Memo To The LPC: Housing Solution Cannot Be All Or Nothing

On How To Build Some Fucking Houses

“All or nothing at all/Half a love never appealed to me/If your heart never could yield to me/Then I’d rather have nothing at all”

It came out on Saturday that Mike Moffatt, a leading economist who cares about housing, will be attending the Liberal Cabinet retreat in PEI, a wonkish bit of news that should raise some hope that the government has started to take the housing crisis more seriously. Plainly, you don’t bring Moffatt to PEI to politely listen and then do nothing with his ideas and recommendations.

The concern with this government, and with its supporters as well, is that there is a tendency to make these conversations all or nothing. There is a eagerness to dismiss Federal responsibility because aspects of what has brought us here is provincial jurisdiction, and this government sometimes can get blinders on about how multifaceted issues interface.

This is a crisis, and the thing about crises is there’s no easy answer. If there were, it would be less a crisis and more an issue. What we have here is a true crisis that’s going to involve many, many steps to solve, many levels of government to work together, and a multi-agency approach if there’s going to be any progress. And the biggest worry for me is that the all or nothing mentality will sink us.

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One of the things that causes issues in any down situation is the instinct to get it all back right away. Be it getting rents back under control, a campaign facing bad polls, a gambler after a bad week, or someone wanting to lose a lot of weight, the instinct is to look at ways to solve the problem with one swing. Go all in on a long shot bet, cut a hyper negative ad that backfires, don’t eat for 36 hours, whatever it is, we all get the instinct. The problem is, that instinct also stops us from finding “half measures” to be enough.

We all want to believe there are quick fixes to our problems, and it’s why we see people become enamoured with political solutions that offer quick fixes and easy villains. There’s a reason scapegoating others has worked so well in history – it’s easier to explain that it’s the fault of some amorphous “other” (Anglos in Quebec, Blacks in America, Jews for most of human history) than to reckon with the real and substantive issues. And on housing, there’s really no easy answer.

The solutions that will actually solve the housing crisis are incredibly diverse, from zoning reform to incentives for development (and especially the right kind of development) to direct federal building to at least a conversation on lower net migration in the short term. What Toronto needs and what Ottawa does are different, let alone what will work in Surrey or Sydney, NS. And anybody who tells you there’s One Simple Fix to this is lying.

The Liberals love using the One Simple Fix trick for their politics – remember how they’d campaign in 2015 on $10B in deficit spending and a 1.5 point reduction in the second tax bracket as if that would be transformative for the middle class’ supposed stagnation? Remember when the Liberals ran the same campaign for 4 elections in a row saying “X dumb quote from a Conservative shows Stephen Harper is secretly a fascist”? – but this is a case where they can’t do it. This is going to take a much more mature approach from this government, or they’ll lose.

With the NDP as intellectually decrepit as it is, there is an opening for someone to make an argument that’s rooted in fact, that accepts that the Liberals have not done enough but also explains that there won’t be a revolution in a second, and that this is a process that will take time and the government should be judged not on outcomes but on effort. Whether the electorate is willing to hear that message is unclear, but the thing is, given the Conservatives aren’t doing what they need to on other issues (like, I don’t know, fucking climate) to keep liberal-inclined but Skippy-curious voters who want housing to go down interested, it’s their best argument.

What we need is a government making announcements constantly – new measures to support municipalities to change zoning, direct incentives for developers who build vertically, new housing projects on federal lands, the direct funding of social housing, all of it. We need all of it. We need this government to never go a week without something happening, somewhere in this country, with a cabinet minister in attendance to show they are trying.

Will it be enough to reverse rent rises before the election? Almost assuredly not, but that’s exactly the point. The Liberals cannot go chasing some One Simple Fix to try and win them the election, because like every 25/1 parlay anyone has ever put together to try and win it all back, guess what, it won’t work. The Liberals have to be willing to embrace a lot of half measures, because while many of these things are half measures in isolation, a lot of half measures in combination can get a lot done. It’s much less sexy to try and grind your way back to profit through smart, calculated bets that chip away at your deficit, but it’s the only way you’re gonna win overall.

The Liberals face the biggest crisis they have since the beginning of the pandemic, because unlike Chinese interference or WE or whatever else, the solution is governance, not politics. Can the Liberals do it? They managed to stand up a mass income support program in a week, so their capacity to do something big does exist. But it’s been 3 years since we’ve seen it, and it needs to come roaring back. Their comms operation needs to start firing on all cylinders, explaining that everything they’re doing that doesn’t seem interconnected is, and that there is a truly whole of government approach underway. But more than a good comms approach, there actually needs to be a whole of government approach.

If the Liberals want to lose the next election all they gotta do is go down the cul-de-sac of looking for the One Simple Fix that can win them the election. The allure of an all or nothing at all solution is real, but it must be avoided at all costs. We cannot let perfect be the enemy of good, we cannot let the size of the problem paralyze solutions, and we must try everything to fix this. Trust me, I love Sinatra as much as anyone, but this is not the time to listen. Half a love might not ever appeal to him, but what will save the Canadian housing market will be a lot of half loafs, and we need to ensure that we don’t lose everything in the efforts to fix this.