Housing Minister Sean Fraser says the federal government should have never got out of the housing business even as high-income professionals are struggling to find affordable housing.
“For the better part of the last half century, federal governments of different partisan stripes, by the way, liberal and conservatives, have stepped away from forwarding affordable housing in this country,” he said. “That should never have happened, but it did.”
Talk is cheap, but it’s refreshing to see the new Housing Minister broach the issue of the feds building housing. AFAIK, landlord Ahmed Hussen never discussed this in his tenure as Housing Minister.
I guess we’ll see if there’s any meaningful action from him before the next person takes his seat.
There’s been a flurry or Canadian news articles that have basically been nothing but fluff pieces talking about an upcoming but unspoken federal housing strategy and it’s all felt like blah blah blah let’s buy time.
My hope is that that’s because they finally do see what a cluster fuck the situation is and have realized that they can either do something to fix it, or be forced to wear it in the next election, and these comments are hints that they will aggressively build out housing themselves (and hopefully the transit infrastructure necessary to support it and connect it to existing population hubs in a sustainable way given that Sean Fraser has been given the dual role of housing and infrastructure).
Can’t say I’m not skeptical though given how hard the government has ignored cost of living exploding and only addressed it with half bandaids, let alone root problem cures.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but Fraser said this while speaking in Burnaby, a city which has recently started it’s own municipal housing authority tasked with creating public housing for 50% less than the market rate. I hope that’s significant.
Are they gonna aggressively build out a supply chain to support that aggressive build out? I mean, it’d be ducks if they did but it seems really unlikely.
They could. I mean, they are the government: they can print money, raise taxes and/or straight up expropriate land and resources.
Will they? LOL…
No, really? Liberals talking up progressive policy options?
Either we’ve been time-warped back to the 1970s, or things are much, much worse than they’re letting on, or they’re going to call an election.
Regardless, call me when they commit funding–not when they “refer it to a committee” or “have a Royal Commission to study the issue”–and actually take action, or else I’ll consider this the “Electoral Reform” promise all over again.
