the different lands that we think are best for housing. And when you're dealing with office buildings that are adjacent to existing apartments or condos in a downtown core, Ottawa is a good example, with a number of federal public servants that are working remotely.

We have the opportunity to collapse different departments into one building to free up space. We've been supporting office conversions. I toured one recently in Calgary through federal financing programs where we actually were able to more quickly provide supply onto the market than a new build would have allowed for. So it will depend on the individual building, but where the building makes sense, we want to leverage that opportunity. I mentioned before the strategy around federal lands, which I think deserves its own hour-long conversation. But when it comes to apartment buildings, or rather office buildings, we think those that can be converted ought to be converted.

Donna Wilson in Duncan, BC wants to know, why does government not consider eliminating or at least reducing taxes associated with home purchases? You talked a little bit about this earlier, but her example is specific. GST on things like realtor and legal fees. So there's a couple of different reasons why we've structured the tax policies the way we have. Again, there is the potential to have regressive tax policy that would disproportionately benefit higher income earners. If you just waive taxation altogether on a higher value home, you're going to be helping a person who can afford a higher value home. But if we're wanting to deploy capital in the most effective way that we can, we want to direct it towards the kinds of projects

that will most quickly release supply. So the GST waiver on purpose-built rentals is not a coincidence. We have a tremendous shortage. And when you create that additional supply of apartments to rent, you end up reducing pressure across the system. Certainly, it can help bring down rents, but it actually can reduce pressure in the housing market to buy as people transition to seniors' apartments, for example, or people decide we're going to live in an apartment for an extra year or two so we can save up for that down payment. So the other piece, though, is just the speed of construction. If this is a supply crunch, and not just an affordability measure,

we at an individual level, but a supply crunch that impacts us at a collective level, we want to put the tax policies into action in a way that will leverage the greatest amount of investment that can deliver the largest number of homes as quickly as possible. And our view is that doing that through purpose-built rentals will help reduce pressure most quickly. I understand the regressive issue on some of this stuff, but on legal fees and realty fees, you could make the first $250,000 or something GST-free. You don't have to take the whole thing. And that would deal with the issue you have on lower income.

Anyway, just a thought. Moving on. We've only got time for one more, actually. This one comes from Jim Stone in Ottawa. I think we have, he says, is the government's objective to see house prices actually decline or does it just want prices to stop increasing or does it want prices to increase at a slower rate than now? Each of these has different policy implications. It does. The actual goal that we're setting is to achieve a level of affordability at 30% of your income. In some markets, this is going to require that we put policies in place that put a downward pressure on those prices. But as I mentioned before, there's a lot of factors that will go into the price of a home outside of the scope of what the federal government can control. So fundamentally, what we need to do is to cure the supply gap. Wages will go up over time, and we hope wages

will go up more quickly than the price of real estate will go up. I think we could certainly live with prices not going up as quickly as they have. But I do think there's other measures that have the potential to bring the purchase price of homes down to some degree. Look at the mortgage fraud issue. There are people who are getting access to mortgages that they can't actually afford based on inflated statements of their income. And the step that we're putting in place to verify a person's income more quickly, more accurately, is actually going to reduce the level of a mortgage that many people who are obtaining these under false pretenses can receive. That's going to have a ripple effect within the market because the people bidding on a

new home won't be putting it up, won't be competing with people that have inflated mortgages. That's a policy that very quickly could have a significant downward price on pressure. I hesitate to predict exactly how much because we don't have as good information as I would like on how widespread these practices are. But my belief is that if we build a lot more supply, certainly we can impact the price of rentals. And if we continue to address the supply more broadly, it could have that impact on homes that people buy. But in addition to the supply, one of the things that we want to do is help with the affordability through the measures that help people save up for a down payment through tax-free vehicles and help by reducing the monthly payments through increased amortization periods. So I'll maintain

the ability to be flexible as this plays out in the real world. But to answer the question, the goal isn't to achieve a dramatic reduction in the home prices. The goal is to achieve a level of affordability where a person's wages will allow them to find a place to live at 30% of those wages. And that'll include a mix of changes in home prices and increased wages over time. Minister, I really appreciate the time you've taken today to go through so many of these questions. There are lots more left. But we had a good idea of the tasks that you're trying to deal with. And that's the basis of my final question. I mean, let's be realistic. At best, you've got a year and a few months in this current government

to make a difference. Do you think you can make a difference in that short a time period? Look, I'm reflecting on the advice passed on to someone who became a friend before he passed away very recently. That's our former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who was the Member of Parliament for Central Nova when I was born. He told me not to be concerned about the headlines I was going to get in the next month or the next year, but the solutions that I can contribute that are going to have an impact over the course of my career and life. I think we've already achieved a lot of progress in fundamentally changing the way that cities build homes in this country. I think we've achieved a lot of progress in putting us on a policy track where we're making it more cost effective for builders to build.

And I think we're making progress on changing the way that we build homes by reintroducing the ability to build homes at scale in factories in this country. Some of these solutions will have a more immediate impact. Some are going to take years to play out. But I can go to sleep at night knowing I've done my best, not based on the changes in home prices day to day, but the policy track that I hope will create a belief with young people across Canada that they one day will be able to own a home if that's what they wish. Minister, we thank you for your time. Really appreciate it.

The pleasure is mine. And next time you need more questions from Atlantic Canadians. Brent Harris is a councillor in St. John, New Brunswick. If you can answer this one in 30 seconds, we can squeeze it in. Our city's having a hard time with speculation, especially around vacant lots with approved developments and 55-plus vacant buildings with tax-delinquent landlords. You promised in the 2021 platform,

Liberal's government did, that they would deal with this issue. Have they? Look, what a timely question. We are right now. We're moving forward with changes to underused land taxes. We need to inspire people to build more quickly. We're not just using the stick, though, on the tax side. We're tying incentives around reduced tax burdens to those who build on a faster timeline. So our hope is to cure this challenge

with so-called lazy lands to inspire people to use it now or risk paying later. And we think it's going to inspire a lot of people in St. John and across Canada to get building on those properties. Great. Thanks again. Appreciate it. We'll talk again. Of course. The pleasure's mine. Take care. Sean Fraser, the Minister of Housing. We've got some final notes, but first, this.

And thanks so much for your questions today on this special episode of Your Turn, your questions for the Housing Minister, Sean Fraser. We've run the clock here. We're out of time. Thanks for listening today. I'm Peter Mansbridge. We'll be back tomorrow, Friday. Good talk, Shanteli Bear, Bruce Anderson. Lots to talk about. See you then.