First time home buyers will not be charged GST (5%) when buying a home, as long as the place they’re buying costs less than $1M. This means that people buying a home for the first time will save up to $50k on their purchase.
Edit: Note, GST is mostly only charged when buying newly built homes, so this won’t have any effect for people buying used homes.
This is great for single family homes. But for the medium and high-density housing that we need this is useless, all those buildings will be over $1M.
Seems like a ploy to snag some Conservative voters, which is good I guess.
They do say it’s a no GST on “homes”, which could theoretically include units in a condo. Maybe if the building costs multiple millions but your unit is under one million it would count?
It’s better than the conservative plan, but it’s not nearly enough to fix the whole thing. But, maybe it’s good for votes because it’s easy to understand.
Need to do what Japan did and offload zoning from the provincial governments to the federal.
Only way to stop the NIMBYs and corruption.
It’s not like higher tiers of government are necessarily less corrupt.
The idea I like is to tax NIMBYs. Have an auction where the “prize” is immunity from new housing for say 5 years, and the price is the property tax you pay. If you want to prevent the construction of denser housing in your neighbourhood, you need to outbid all the other neighbourhoods that also want to avoid it. Any neighbourhood that drops out of the auction pays no additional property tax.
That way right neighbourhoods of NIMBYs basically pay the rest of the city for the privilege of not having things built in their backyards.
You know, Poilievre was right.
He can’t go around taking concrete positions and advocating actual policy decisions. The governing party might agree they’re good and do it themselves. And we certainly can’t have that, can we? The point of official opposition is to oppose, not some hippy leftist nonsense like making Canada better.
On many other parts of the internet you’ll see a lot of people saying Carney copied Pierre’s policy.
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As shown below Carney’s exemption is specific to first time home buyers where Pierre’s is not. Also doesn’t have whatever that rental thing is supposed to be.
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Liberals most tangible housing policies in the past 9 years has been providing more purchasing power to “first time home buyers”. I think this would be there 4-5th thing to do so, in which case not exactly a significant departure what they’ve done in this area.
Sept 2023
https://www.conservative.ca/building-homes-not-bureaucracy/
Remove GST on the building of any new homes with rental prices below market value. This will be funded using dollars from the failed Liberal Housing Accelerator fund. Within a year and a half of this law passing, list 15 percent of the federal government’s 37,000 buildings and all appropriate federal land to be turned into homes people can afford.
Oct 2024
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-gst-new-homes-cut-1.7365339
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is pledging to eliminate the GST on new homes sold for under $1 million if his party wins the next federal election.
I don’t even care if he had copied Pollivres policy, governing is about doing what’s right for Canada before all else, including your own pride.
I want leadership who implement good ideas from all sides of aisle.
If Pollievre is more worried about pride than happy that Canadians are benefitting he has the wrong mentality.
Yeah, I really wish the Federal Conservatives would implode as a party already. They’re making our politics so toxic that they make the Ontario Conservatives/Ford look good.
What I want more than anything right now is for our politicians to work together to solve the ridiculous amount of issues at hand rather than flinging shit.
Those are some important distinctions.
Informative
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Same shit different PM.
These people don’t have the fucking cojones to do the right thing and just make foreign ownership of residential homes illegal. And make it illegal to have investment vehicles based on residential properties like ETFs. And straight up make it illegal for a publicly traded company to own residential property. And limit ownership of residential properties per person. And ban AirBnB and the like.
But nooooo. Just make it even cheaper for the already wealthy people to buy even more peppery.
Many of these things you’ve suggested have been tried in various parts of Canada, and while they feel good they haven’t been effective at lowering prices.
We need to build more homes. That’s it. That’s the thing we need to do. Build homes at a faster rate than we add potential new homeowners. Block nimby laws that prevent density and keep building until the prices go down.
Like markets? Enable the market to build em. Socialist? Have the government build em. Someone’s got to. If you want to focus on Airbnb and other feel good stuff fine I won’t stand in your way if we also just build more goddamn homes.
That’ll take time. What I mentioned can be applied now.
We need to build more homes. That’s it. That’s the thing we need to do.
We’re 3 million homes in the hole according to CMHC. Nobody is pretending we’re gonna get those built in the next five years. Along with building houses, increasing density, and reducing limitations on construction; we need to lower the cost of houses.
Like the Lemmite up thread says: tax unreasonable house gains, and disincentivize rentals.
We’re in a crisis, we can’t wait to build.
I’m 100% on board with solutions to help mitigate the short-term effects if we also start building now for the medium and longer terms.
The reason I was being prickly on this is that my home city and province (Vancouver) has been doing these feel-good things for years as a politically expedient distraction and excuse to not prioritize building.
So it scares me when people suggest these as the solution —and I’ll include Carneys announcement in with that same bucket. If folks suggest these as a stop-gap relief to the current situation and are also gonna build our way out? Alright I’m on board with that.
If folks suggest these as a stop-gap relief to the current situation and are also gonna build our way out?
Yes. I think that’s a pretty universal sentiment. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say that we should just do GST rebates - we want construction and immediate relief.
It’ll probably be a generation or so until the proportion of homes to people gets back to affordable territory. That’s not gonna help me, but hopefully it’ll help my kids.
In the meantime, we need to adjust other parts of government to get money out of housing: remove capital gains exemptions on housing, implement the anti-money laundering stuff BC has been asking for; do all the zoning crap; train people for the trades; import trades workers (with a path to citizenship); increase density; etc etc etc.
You’re correct that no one says that, but that seems to be what’s been happening. So I want the focus to be on the things that are going to deliver the actual results.
But maybe also I can get my head out of my own ass and not derail your enthusiasm for helping things in the here and now. So yeah, I’m with you. But let’s make those things a comma. I want my leaders at the federal, provincial, and municipal level to start moving the needle today, and stay focused in the months and years to come and ensure that the steps they are taking are the ones that are making meaningful improvements.
I’m with you.
Awesome! Please email your MP and ask them to address the housing crisis. I typically send something along the lines of:
- task CMHC with building the 3.5 million units necessary to return housing to affordable levels,
- restoring public housing construction to historic levels (20% of all new builds) with mixed income models to ensure sustainability and maintenance of public housing stock,
- removing income tax exemptions on the sale of primary residences,
- increasing the number of people in the trades through training and adjustments to the points system for immigration,
- increasing tax on foreign owners of Canadian property and implementing a beneficial owner registry for property,
- strengthening anti-money laundering laws and enforcement.
I’ve sent similar messages to my MP, MLA, and councillors over the past few years.
I have written my MP about this multiple times, signed a counter-petition against a movement to block a high rise in my building, and promoted the development with my neighbours. I’m also meeting my MP tomorrow and I won’t shut up about this, I promise.
And if they don’t move the needle I’m gonna vote the bastards out and support the next ones instead. I don’t care if it drops my house value — because my kids deserve to be able to afford to live.
Another part to consider is how house sizes have gone up by a fair margin over the past 50 - 70 years. If you look at old bungalows built after the war they are 1000 - 1500 sqft homes, modern builds (around me at least) are all 2500+ sqft. So part of why homes are more expensive is that we’re building more home on each lot (just speaking on fully detached homes here).
A “starter home” isn’t really a thing anymore.
It seems like we have lots of single bedroom starter condos at 500-900 sqft, but I think those are designed to appeal to investors. 😬
I think a lot of people would be open to smaller homes/condos (1200 sqft) if they were affordable and nice.
Let’s imagine a world where an unapologetic socialist NDP leader stood up and said: “the market has failed to deliver homes at a price the median Canadian family can affords. So our govt will build homes across the country, employing Canadians and using Canadian products. These will not be luxury condos for the rich, but they will be functional and good, and will be made the wood and materials we used to send to America at a discount. And we will close the gap in 5 years, and deliver public monthly status reports on what we have accomplished.”
After the election, assuming Singh steps down, can we all agree to get someone who says something like that? Pretty please? Because I already got my wish with a perfect candidate to match my way of thinking, and I want you to be waiting in the wings if our way fails yet again.
What land is the government going to build all this housing on? Crown land? That’s mostly wilderness. Who wants to live out there?
Farmland? They’d have to buy it from farmers. Appropriating land from farmers is an extremely unpopular and regressive policy.
That leaves land in the city which is generally either occupied by houses or businesses already or it’s in the process of being developed but is caught up in regulatory hurdles or in various stages of construction. It’s actually a big problem that we don’t have enough skilled tradespeople to build houses at the speed we want them built.
The regulatory issues are a problem for municipal and provincial politics. The Canadian federal government doesn’t have any power to fix that stuff. The design of our federation gives most of the power to the provinces.
Let’s stop pretending these are unsolvable problems.
You’ve identified some real obstacles – a lack of tradespeople and opposition from local groups blocking. We need the federal government to work with the provinces to push them to do what we need to do, using the carrot or stick or a combination of the two.
Here’s how I would do it. Make designs for a small number of standard plans for buildings that are designed around the principles of efficient building. Across these sets of plans, you standardize building materials so that the parts can be sourced by a variety of Canadian suppliers using Canadian-sourced materials. Then work with the provinces to ensure that the homes meeting these specifications can be built anywhere it’s safe to do so – be it a quiet suburb of Vancouver who fights against any change to the “character of their neighbourhood” or a depressed town in rural Newfoundland or anywhere in between. If the provinces have conservatives who want to rely on the private sector, let the markets build em.
If the provinces are run by leftists, have the government build em. And yes, we need to train people to build. But this is where the standardization comes in – because we aren’t just building bespoke homes, we are implementing well-understood designs and can share in each others knowledge and experience as we build them. And with the economy in turmoil due to the American-led trade war, there will be people eager to be retrained.
We have the materials, we have the people, we have the money, and we have the will. What I’ve outlined is one path – and I have absolutely zero delusion that it’s the only possible path. Maybe someone smarter than me will come up with a better one, and well hey by sheer coincidence we just got a new PM who is in fact smarter than me.
The technical problems are likely the most solvable ones, except for the skilled trades shortage. That problem is very difficult to solve because most people don’t want to do the work and the people who don’t have any other options tend to have personal / mental health problems that make them very unreliable as workers.
I have several friends who work in the skilled trades (drywall taping and finishing). It’s extremely tiring work that leads to chronic joint pain later in life. You’re also exposed to large amounts of dust so you’re wearing a lot of PPE which is quite sweaty and uncomfortable. Many of the other people they encounter in the trade have severe problems with alcoholism, drug addiction, and are very unreliable as workers.
You might suggest that these trades should pay more in order to attract higher quality workers but that means the cost of building housing goes up even more! Ultimately, the problem for skilled trades is the Baumol effect. The labour productivity of construction work has not risen to match the productivity of other industries (notably the tech industry). This problem has affected many industries in our society. It’s the hidden cost we all pay for the convenience of technology.
The political problem is even more difficult to solve. The issue there is that the middle class has grown rich on the back of their home. The rise in real estate value for people’s single family houses has been the main contributor to the wealth of the middle class. Building on this, the two main political parties in Canada (Liberals and Conservatives) target the middle class as their voting base. Thus they are both extremely reluctant to do anything that would lower the demand for housing which would cause real estate prices to fall, destroying the wealth of their voting base.
Milton Friedman has called this problem “middle class welfare.” Political parties target the middle income 51% of the population with social programs and policies that benefit them, not the bottom 51% as we might expect. The most obvious of these programs is government-supported higher education (which benefits the middle class at the expense of the working class), but that’s another discussion entirely.
I believe that the Liberal government’s pursuit of aggressive immigration policies was done deliberately to increase demand for housing (making the middle class rich) and to provide more working class taxpayers to support the education of the middle class.
The rapid expansion of immigration isn’t a mystery, it was explicitly done to combat the perceived labour shortage coming out of the covid era.
The failure to account for how that would impact our already-tight housing market be attributed to mismanagement and lack of focus, or to malice as you suggest. But the housing crisis they created didn’t aid the liberals, and is no small factor in why they have seen their support plummet until so recently.
So if what you describe was actually the plan, it was a stupid plan. Instead I believe that Trudeau had good intentions and was trying to be everything to everyone and moving from hot issue to hot issue without dedicating the appropriate follow through to how the policies were actually doing. I can’t prove this; or prove that your idea is wrong.
But I will say that our crisis and the urgency we need to move can give us an opportunity to address some of the trades issues you bring up. Is there a better way to do these things? Is there another way to accomplish the same functionality of drywall without the causing the suffering you describe? Sure this is hard when the obstacle is to do this for one bespoke home, but what if you had the opportunity to invent a new method for 10000 homes? For 100000 homes? Because we need 3 million homes, so if someone can do this better and we can standardize on that; we can justify factories to make the products we need to make that work.
I’m not say it it’s easy. I’m not even saying my idea is best. I’m saying that this is the time to try something big and bold and new, because we have every reason to try and no reason not to.
So our govt will build homes across the country, employing Canadians and using Canadian products.
That’s exactly what I want. And I also want tax changes that stop homes from being a investment vehicles. That’s part of what has run prices up, in addition to the stuff we both listed above.
“Why won’t the liberals deliberalize the economy?”
lol. Nice one.
I generally agree with you, but there’s some complexity.
Change all those things too quickly and housing plummets in value. That’s great for buyers, but bad for sellers. Some old people have most of their life savings wrapped up in their houses, and some are even using reverse mortgages to make ends meet.
At the least though, they should tax those things, and ramp up the taxes so they’re really painful. If an ultra-rich foreigner wants to own a house in Canada and is willing to pay huge taxes for that privilege, maybe that’s OK because those taxes can be spent on housing solutions for everyone else.
I don’t care if houses plummet in value. You want to invest? You gotta assume the risk, just like in the stock market. And peppery prices are way over inflated anyway.
And if we limit who can buy these properties to Canadians and PRs and limit the number of properties per person you won’t have a hoarding problem. And everyone will have better access to housing.
Just like any form of investment, diversifying is important. If someone is 100% invested in Loblaws stock, do you expect the government to defend Loblaws to protect their investment just because they’re relying on that to retire? The people made the choice to depend on a single volatile investment to retire, it means they took a chance that its value could drop.
Hell, it could happen for a bunch of other reasons, one bad neighbor fucking up their lot and your home loses value.
Yeah, Boomers getting special protections is kind of annoying.
A generation of millenials were told to go to post secondary no matter the cost and then when we did and incurred a ton of debt but the good jobs that were promised to us weren’t there, the reaction was “oops, oh well, get fucked I guess”.
Maybe if we stopped funneling a billion dollars into “managing” our CPP plan into poorer performance and used that money to increase CPP payouts instead, boomers could afford more of a hit on their housing.
I do wonder if another large contributing factor is that most of our MPs have conflicts of interest when it comes to the real estate market.
Not to burst your bubble buddy but it’s not just boomers who reaped the benefits, the X and Y generations did as well. Many millennials are over 40 with a career, a house, a family, all the typical stuff boomers are known for. I’m under 40 and already sold a condo for profit and we sold a cottage for profit which allowed us to buy a bungalow that we can afford on a single income and that will be paid in by the time we turn 50.
lol Were you just looking for a comment so you could flex about your property deals?
Personally, I’m a millennial and I’m okay – we recently sold our starter home and we got way more than we were expecting for it. But it didn’t make me feel “smart” it made me feel gross that the market seems so rigged.
I’m not talking about individuals, I’m talking about trends. The priority for housing should first and foremost be to house people.
No, I’m just saying that people might be complaining but millennials in general are way better off than those who came after them. If you look at wealth stats the average makes that plenty clear and I just gave my experience as a counter example to everyone that’s complaining. Average background, still made it out comfortably.
Older millennial here. Boomers bought their homes in their 20s.
Guess how long it took me to afford my tiny condo?
I bought mine… In my 20s. Without help and with a middle class background.
So yeah, experiences vary but things are really getting bad since the end of the Y generation, but most of the Ys will have had it pretty great in comparison.
Bought mine at 39. In 2019. And was only able to afford it because I have a partner with whom I bought it, who suddenly received a huge amount in backpay.
Sure, I get what you’re saying. But, from a practical point of view, older people vote, so the government isn’t likely to want to piss them off.
I just think this is realistically going to take decades to fix. We need to get back to thinking of housing as a boring expense, not a huge investment. That’s going to take a long time to unwind.
That’s why you begin by taking advantage of the incoming boomer drop off. They’re gonna start dropping fast. Unfortunately, that’s what most of the wealthy and powerful want to take advantage of too.
As long as our population is growing, the death of boomers isn’t going to make a difference.
I don’t know if the baby boomers dying is going to be a big sudden event. If you look at the population pyramid, many boomers are already gone. The rest are going to trickle out over several decades.
Boomers are ‘46-‘64, the oldest boomers are just now turning 80.
Right, and a lot of boomers never made it to 80. If you look at that population pyramid, the deaths really start once people hit 60, which was 2 decades ago for the first people in the baby boom generation. It looks like roughly 1/3 of the oldest boomers are already gone. The youngest boomers are 60, so about 1/3 of them will die in the next 20 years or so.
It’s not going to be a big, sudden event.
Making it easier to buy a home for a first-time homebuyer is good. But, this is also going to cause more inflation in home prices. It’s basically the government kicking in up to $50k of the price a new buyer will pay. That means that the amount a new home buyer is going to be willing to offer for a house will go up by about 5%, and anybody else trying to buy the same home will have to match that bid or lose out.
If this is a temporary thing, then it’s a very nice gift to first-time home buyers. And, being fair, it’s mostly first-time home buyers who need the help. Anybody who already has a house is already on the “property ladder” and has been able to just sit back and watch their houses appreciate in value much faster than even the superstar stocks on the stock market while they do literally nothing. But, in the long run, this just makes the problem of insane housing prices worse. I’d love it if it were matched with a big tax on the sale of houses by people who own multiple properties. But, that’s not going to be popular during an election season.
Shouldn’t it be a big tax on the sale of houses to multi-property owners? They’re the ones to discourage, not the people reducing their real estate portfolio.
Good point. I was just thinking of taxing the transaction, but you’re right that if a multi-property owner wants to slim down to just the house they live in, they shouldn’t be taxed for doing that.
I figured it was loose grammar rather than explicit intent, but my inner pedant hates relying on assumptions. 🙂
Yes, but making new homes cheaper and more in demand will increase demand for them and that’s where developers can increase supply
Your economics is all screwed up.
The whole point is that this isn’t making homes cheaper, it’s making homes more expensive, but the government is picking up part of the tab. First time home buyers will be willing to pay a higher price for a given newly built house because some of the money they’ll be spending won’t be their own. If people who aren’t first time home buyers want to compete, they’ll also have to pay more for the same house.
Isn’t high demand the whole reason that prices are so high to begin with?
The issue is elasticity of supply
Housing is relatively inelastic, it’s expensive and takes a long time to build and is sensitive to interest rates.
Improving demand for the most flexible portion of the market might result in increased supply from developers.
It’s still a step in the right direction tho, eh? Of course, it needs other policies in addition to it like:
- MANY preapproved house designs to spend less time in bureaucracy. I think Carney’s already doing that, right?
- Removing single family zoning. This comes under provincial/municipal governments from what I know. My municipality has already done this.
- The big tax thing you suggested. I would go ahead and say that there should be an outright ban on owning more than 2/3 properties by private individuals/corporations (this excluded non profit housing coops). But yeah, it’ll be wildly unpopular. See how the carbon tax turned out.
Yeah, it will help a bit. But it’s a really, really big problem. I think it’s going to take decades to fix. But, if they can at least make it so house prices stabilize and only increase at the same rate as everything else in the economy, that would be a big step in the right direction.
New homes means newly built, right? So if a model sells for 300k the company building it can’t just increase the price to 315k to compensate as it would mean losing the non-first-time home buyers who are willing to pay 300k as customers.
