The Paul Wells Show - How did housing become a federal battleground?

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Housing policy has become one of the main debates among federal political parties. It wasn’t always this way, even as house prices were getting out of control. So why exactly did the housing crisis become such a prominent issue on the national stage? And can the federal government solve it? Mike Moffatt keeps a close watch on housing policy, and has advised the Trudeau Government on the issue. He is the founding director of the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute, and an assistant professor at Western University’s Ivey Business School. He shares his thoughts on the debate over housing playing out in Parliament.

How many politicians does it take to build a housing crisis? Given the tone and the nature of comments between Polyev and Trudeau, there's actually not that much disagreement between the two parties here. Today, Mike Moffitt on supply and demand in Canada's endless housing mess. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. This week, we're sticking closer to the headlines than we sometimes do. We're in something like the eighth month, maybe the ninth month,

of housing being the main issue in Canada's federal politics. Housing cost, housing affordability. And there's probably nobody in Canada who pays closer attention to housing policy than Dr. Mike Moffitt. He's the founding director of the Place Centre, which is a think tank run by the Smart Prosperity Institute that studies how Canada can build livable communities. He's a professor at Western University's Business School, and he's established himself as such an authority on housing that when the Trudeau cabinet met last summer in Charlottetown, they had Moffitt come out there and brief them on the issue. Now he gets to brief us. and brief them on the issue.

Now he gets to brief us. Mike Moffitt, thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. Let's go into the prehistory of this, which I guess is before last June. How did housing rise up out of, not quite nowhere, but how did it rise up out of sort of the muck of general angst

in Canadian politics to become the leading issue? When did that happen and why? Yeah, so I would suggest that this has been bubbling up since about 2015 or so, particularly in Ontario. Now, this had been an issue in the Greater Vancouver and Greater Toronto area for decades, but it had been largely isolated. But since about 2015 or so, we've seen Canada's population kind of growing faster than the housing stock. So when you've got demand for housing rising faster than supply, you're going to get these pressures. Then the pandemic hit, and everything turned really really weird that interest rates went down to zero people had uh really wanted to to have bigger spots since they were working and living in the same place so our real estate markets completely broke and we had sky

high prices now there was a thought that when that went away and interest rates normalized which they've done that you know housing prices would correct themselves and they largely haven't uh that we have seen some some prices going down but not nearly enough to match the change in interest rates so I would say it's a combination of these population uh patterns since 2015, coupled with the roller coaster of interest rates that we've had during the pandemic. Okay. Now, I've seen some indications that there is housing pressure in a lot of countries right now for comparable reasons. Inflation, rise in the cost of everything, and some post-pandemic pressure. Are we just worrying locally about a problem that is, in fact, very widespread, or is it particularly pressing in Canada?

It's particularly pressing in Canada, though I wouldn't say sort of all of Canada. So I would say Saskatchewan probably looks like the rest of the world when it comes to housing prices, that you've got these interest rate pressures. You've had these supply chain pressures where it's hard to get bathtubs or whatever you need. And you've seen some affordability crisis. So Saskatchewan doesn't look that much different than the United States or the UK or most of Europe. But you do have these specific problems in Ontario, in BC, starting with Alberta, which are more so than, I would say, the rest of the world. So it's this combination of these global factors,

like interest rates, supply chains, affecting housing markets. And if you had a fairly resilient housing market before the pandemic, you're probably able to weather it. If you were like Canada and went into this with an already broken housing market, then it just basically kind of took a chisel to that crack. But it's a good point to remember that we're not alone in this universe. And whenever I talk to my friends in the UK or in Australia, they're talking about these issues as well. Now governments, I think it's fair to say are wired to be not great at handling this sort of problem because the automatic first response from governments, and we've seen some of this over the life of the Trudeau government, is to make it easier for first time home buyersbuyers by giving them money, you know,

through a tax credit or a fund that they can draw down or some sort of thing. So we'll chip in some money to help you make the down payment on your first house. Let me play naive to begin with. Why would that be problematic? Everyone likes free money. Well, everybody likes free money,

but, you know can we can basically think of the housing market as a game of monopoly right that you and i and everybody else are kind of bidding on the same property if the banker in monopoly gives more money to one player than another that yeah it may change who who wins the auction but the other thing it's going to do is is end up raising the price but essentially yeah that, that's most of the levers that the federal government's been using over the past five to 10 years are these kind of demand side pieces to kind of determine who wins these auctions. So on the one hand, they might have savings plans or tax credits for first-time homebuyers. first-time homebuyers. And then on the other hand, they go, okay, we're going to block foreign buyers or we're going to make life more difficult for house flippers or things like that. But there's really sort of demand-side focus. And some of those can be good things, but they don't address the core of the problem, which is this supply mismatch between the number of people and the

number of homes. And by the time last summer rolled around, and you were actually in Charlottetown meeting the cabinet to talk about housing affordability issues and housing supply issues, they had got past that sort of first flush of trying to fix it by helping people buy houses. And they had realized that, A, that wasn't helping, and B, they needed to do more stuff.

Now, I'll ask, even though I'm not sure whether you're allowed to say, what did you tell cabinet? How did they respond? Yeah, so I can't say that, but I would agree with your general premise. And actually, I think this is one of those points. And I've heard you use this term before

in one of your books, the sort of Ceausescu moment. And I think the federal government had that. And I think we can point to an exact point of time. It's when the prime minister was in Hamilton, Ontario last summer and made a comment that basically said that housing wasn't a core federal responsibility, but they need to do things to help and this was one of those situations where a politician got themselves into trouble by saying something that was largely accurate and largely true but it just came across uh to i think most canadians are saying okay you know these guys are uh you know clearly not getting the message and i feel like that was the moment that everything changed i think that was the moment that everything changed i

think that was the moment that the polling changed i think polling was changing anyway because of a couple interest rate hikes over the summer that were making life difficult for people but you noticed after that week um that you know the tone of the government changed the acceleration of policy changes and you know to be quite frank, I don't know if I get invited to that cabinet retreat had that discourse hadn't changed. So I do think, you know, it led to this kind of chain of events that caused the federal government to be more serious about housing and led them to invite, you know, not just me, but Tim Richter from the Canadian Alliance to end homelessness and others to advise the government. Okay.

So I'm actually perfectly content to treat that meeting like a black box, but now you came out of that meeting and you're watching like a citizen with the rest of us. How would you sum up federal action since last summer on the housing front? And how would you evaluate it? How effective do you think it's been? I think it's been very effective. I think overall, you know, the policies that they've made have been helpful. The GST elimination on apartments, new apartment construction has been, I think, a wonderful initiative.

It was something that was actually in the federal platform back in 2015 that they never enacted. And I think the government did the right thing, that the temptation of a lot of governments, particularly this government, is to put sort of 37 different conditions on this and go, okay, well, we'll make this. You get the GSE tax cut if you apply for it

and you meet certain affordability criteria, et cetera, et cetera. They didn't do that here. They just said, no, across the board, we're not going to micromanage this. You build it, you get it. So I think that helps. I think there's a lot more that they could be doing. A number of us came together and put out something called the National Housing Accord, which

has a number of suggestions, and they've implemented about, I'd say, about a third of it. So there's a long way to go. And I think they're also trying to do things on the demand side, particularly, you know, some of the changes we've seen to international students, which has been a big source of demand, particularly in Southwestern Ontario, you know, whether it be, you know, Fanshawe College in my hometown or Lampton College in your hometown, you know, we're seeing a lot of single family homes getting turned into student rentals, which is, you know, really affected the housing market. So the federal government saying, okay, maybe we need to scale this back a bit. So, you know, I think it's

positive change is probably not going far enough or fast enough, but they're certainly moving in the right direction. Here's a very broad question. Do governments make housing more expensive and more difficult to build? Or is this entirely in the hands of the market and governments are scrambling, looking for some way to influence what are just broad macroeconomic directional trends? Canada can't really affect global interest rates. You know, those are sort of a big global macroeconomic trend. And yeah, we can influence it a little bit, but that's, you know, that's largely not a government thing. So there are, you know, supply, you know, a ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal is not the responsibility of the Canadian government, but that makes housing hard to build.

But yeah, absolutely. Regulations and taxes and other rules play a role. But yeah, absolutely, regulations and taxes and other rules play a role. And it's a balancing act where you want to be able to protect environmentally sensitive areas. So that's going to limit the amount of land you can build on, and that's going to increase the price of land. So it is a trade-off. And I think governments have to sort of figure out how to navigate that trade-off. And there's no sort of free lunch here. You're weighing a bunch of sort of things that are nice to have against each other.

But yeah, absolutely. I think that governments have made things more difficult than they need to be. And actually, a lot of that is more provincial and municipal governments than the federal one. But I think people are looking for federal leadership because they kind of recognize, you know, rightly or wrongly that this is a problem across the country. And, you know, most of us are not constitutional scholars. So we think, okay, well, if this is a nationwide issue, then it should be the federal government dealing with it. I want to carve out some time to talk about Pierre Poilio's proposed remedies a little later, but let's get to the claim he makes that if houses aren't getting built in this

or that city, it's because local bureaucracies are getting in the way or incompetent mayors. Do you buy that? Can a municipal administration make a big difference in the rate of housing construction? Yeah, I think they can. They're not the only thing that can slow that down. And we should also recognize that municipalities are creatures of the province. So they play under the rules that the province gives them and they play under the sort of economic conditions that the province gives them. But absolutely, they can. Though, you know, I find it somewhat ironic, you know, given the tone and the nature

of comments between Polyev and Trudeau, there's actually not that much disagreement between the two parties here. You know, it seems to be more the sort of tyranny of small differences where you look at something like the housing accelerator, the federal government says, okay, if you, you know, get rid of all these NIMBY rules, we will give you more money. Whereas Polyev basically says, okay, if you don't get rid of these NIMBY rules, we will give you more money. Whereas Polyev basically says, okay, if you don't get rid of these NIMBY rules, we will take money away from you. But it's kind of two sides of the same coin, right? That, yeah, there are some implementation differences,

but the core housing accelerator at the end of the day isn't really that much different than what Polyev is proposing. I suppose the one difference is it's a little bit more prescriptive, where, you know, the federal government's saying, okay, you know, municipalities, we want you to get rid of these specific rules. Whereas Polyev is saying, like, we don't care how you get there, just get there, and we will give you more or less money depending on your performance. Yeah. Well, let's talk about federal leverage on these decisions. I mean, so the feds have a thing called the Housing Accelerator Fund, which does sound like it's at least being used by the current

minister as a sort of a reward system for upping your game on housing construction. How does that work? Yeah, so basically what the federal government has done is this kind of agreement-type system where they negotiate these agreements with municipalities to enact certain reforms. And we've seen in Ontario, for instance, the reforms being you have to be allowed to build as of right a fourplex.

So any residential lot you could put up to four attached units. A number of other qualifications like that. But if you do that, then you get some sum of money, which is proportional to your city's population. So if you look at Ontario, they've signed deals london was the first they've signed deals with ottawa a number of other cities where on the other hand uh windsor has dug in their feet said no we don't we don't want to agree with that and the federal government has said that's fine you don't have to but you're not getting the i think it's 4545 million or whatever their share would be. There's not a lot of restrictions on how the municipal governments can spend that money.

They're kind of expected to use it to modernize systems and make housing available. But it's basically a cash for reforms type system where municipalities make a bunch of reforms to make it easier to build housing and in return, get a check from the federal government. Let's take a look at what the other team is proposing. Pierre Poiliev has introduced in the House of Commons a Build Homes Not Bureaucracies Act, if I'm remembering the name of it correctly. And that's essentially a mechanism for rewarding municipal governments that do better in any given year than they did in 2023 and penalizing those governments if they do worse than they did in 2023 in terms of housing starts. Would that represent an improvement over the liberals' way of doing things? Well, so I think there's a challenge here.

So I would say if I'm sort of saying, okay, what's good about the PolyEF plan? I think the PolyEF plan sort of recognizes that if municipalities really want to, they can find all kinds of creative ways to block housing. So for instance, let's go back to that fourplex rule. So a city could say, okay, yeah, you could build a fourplex as of right, but oh, by the way, every spot in that fourplex needs to have its own parking spot.

Well, then yes, they're legal to build, but with that kind of regulation, they basically become uneconomical. So the sort of Polyev argument is, well, look, we should be basing this on outcomes not being that prescriptive because a city can agree to all kinds of things and still find all kinds of creative ways to block housing. read all kinds of things and still find all kinds of creative ways to block housing. I think the challenge with PolyEF's done is the sort of arbitrariness of the targets, of the sort of 15%. And you'll note that it only actually covers a handful of cities, cities that PolyEF has designated as expensive and ones that are a certain population size. as expensive and ones that are a certain population size. So you'll note that actually most of the 905 would be exempted from this plan.

So London and some bigger cities, Halifax and so on would be part of it. But a city like Burlington, I don't believe is in there. Like any city of under, I think, 200 or 250,000. So I like at a high level what he's trying to do. And it's really not that much different than what the Ford government is doing in Ontario. So I like what he's doing in theory. In practice, I think some of the details need to be worked out. But I suppose he's got time to do that.

So I imagine what he would do as PM might look a little bit different than this private member's bill. You'd kind of hope so, because I'm fascinated by the choice of a base here to measure everything against, because I've looked at trends in housing starts in large Canadian cities, and they're all over the map. They go rocketing up in one year, and then a couple of years later, they grind nearly to a halt. rocketing up in one year and then a couple years later they grind nearly to a halt and I suspect that construction companies engage in fewer starts in years when they're actually working on

completing the project from a couple years ago so it it swings back and forth and a policy based on penalizing them for being higher than the base year and lower than the base year would amount to penalizing cities half the time and then paying the rewards the other half of the time and it comes out as a kind of a wash yeah no i i think that's fair and i think you know depending on the base year you use that if that was a particularly good or bad base year for the city that you know for some cities it will be trivial for them to hit it other years you know if you're basing it on 2023, let's say, and that was a really good housing start year for that city, then they're never

going to be able to realistically hit that again. So I think a more nuanced approach, it feels weird to say, but a more nuanced approach like the one that Doug Ford would take, where they look at population trends and things like that, it would take, where they look at, you know, population trends and things like that, it would actually serve them well. So yeah, I wouldn't say that the Ford targets are perfect, but they're a lot more nuanced. I think they're a lot more defendable than this, you know, it feels like a little, it feels like a blackboard exercise I might give to my students. But you know, I think there's a lot of real world drawbacks. But again, at a high level, 30,000 foot level, I like what they're trying to do. I think they just need to

spend a little bit more time working out the details. Okay. Let's stay up there at that high level for a while. Are we just, as a society, finally catching up to the reality of some shaky assumptions that had guided urban development in Canada for a generation, including the idea that space was infinite, that cities could sprawl or people could move out of cities if they didn't like it, and that cities didn't have to build up much density in their inner cores because people could live somewhere else if they didn't like the way their cities were built. And that our cities could reasonably stand

to build a lot of residential capacity up by now. Yeah, I think so. And if I look back on Ontario over the last 20 years, that 20 years ago we were building we were sprawling quite a bit we were building all kinds of uh single detached homes on on the edge of town and full disclosure i bought one in 2004 so it was i was part of that and governments started to get concerned about that and this is you know here in ontario this was the beginning of the magenta years where there was you know the whole debate about the Greenbelt and urban growth boundaries. And I think there was an implicit assumption that the McGinty folks had

that if they started to cap sprawl, cap this land use, they said, okay, well, if people can't build out, they'll have no choice but to build up. But essentially what happened was instead that it's like, okay, if I can't build in Kitchener-Waterloo anymore, and we're just not allowing land, that didn't cause Kitchener-Waterloo to necessarily densify. It just got all of those young families kind of pushed them out and they ended up moving to Woodstock and Tilsonburg and places that could densify. So you ended up substituting suburban sprawl for what I would call ex-urban sprawl, right?

So all the Sarnia folks were moving to Bright's Grove, all the London folks were moving to Lucan and so on. So we actually kind of made this sprawl problem worse with, again, this flawed assumption that density would just occur naturally. And I think that's what we're starting to sort of recognize in Canada, that no, if we want that density to happen, we need to put the conditions in for it. We can't get there just by saying no to stuff. We have to actively create the conditions to say yes.

create the conditions to say yes. But it's pretty clear that the notion of building up in downtown cores is politically unpalatable for a lot of administrations. And as a matter of fact, it's what led directly to the Doug Ford's near death experience with the Greenbelt scandal that he managed to nip in the bud. His own government was so terrified of building up capacity in Toronto that they started looking at too clever by half ways to increase development in the protected greenbelt areas. Clearly, you've got a really strong incentive to not build up in your downtown core if you're going to look at other solutions like the greenbelt. Yeah, no, I think so. I think there were concerns there. And I think we're going to have to do some of both, not necessarily

into the Greenbelt. But some of the other contentious things that the Ford government did was around urban growth boundaries in Ottawa and Hamilton and so on. But yeah, absolutely that these things can be contentious. I think there are ways around it. The British Columbia's government has put in a lot of pro-density near transit line rules and things like that. And I think there are arguments you can make to suburban voters to allow these things to happen. That yes, suburban voters are worried around issues around traffic and so on. But if you can point out like, hey, if we can put an extra five stories on that apartment, that's going to generate an extra $4 million a year of property tax. And that's tax you don't have to pay. So I think there are arguments out there. But overall, it is a challenge.

It is a challenge. And again, I think it's one of the things that governments are recognizing that density just doesn't happen. And you don't create density just by blocking sprawl. You have to take a more active approach. Okay. Is this problem going to be with us essentially indefinitely? You look at the rate at which policy is managing to increase housing starts. It's still a drop in the bucket compared to the current need. It is, yeah. And I don't think this problem is going to get solved anytime soon. And I would argue, again, that this is a, in Southern Ontario, this is a problem that's been 20 years in the making. So, you know, we didn't get here overnight. We're not going to solve it overnight. And I think we do need both supply and demand approaches.

And, you know, I do think we need to look at, again, things like the international student enrollment and some of the population growth side and have a larger plan when it comes to both building out and building up. We've been very ad hoc of just a variety of approaches without any real plan. It doesn't have to be that way. If we look back in the 70s, Bill Davis's government had real plans on how we were going to grow as a province and where everyone was going to live and that kind of thing. And I don't think we'd want to replicate that because exactly because that was some of the things that, again, led to a lot of the sprawl in the Peel region. But I do think there is a 2024 version of that where we can say, OK, you know, what do we think the next 25 years looks like in Ontario or in BC? And how do we create the conditions for that where we're opening up enough land to create affordability, but we're not paving over all of our great farmland or building on environmentally sensitive areas? I do think there is a way to do it, but it requires

collaboration and it requires a level of patience and long-term planning from governments that we really haven't seen in a very long time. Right now, we have a crisis and everybody's running around like their hair's on fire, which is completely understandable, but there's not a lot of long-term planning going on right now. But in the meantime, and Paul, youff is absolutely right on this, the concrete impact on people trying to plan their working lives and plan the homes for their families is sometimes

pretty dramatic. I mean, if costs are multiples of what they were a fairly short time ago and there's no relief in sight, it makes it very hard for people to aspire to the kind of lifestyle that you and I grew up with. Yeah, he's not wrong. And I think it's one of the reasons why you look at the polling that Polyev is doing well with young people in a way that, say, Singh isn't, that he's speaking to aspirations. I find it surprising that the NDP really seemed to be focused on the sort of social housing side, which is important. But I think most young people are going, well, I'm never going to be able to qualify for that anyway.

By the time they get to me, there's going to be a million people behind me. So I'm never going to get that. So he's speaking to aspirations in a way that I think the other parties aren't. Now, again, there's not a lot of there there right now. But I think if I look at all the sort of federal opposition politicians who are speaking to what young people are looking for, I think by far he's head and shoulders above everyone else. Okay. Part of your work at the Smart Prosperity Institute is, uh, you have this podcast called The Missing Middle, which is about all of the long-term trends that are squeezing out the middle class, uh, in this country. Do you have a sort of top level explanation for how we came to be in a situation where

a government that is preoccupied with the middle class, a discourse across parties that never stops talking about the middle class, ends up adopting sort of a myriad of policies that end up hurting or limiting the options of the middle class. I mean, it seems kind of paradoxical. Yeah, I think it is paradoxical. And I think the federal government kind of limited its options a little bit of like, okay, we'll help the middle class through childcare policies or HST benefits and that kind of thing. And it was really hands off in a lot of areas that are traditionally seen as provincial or municipal in nature to its discredit.

So I think that has a lot to do with it. I think overall there was a sort of lack of an overall understanding of the issues facing the middle class. It was very micro targeted in saying, okay, well, child care is expensive. So we'll do this child care thing or diabetes medication is expensive. So we'll do this plan with the NDP. I think there was less foresight around these other issues, particularly around housing and real understanding what they can do with it.

Again, before the prime minister made those comments in Hamilton, I think they really did believe that they didn't have much of a role in housing beyond chasing away speculators, maybe regulating Airbnb and giving first-time homebuyers a savings plan. I think, you know, other than that, and obviously on the social housing side, you know, I think they really just missed what was going on. And again, to their detriment, they were really overly focused on, you know, whose responsibility was what under the Constitution, not recognizing that, you know, young people want a place to live. They don't want a lesson on the charter of rights. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of extraordinary though, because when federal governments want to get in on a, on a juicy file like healthcare or education or school lunches or whatever, it's not the constitution of 1867 that's going to stop them,

right? Like I've, I've, I've probably heard five successive federal governments say nobody cares about jurisdictions when it comes to health care. Well, now that's shifted and now it's housing that people don't care about jurisdictions on. But the prime minister needed to really get a smack about the head and shoulders for denying that reality before he decided to act on it. It's a surprising blind spot. Yeah, I have trouble explaining it. I really do. That you would think how much this is affecting young people in particular and how every minister's office is made up of a bunch of 23-year-olds who would someday like to own a home, it was a surprising omission. Perhaps everything that was going on with the pandemic and just constantly dealing with the day-to-day crises in the last few years. And then going back to the election of the Trump administration, that these kind of big but slow-moving issues

seem to be ignored in a way that putting out these fires, again, was a sort of day-to-day concern until the housing situation just got so out of control that it did become a pressing immediate issue in a way that if we had dealt with it five or six years ago, we might not be in the crisis that we are today. Okay. I want to wrap this up pretty soon, but you did say something interesting a few minutes ago where you said, it seems like governments used to be able to have a big sector-wide plan and they're not able to anymore. And that's something that I'm more and more preoccupied with myself. How is it that governments, certainly including the federal government currently in place in Ottawa, but governments in general, seem to be getting worse over time at publicly stating goals, publicly admitting difficulties,

asking the various actors in society how they would go about solving it, having these conversations in public, these all seem like things that were commonplace not too long ago that are now just impossible to contemplate. First of all, do you feel it too? And secondly, do you have any sense of why that's happening? Yeah. So I think that is happening. So I would agree with the general idea. I would agree with the general idea. Why it's happening, I'm not too sure. I feel like everybody kind of blames social medias and phones for our sort of societal lack of attention. So I kind of feel the need to do that here.

I'm not sure if that's the case or not. But as somebody who suffers from attention deficit disorder, it does feel like our entire society has developed it somewhat. But yeah, it does. I don't like, like, for instance, one of the things that we recommended in the National Housing Accord was, you know, the federal government should, you know, convene the first ministers and come up with, you know, some basic plan on this saying, okay, this is what we see as a future housing for the next five to ten years and you know not overly prescriptive but just you know have some kind of vision um in some kind of direction and they still haven't done that for for whatever reason we've got all of these little

micro targeted things but no real plan no real putting people together i find it incredibly frustrating i wish i knew uh what was causing it, but I absolutely agree. It is a real phenomenon. Yeah. So I blame modern, I think I might be starting to bore my readers with this. I blame modern communication strategy, which is only ever about trumpeting your success and repeating that you're making steady progress against worthy goals and not even acknowledging criticism and not even. So the effect of that is that nobody really is interested in having a conversation with anyone because no one wants to hear what someone else has to say if it contradicts this story of triumph that everyone's starting to peddle. So what would a

federal housing conference look like? It would be eight or 10 provincial governments coming to say that they're doing everything right. It would be the fed saying they're doing everything right. It would be stakeholders coming in to deliver the message that they came to deliver and not even really paying much attention to what someone else was saying. Like it's, it's like we've all had our ears, uh, plugged as a society in the last, in the decade or so, and it's starting to get a little maddening. Yeah, I would agree. And this is one of those things where I often say, be careful what you wish for. So somebody who's saying, okay, let's convene. The first minister's come up with a national plan.

I do wonder, had that happened, might I be horribly disappointed by the outcome? Because you're right yeah you get you know a variety of different groups you know saying their piece governments talking about all the great things they're doing and you know at the end going but we know we need to do more that kind of standard line so yeah it is it is frustrating and i agree there does seem to be this idea that you know governments need to be constantly winning the day on Twitter or whatever social media is without this really kind of long-term planning. And it's maddening because, again, we can use it. We've done it before. Federal governments used to do this on housing.

We did this after World War II. CMHC was heavily involved. We did this after World War II. CMHC was heavily involved. As I mentioned earlier, the Davis government did this back in the 70s, which led to a lot of the building in the Peel region and so on. So we've done it before. I think we could do it again. But I don't know.

We seem to have lost that muscle memory. Well, on that cheery note, I think we've laid waste to yet another policy area in this discussion, but I really appreciate the long-term perspective that you bring and the command of detail that you bring to these kinds of discussions. And I'm sure we've got enough to discuss in future sessions that we'll probably have you back to talk about more of this. Mike Moffitt, thanks so much for joining me. Oh, much for joining me. Oh, thanks for having me.

I look forward to being back. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright, and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter.

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