Both Liberals and New Democrats were talking housing in B.C. Tuesday, with the Liberals attempting a campaign stop that rolled Canadian nationalism, housing affordability and fighting back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs all in one.
Liberals highlighted tenets of their previously announced housing plan at Intelligent City in Delta, a prefabricated home and technology company specializing in mass timber, which can be used to build higher-density housing (taller than seven stories).
“This is the most ambitious housing plan since the Second World War. We will build our way out of the housing crisis. We will build our way out of the economic crisis,” said Liberal Leader Mark Carney, surrounded by timber and a door frame at the plant.
Liberals are promising to double home construction to nearly half a million homes a year for the next decade, and are offering $25 billion in financing for businesses like Intelligent City that specialize in prefabricated homes.
“Homes made right here with Canadian ingenuity, Canadian labour, Canadian products, including softwood lumber and mass timber,” said Carney.
But Intelligent City’s president, Oliver David Krieg, said 80 per cent of the timber surrounding Carney is not Canadian, with most of it coming from Europe due to price, quality and availability.
“From tree to house, it could be all Canadian,” said Krieg.
“I think we really need to work on doing that so that we can be independent and reinforce our industry.”
Krieg believes that with government support like the Liberals are proposing, strengthening the Canadian supply chain quickly is possible.
“It’s going to become more urgent and more quick,” he says, in the face of Trump’s tariffs.
It’s no accident that a wood-related announcement happened in B.C., where fifty thousand forestry workers are about to be impacted by a doubling of duties on Canadian softwood lumber heading to the United States.
Stepping off the campaign trail, in his role as prime minister, Carney discussed the issue with B.C. Premier David Eby on Monday.
But the housing crisis has been top of mind for Canadians long before Trump took office, and it continues to be a ballot issue all parties are taking a stab at tackling.
Recent data from Statistics Canada shows nearly half of Canadians are very concerned about affordability, with one in three reporting at least one member of their household has had “significant financial difficulty” because of increased housing costs. Younger Canadians, under age 36, are the hardest hit.
“None of the parties right now have put in place a set of recommendations that kind of name the elephant in the room,” said Paul Kershaw of the organization Generation Squeeze.
“Canada’s political bargain over the last many decades for housing has said, ‘Younger people, please pay higher rents, take on larger mortgages, maybe abandon your dreams of home ownership so that we prop up these higher home values we’ve seen over the last couple of decades, because an older population is counting on those higher home values now for their financial plans.‘”
Kershaw says the Liberals are slightly ahead in the housing promise horse race, but questions the ability to meet their half a million homes per year promise.
Kershaw says over the last five years, new home building has increased to about 250,000 units.
“That’s not inconsequential. It’s a 25 per cent increase. But now going from 250 to 500,000, is like another 100 per cent increase that is not going to happen in the short term.”
While the Liberals were re-announcing their housing ideas Tuesday, New Democrats put some new ones on the table.
Speaking in Vancouver, leader Jagmeet Singh promised to permanently ban foreign homebuyers in an effort to stop climbing prices, and strengthen the rules around house flipping, by extending the tax guidelines from the current one year, to five years.
Singh says recreational properties like cottages wouldn’t be included.
Conservatives weren’t talking housing on Tuesday, but have previously made housing promises. The biggest one is to eliminate the GST on new homes under $1.3 million.
“Newly built homes only represent about one in five of the homes that people have purchased, so four in five people aren’t going to be influenced by that,” said Kershaw.
With files from CTV News producer Menna Elnaka
