OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre returned to one of his signature issues Thursday, promising to incentivize city halls to make it cheaper to build housing if he becomes prime minister.
Poilievre said in a
on Thursday morning that cash-hungry municipal governments are driving up homebuilding costs in Canada’s major cities, resulting in fewer housing starts and higher listing prices.
“City hall bureaucrats also take their cut. They’re called development charges, paid before a shovel even hits the ground,” said Poilievre.
“Let’s call these charges what they really are, homebuilding taxes.”
He noted that these municipal fees have increased steadily over the Liberals’ decade in power, notably by more than $100,000 per single-family home in Toronto.
Poilievre said that a Conservative government would pay city halls half the cost of cutting their building taxes, up to $25,000, with the goal of getting these fees down by a total of $50,000 per home.
Combined with the
on new homes up to $1.3 million, Thursday’s announcement means that home buyers could get up to $115,000 in tax relief under a Conservative government.
Poilievre added at a Thursday press conference near Toronto that his government would also require cities that receive the federal matching funds to publicly disclose their fee schedules, including a section that shows how the reimbursement is being used to lower development charges.
Poilievre has also said he’ll eliminate the Liberal Housing Accelerator Fund and other “bureaucratic” federal housing programs if he becomes prime minister.
Meanwhile, the Liberal campaign has promised to waive GST on first-time home buyers, for homes up to $1 million.
Liberal Leader Mark Carney has also promised to launch Canada’s
most ambitious homebuilding plan
since the Second World War, building 500,000 new homes each year for a decade.
Toronto-based housing advocate Eric Lombardi says that, while the Conservative proposal has its merits, it doesn’t go far enough.
“The real problem is that cities, often Canada’s worst-run governments, still have the power to levy these taxes in the first place,” said Lombardi.
“Without a federal-provincial deal to take that power away, we risk spending billions without meaningfully lowering housing costs.”
Property developer Chris Spoke, also based in Toronto, says that he likes the idea in principle but thinks it will be hard to implement in an equitable way.
“We need to cut development charges but that it’s very hard to do that right from a higher level of government, especially the feds, without introducing wacky incentives,” said Spoke.
“For example, under this proposal cities that have raised charges most stand to benefit for having done that. I’m not sure what the perfect design would be for a proposal along these lines but can see that being an issue.”
Housing starts have been slow to start 2025 after seeing a modest
year-to-year increase in 2024.
The pace of homebuilding has been
especially slow in major cities
.
Housing starts fell 68 per cent in Toronto and 48 per cent in Vancouver in February, versus the same time last year, with both multi-unit and single-detached starts down.
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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