What are federal political parties promising surrounding housing?

The three major parties have all promised to build more, but how they would go about it has some key differences. The Liberals have promised to double the pace of home building, and build 500,000 new homes a year. A large part of this would come from the promise of bringing back pre-fabricated homes.

“One of the most interesting items in that platform is they’re proposing to create a new federal housing developer that would get the federal government back in the business of building affordable housing at scale. That’s something we used to do in this country that was cut back severely under a previous Liberal government in the 1990s. They’re talking about reversing that and in particular, creating a developer that would focus on creating prefabricated homes,” Hemingway explained.

While government funded housing is a significant part of the Liberal campaign, Hemingway adds the party has also promised to enable more private housing creation by pushing provinces and municipalities to reduce development charges.

“They say they’ll work with other levels of government to replace that funding for that infrastructure, but there’s not a lot of detail on how they do that. So I think that’s a big question mark,” Hemingway said.

The Conservatives have a big focus on municipalities, as one of their key points surrounding housing is pushing municipalities to increase houses built.

“They’re saying essentially that they want cities to increase their housing supply by 15% a year. And if they don’t, federal infrastructure funds, various forms of federal funding, would be clawed back, depending on how much they they miss that target,” Hemingway said.

The Conservatives say it would make this 15% target more attractive to free up land and speed up permits by cutting red tape cutting development charges to build more homes.

Elsewhere, the NDP are focused on creating affordable homes on public property to create dedicated, rent controlled housing.

“They’ve promised to create 100,000 homes over ten years on public land that would be rent controlled and affordable. I think that’s a positive direction, but if you think about it, over ten years, that’s only 10,000 units a year, and you spread that across an entire country, it’s not at the scale that’s needed. It’s not ambitious enough, in my view,” Hemingway said.

Both the Liberal and Conservative Parties are also promising GST cuts for home buyers, although there are some key differences. The Liberals promise this cut for first time home buyers on purchases less than one million dollars, while the Conservatives promise this cut on all home purchases less than 1.3 million dollars. While the intent is to help get more buyers into the market, Hemingway warns there’s potential for unintended price increases with policy like this.

“Those types of tax cuts can actually lead to price inflation. As you know, people still have access to the same level of financial room. They may actually end up just bidding against each other and bringing larger mortgages to the table,” he said.

Regardless of which party wins, Hemingway believes significant changes to zoning laws need to be implemented for any party to have success in building more housing units.

“I think one thing missing in all of these platforms: everyone is pushing for more housing at the local level, more density, that’s positive. But it remains the case, particularly in our big cities, but almost any municipality, that on the vast majority of residential land, you can’t build apartments. Zoning blocks it, you can only build single family homes,” he said.

The election will take place on April 28.

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by Tommy Osborne

What are federal political parties promising surrounding housing?

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