CPAC - Friday, May 24, 2024 - 10:00 a.m. (ET) - Segment #15

[Voice oce over] No matter where they take place, world events can affect us. Cpac takes you insidethe parliaments of various countries to learn about the international issues that shape our world. Watch "World Showcase,"a look inside parliamentary democracies around the world. See it on cpac. [ ] the nex next Outburst, should ai be included as an educational tool in schools? Under some circumstances, yes. You're going to have to be able to disclose how much of your thesis was produced by ai. [Glen] Outburst. See it on cpac. usic pla playing] [Music playing] [ ] >> I guess you realize I'm missing somebody sitting next to me. He is here. He's just voting right now because their allowed to vote. He'll be joining news a second unless he -- come on, minister. Did you volt yet? Do you want me to vote for you-duh vote for it? >> -- do you vote. >> I know your whip wouldn't be happy for your vote if I was voting for you. >> That's right. >> So welcome. And you're in a bit of a whirlwind tour lately. Do you know what city you're in right now? Do you feel like a rock star being all over the place with all these announcements. >> As long as I wake up with clean laundry to wear I'll do fine, but I think I'm in toronto. >> You are definitely in toronto. I know yesterday you spoke at the canadian club in ottawa. >> M'hm. >> And carol from the federation of canadian municipalities, a good friend of mine, modrated it. And I'm wondering, maybe I can give us a high-level synopsis of what you said. I know you can fill 20 minutes on that because I've seen you in action. We'll keep it to a bit of a short one to give an overview of the announcements you've been making over the last five days. >> Sure. So, like, the message yesterday to the canadian club was -- we have to acknowledge that we're in a housing crisis right now. It's having a serious impact on people at an individual and household level that we can't ignore, but it's also throttling or economic economic potential. The good news I've taken from the meetings we've had and the policies we've been rolling out recently is we can solve the housing crisis. I'm filled with a sense of optimism most dyes because I'm dealing with the people implementing -- most days -- the solutions. We need to do a few key things. With sun to build more homes by reducing the cost of home building, making it easier to build homes and changing the way that industry can actually build homes. We also need to make it easier, particularly for young people, to find a place they can afford to rent or buy, and we can't forget that we need to serve the needs of people who can't afford a place to live to ensure that everybody in this country has a roof over their head at night. If we can accomplish those three major things, we can actually solve the housing crisis and we're going to experience a collective benefit as a result. >> Very true. You set out the issue and the problem well. Cibc had a poll out yesterday, and I shared with you the results. 76% of canadians who don't own a property say that entry to the housing market feels out of reach. 76% is pretty high. You must want to do this very quickly. >> Yeah, I do. And, you know, this isn't an academic conversation for me. It's a very real thing that's impacting my friends and my family. For at least a few months longer, I'm still in my 30s, everybody I chat with who is my age and younger is rarely talking about the dream home they'll live in one day. They're more focused on whether they can actually keep the place they're renting now. We can change that. There is a deficit of hope amongst young people when it comes to the housing market today. But it doesn't have to be something that we accept. Now, there's going to be a number of people who are quite happy with the opportunity to rent a place in a livable community near the services and opportunities that they want for themselves. There will be others who want to own a home of their own where they can raise their family. And I think it's incumbent upon us to lay out a policy framework and inspire others to join us to make it a reality that people can choose their own kind of housing situation at a price that they can actually afford. So it's not lost on me that the

people feel the way that they do today, but my sense is, and I think it's my job, to put us on a policy track that convinces people that they can achieve homeownership should that be something that they want. >> Practically speaking, one of the items that you've announced as get prague funding is a recommendation made by many task forces out there. That has to do with manufactured housing -- getting -- flash back to five years ago, people would think, I don't want to live if a trailer. But tell us how that has changed because there's a very big difference of opinion now. >> Well, one of the things that people -- I hope we can communicate effectively to people is that the homes that are being manufactured today don't look like the homes that that were being manufactured a number of years ago. There are apartment buildings that are being manufactured in a factory setting. There are large stand-alone single-family homes that are quite nice that are being manufactured in factories today. I met recently with folks involved with the home manufacturing sector in sweden where almost 80% of the market is for manufactured homes and they're known domestically for producing a higher quality that's more reliable along different styles. So I hope with the introduction of a national home design catalogue we're going to be able to not just talk about what homes of the future that are manufactured in factories look like. We can actually show them to people. I've been through a number of these that exist today that are providing homes for families that are spacious. Near services and communities that are walkable to schools. That are already hooked up to infrastructure. These are very real things that exist. And it doesn't mean that you have to settle for something less than. It just means that there's going to be a different process of creating the homes that people actually wouldn't. >> Yeah, full disclosure here, both the minister and I are from nova scotia. We both went to st. Francis xavier university. I'll make an inside joke that you won't get, but it won't be wyndham park mobile home park. >> Where I lived, by the way. >> There you go. But reality -- we grew up in an area where kent home was everybody's starter home. >> Yeah. One of the thing you have to realize is these kind of homes existed for different people over different parts of our history. Kent homes was -- and remains a successful home manufacturer. After the war everyone in different parts of the country has likely seen strawberry box homes or victory homes as they were called. There's different styles that you can achieve that are designed for different family sizes. When I look actually at some of the -- hop on a website for some of the home manufacturers today and look at the designs that they're already producing in factories. It would surprise you because they look in some instances identifies well do a traditional stick-built home and you can achieve different levels of design. We need to now make sure that we're achieving a level of standardization for different kinds of designs that will achieve economies of scale, allow us to produce homes in a cost-effective and labour-efficient way so we can do it more quickly. But this is going to be a big part of the path forward. We're not saying there's not going to be traditionally built homes. We're saying we'll be able to scale up the opportunities for different kinds of homes to be manufactured in the factory setting. >> Is this going to be the sean fraser christmas wish book? Is that the equivalent of it? >> Look, it's not going to be about any one person. There's people who talked about this, who have advocated long before I have. This is going to be something that is going to change the opportunity for home builders to build homes for canadians in every part of the country. But I'm really looking forward to. >> I'm going to link that specifically to productivity because you mentioned in there about being more labour emission enters. Tell me how you are planning for better productivity with the announcements that you're making. >> So this is an enormous challenge right now that I see. In fact, it's the one that serve as the most challenging bottleneck to overcome in order to actually solve the national housing crisis. And I'm not interested at playing around the margins. This is a problem I actually think we can solve collectively. If we have the perfect set of pressures in place to reduce the cost of home building, if we have perfect municipal zoning rules in canada in every city across the country, we're going to run into a ceiling based on how many homes the canadian economy can actually produce. We're producing near record levels -- not quite at record levels, but not far off today. We need to grow the canadian home building workforce and we need to adopt new strategies to allow the workforce we have to produce more effectively. We're going to be making serious investments to train the canadian work force to have the skills necessary to build more homes. We're going to continue to use targeted immigration programmes that will help attract people with the skills that we need, that we have a deficit of in canada right now, and we're going to I believe sent vise home -- incentivize home buildings and factories so we can produce more homes with the labour we have today. The enormous opportunity that I see, it's going to create good-paying jobs for canadians. Construction is one of the industries that has the lowest cost barriers for people to get into the industry compared to

the wages that workers actually earn. This is an opportunity to increase productivity, create good-paying middle-class jobs and solve a very big social problem at the same time. >> You said immigration. I'll ask you the question build immigration -- about immigration. How do you do this, how do you create more skilled workers at the same time as throttling back on immigration? >> To understand the solution I think it's important to draw a distinction between our permanent residency programmes and our temporary residency programmes. We set every year as a federal government through the immigration levels plan the total number of people who want to come and live in canada permanently and work in canada for the rest of their careers. That number in my view is in a pretty healthy spot. We are moving towards 500,000 over the next couple of years, and within that number it's common for about ballpark 40% of the people who become permanent residents, but they're already living here. They don't need a new home because they've been here for a number of years. There's an additional cohort of that group who is coming to be reunited with family members who already have a place to live. Within the programme of people who are coming from another country to be here, we also take great care to incentivize people to move to parts of the country that may have greater capacity, including the atlantic immigration pilot, cluck the rural and northern immigration programme, both of which are being made purple indefinite -- including -- they are coming to work in our health-care system, build homes, work in the tech sector, agriculture, transportation. The workers we need. When you look at the number of people hornet new, we're actually building enough homes today -- people hornet new -- to -- who are net new -- to accommodate those people where. We neat to make changes is on the temporary side of the equation. This is not historically an area where the federal government sets an overall target or level for people to come in. It's been driven by demand set by employers who use the temporary foreign workers programme or institutions who bring international students to canada. What we saw coming out of the pandemic when the borders were closed were multiple cohorts of people were arriving at the same time when the borders opened up. In addition, particularly with the student programme, we saw an explosion of application for study permits from colleges and universities who were struggling with their bottom line, but didn't take any of the responsibility to build homes for the people who were coming to the communities where the campus was located. This demanded a change in approach. And murrester miller put forward new measures setting a cap on the total inform of people to better align with the capacity of municipalities to absorb that intake. Going forward we are going to be managing not just the overall number on the permanent side of things, but setting a level tied to the absorb tiff capacitive of communes on the temporary programmes. This is the right approach until things settle -- communities. But we'll pursue a trusted model with post-secondary institutions and I a lou universities and colleges to bring more people in -- universities and colleges -- if they provide the supports they need for them to succeed in their community, including housing. >> Minister, you said a couple paragraphs ago we're building. But the federal government doesn't build. You're not a builder. The builders are the people who are going to have the contracts and build. And I know you're doing a lot of stuff to incentivize it, but you have the province go through and the territories and the first nations. So just full disclosure, prior to this -- because I didn't know the state of play of the relationship between my friend paul calandra and my friend sean fraser, so I actually googled calandra-fraser so I could get the latest exchange of letters, sternly-worded letters between the two ministers and here's an interesting fact if you do google it yourself. There's actually a person whose name is calandra-fraser, and, wait for it, wait for it, they're a bricklayer. [ Laughter ] so this was meant to be, you and paul having -- but I do want to ask a serious question about this. Look, in order for us to get anything done we know we have to work together. So if the provinces doesn't want to tell the municipalities how to run their zoning and their by-laws why do you think the federal government should tell the provinces to hammer down on the municipalities? >> So first I think we should probably send information about our immigration programmes to calandra-fraser to help out with some of these challenges. So I like paul. >> Yeah, no. >> We get along well and personally. We're sorting through a couple challenging issues right now, but despite the fact that we may have some challenging issues, particularly when it comes to affordable housing, there's good alignment when it comes to working together to establish a catalogue of designs that will work. I sense there's good alignment on some of the tax policies that we want to put in place that will reduce the cost of home building. You're never -- with anyone in your life you'll never agree on every single thick. I do think that -- thing -- without exception all of my counterparts do want to build more homes to meet the needs that exist in their communities. Sometimes there are disagreements on how we get. There I think if I'm going to come into these conversations with credibility I have to make sure our hone house is in order first.

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