Justin Trudeau now says housing is not a 'federal responsibility'

Aug 14, 2023

Tristin Hopper: Trudeau made the comments while standing behind a lectern affixed with a sign reading 'building more homes faster'

After coming to office on promises of “affordable housing,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week it’s not a “federal responsibility.”

“I’ll be blunt … housing is not a primary federal responsibility, it’s not something that we have direct carriage of,” Trudeau said at a Monday press conference announcing the opening of several federally subsidized housing complexes in Hamilton, Ont.

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Standing behind a lectern affixed with a sign reading “building more homes faster,” Trudeau added that housing is “something we can and must help with.”

The comments stand in contrast to more than 10 years of Liberal Party messaging, in which Trudeau has often promised decisive action on bringing home ownership within reach for average Canadians.

The Liberals’ 2015 campaign platform promised “affordable housing for Canadians.” “We have a plan to make housing more affordable for those who need it most – seniors, persons with disabilities, lower-income families, and Canadians working hard to join the middle class,” Trudeau said at the time.

Housing affordability was actually one of the first issues championed by Trudeau when he first entered the House of Commons as a Liberal backbencher in 2008.

“In my travels throughout my riding of Papineau, I heard time and time again how access to affordable housing is a major challenge for Canadian families … high housing costs mean young people and new Canadians cannot buy homes, which leads to increased pressure on existing affordable housing,” said Trudeau in his second-ever parliamentary comments, delivered on Nov. 21, 2008.

But Trudeau’s premiership has largely coincided with an unprecedented spike in Canadian housing prices.

The Liberals’ 2015 campaign platform promised 'affordable housing for Canadians'

In 2015, the average Canadian home price stood at $413,000. Now, according to the latest estimates from the Canadian Real Estate Association, average home prices have risen to $702,409 — an increase of about 70 per cent.

Shelter costs have been even worse for renters. In 2015, the median rent across Canada’s 35 largest urban centres stood at $966 per month. As of the latest figures from Rentals.ca, that figure has almost doubled to a median rent of $1,811 per month for a one-bedroom.

Reporters at the Hamilton event noted that Trudeau was cutting the ribbon on an affordable housing complex at which average rents would be $1,400 a month, and where the cutoff for household income stood at $90,000. “Is this what is being considered affordable in Hamilton at this point?” asked a reporter.

It’s true that the Canadian federal government does not have direct control over the usual levers that drive Canadian housing construction. Zoning and permitting are generally decided at the municipal level, but they can be overridden by provincial mandate. Last October, for instance, the Ontario government proposed the More Homes Built Faster Act, which would kneecap the ability of cities to deny building permits.

Subsidized and affordable housing, similarly, are usually greenlit by cities or provincial legislatures – although they can be driven by federal monies, as with the Hamilton projects that Trudeau was visiting Monday.

But the federal government has not always shied away from asserting its power over policy areas that are technically supposed to be left to the provinces.

This most noticeably describes the current state of Canadian health care. Although it’s up to provinces to administer their own health-care services, the Canada Health Act uses conditional funding to tightly control what these health-care services look like.

As recently as March, the federal government was threatening to deny health funding to provinces that allowed the establishment of for-profit virtual care.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has campaigned hard on the promise of increasing Canadian housing supply and driving down real estate prices. His plan, unveiled in March, leans heavily on the threat of denying federal funding to municipal and provincial governments who don’t meet defined federal targets on home construction.

As one plank reads, it would “require unaffordable big cities like Vancouver to increase homebuilding by 15 per cent annually or face big financial penalties and have portions of their federal funding withheld.”

The Trudeau government also retains unilateral control over one of the most conspicuous policies driving up demand for Canadian real estate: immigration. The Trudeau government has dramatically increased Canada’s immigration quotas, leading to an unprecedented one million new residents entering the country last year.

The result is a rate of national population growth that is dramatically outstripping home construction. Although home building was up for 2022, the year closed with a raw number of housing “starts” standing at only 240,590.

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