Liberal Housing Announcement A Home Run

On The Brilliant Housing Announcement

I owe Nate Erskine-Smith an apology.

In December, I took the news of Nate’s decision to take the Housing portfolio pretty fucking badly, thinking (not necessarily unreasonably, given the polling) that Nate was signing up for a stint on the Titanic, and that it would be a worthless job and an anchor to his political career.

And now the Liberal Party of Canada is proposing a public builder, over $25B in financing for prefabricated home builders, $10B in low interest financing for affordable home builders. They’re also working with municipalities to slash Development Charges in half for multi-unit building, working to cut needless red tape and zoning restrictions, making it easier to convert single family homes into affordable housing, and harmonize regulations that increase costs and create barriers for developers to work in multiple provinces and territories. It is an innovative plan that meets the scale of the crisis we face, and is proof of the seriousness Carney’s Liberals bring to the issue of housing.

The public builder is the newsiest bit, but I have to say, I have been banging the fucking drum on cutting Development Charges and filling the gaps with Federal dollars for months now, and to see Carney do it is remarkable. It’s a concrete step to get the cost of housing down, and it serves to help both home builders and home buyers make the math pencil out easier. Especially at a time when Canadian lumber, steel, and aluminum are at a tariff risk, spurring domestic demand for those products through more home building seems like a damn good idea.

The other part, beyond the public builder, that strikes me is the prefabricated builders financing. There’s a lot of money being thrown at innovative solutions in the prefab space, and this Policy Options article examines a lot of the benefits of prefab building. This is a big commitment to prefab as a source moving forward, that can cut costs, speed up timelines, and make it easier to achieve outcomes. The introduction of federal financing - both for prefab and traditional affordable builders - also gives certainty in an economic environment where there is little certainty elsewhere.

It’s also worth noting that prefab’s lower costs could work well for transitional and supportive housing, of the kind that we’ve completely abandoned in recent decades. If the government wants to end encampments and the kind of tent cities that have become commonplace in a way that’s better than just bulldozing them, then building more places for the homeless to go is a pretty key part of that. I assume this is not lost on the team at Housing.

The public builder is the most interesting idea, however, because it achieves both a policy objective and a political one. There’s been a lot of talk about how the left is going for the Goldman Sachs banker who is moving to the right, but that’s always been a dumb and facile understanding of what’s actually happening here. Mark Carney and the Liberals understand what happened to the housing market cannot merely be fixed through necessary market reforms, but by a return to public building. It’s a very crucial sign that a re-elected Carney government will not be bound by rigid ideology, and will listen to the best arguments.

I wrote before the Cabinet Shuffle that the Liberal left doesn’t need to be in control, we just need to be assured of having a seat at the table. The public builder kills any argument we don’t. This is a hugely significant step towards firmly putting the NDP in the single digits and keeping them there, because a solely market-oriented reform package would have seen the government attacked for being too centrist and insufficiently progressive. Now, that line is there.

That the Liberals are proposing both market and non-market solutions is hugely significant. If the housing crisis is as severe and serious as we all agree it is, then we need every tool in the toolkit to do so. We need pro-market reforms like cuts to DCs, tax incentives, and cuts to red tape and needless, duplicative regulation to spur housing, but we also need a more active Federal Government in building affordable and non-market housing.

The other part of this that’s worth enumerating is the sheer scale of the ambition here. This is a hugely ambitious agenda that has the potential to not merely stall the crisis getting worse but actually be transformative over the course of the next Parliament. It is the housing ambition dreams are made for. That this is the first truly big announcement the party is making of the campaign that isn’t a response to Trump is an even better sign that this truly will be the priority we all want it to be.

I know it can be cynical about this government’s housing record, and lord knows it was bad in the majority Parliament and the immigration decisions taken in 2022 added fuel to the fire. But this is not that government. With a new PM, a better immigration and housing policy set, and back to back Ministers of Housing who know their shit, this is a very good policy and a Liberal Party that is re-committed to best practices.

The honest truth is that this is the kind of policy agenda that I’ve been waiting for from a Liberal PM for years. Something this bold, this ambitious, this all encompassing. We have a serious plan to end the housing crisis, and Nate was right to think there was value in going into the Cabinet even when I didn’t see it.

Sorry, bud. Next time I’ll trust your instincts more.

Bonus - Paul Chiang

I’ve tried to keep the Chiang story out of the pages of this site until now for a simple reason - I did not actually believe we were sincerely stupid enough to keep him as a candidate. The Liberals seem to be treating his comments as merely some form of bad joke, making an argument that is closer to an anti-cancel culture argument. It’s a downright conservative case against dropping him, the idea that one terrible comment shouldn’t be enough to ruin a career or a reputation.

The problems with that are twofold. The first is that I don’t give a shit about Paul Chiang, I give a shit about the Liberal Party of Canada, and so any sort of unfairness to him I simply cannot give a shit. The second, far more important point is that this joke isn’t merely bad. It’s unacceptable. If this were a male MP or candidate joking about the raping of a female candidate, with no diaspora politics around it, he’d be gone. His joke was about the murder of a candidate. It’s too far. If he were merely a cop still, my response would be to roll my eyes and say it’s a bad joke but a lot of people make bad jokes. Now it’s worse than that.

He needs to go, and if not he needs to be fired. I understand the (what passes for) logic in keeping him, but you’ve now let this story step on a genuinely transformative housing announcement. This is a fuckup. By no means an election ended or even something that will likely move the polls, but it’s bad and we shouldn’t pretend it’s not.