New single family houses billed as estate cottages and townhouses are under construction in Delta, B.C., on Aug. 12.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
In a previous episode of Why Pierre Poilievre’s Simplistic Solutions to All of Canada’s Problems Won’t Work, the federal Conservative Leader said “gatekeepers” were largely the cause of the country’s housing crisis.
Get rid of the gatekeepers – those municipal and provincial bureaucrats who were putting too many obstacles in the way of construction – and voilà, problem mostly solved. Also necessary, he added, was eliminating the inflation for which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was apparently solely responsible.
And to think no one else understood just how easy it was to remedy a situation that was growing worse by the year.
If the gatekeeper gambit were to be adopted by other countries, and their dire housing predicaments were fixed as easily as Mr. Poilievre was suggesting they could be in Canada, might a Nobel Prize be in the offing for the Conservative Leader?
Alas, it appears that those hailing Mr. Poilievre for his keen eye and unique problem-solving talents may have jumped the gun.
It was revealed last month that new housing starts in Metro Vancouver had fallen 15 per cent in July, compared with the same month last year, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation figures. This occurred at the same time as housing starts increased by eight per cent in other Canadian centres with more than 10,000 residents. The Conference Board of Canada is predicting further declines in B.C. this year and next.
The issues responsible for the current situation are multi-layered. It’s not just one thing – i.e. gatekeepers. It’s a raft of problems, most of which were recently laid out in an excellent piece by Kerry Gold in The Globe and Mail.
While not a sexy thing to talk about, the costs of materials such as gypsum (or drywall) have gone through the roof. Why? A tariff implemented by the Canada Border Services Agency in 2016 – before the pandemic – created higher costs and supply-chain issues. As Ms. Gold points out, gypsum is also an industrial byproduct of burning coal. But coal-fired manufacturing plants are shuttering by the day in the U.S., and as a result, the crushed rock needed for drywall is instead being imported from places such as Spain and Turkey. Freighting that into Canada is extremely costly.
In other words, this is not a problem that can be solved by eliminating “gatekeepers” or the inflation Mr. Poilievre has blamed on Mr. Trudeau.
There is another dilemma facing the housing industry that also has little to do with the problems Mr. Poilievre has focused on. The construction industry itself is facing a major challenge: a shortage of workers. Go to most job sites in B.C., or anywhere else in the country for that matter, and you will find foremen desperate for tradespeople of all disciplines. The B.C. Construction Association estimates that by 2033, the province will have 6,600 unfilled construction jobs. People are retiring, and finding people who want to go into this line of work isn’t always easy, despite the money that can be earned.
All this is not to say that the rules imposed on residential construction by city and provincial authorities haven’t been having any impact on overall costs. Building code conditions are constantly being changed and updated to meet evolving environmental protocols necessitated by climate change. Mitigation measures are needed in cities around the world, to address the challenges a warming planet is imposing on them. It’s not optional. Low-carbon building materials are now a fact of life, but they do cost more money. The alternative is to ignore what is happening to the planet and just plow ahead as usual.
Yes, evolving municipal building policies and increasing fees are an annoyance for builders and do impact the bottom line. But this, alone, is not the reason housing costs in this country are so high. Or why so many residential projects in Toronto, for instance, are in financial distress and likely won’t get built for a while.
Many builders in the U.S. are facing the same problems as their counterparts in Canada. They’re the same problems that developers in many parts of the world are grappling with as well. Everyone is waiting for interest rates to go down, which will help somewhat.
But again, that is just one aspect of the problem. The housing crisis the world is facing is the result of multi-faceted conditions. Ones that will never be addressed with simplistic answers from campaigning politicians who ignore today’s reality.