By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on August 28, 2023.

OTTAWA—Canada’s housing dilemma is not just a national crisis. It is a stark example of what happens when the federal government vacates an area of responsibility in the name of good government.

For decades, provincial governments have lobbied to receive more responsibility and funding for housing, claiming their proximity to residents gives them a better understanding of the challenges. Starting back in the 1980s, the national government signed agreements turning over housing responsibility to provincial governments.

It wasn’t until 2017 that the federal government joined together with most provincial governments in launching a National Housing Strategy (NHS). It included a 10-year, $40-billion plan to house 530,000 families and reduce chronic homelessness by 50 per cent.

Not surprisingly, the province of Quebec has refused to participate in the national strategy, claiming it “intends to fully exercise its own responsibilities and control over the planning, organization and management of housing on its territory.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was criticized when he claimed recently that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility. It’s not something that we have direct carriage of. But it is something that we can and must help with.”

As usual, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has a simple solution. He promises to withhold transfer payments to local governments who do not fast-track housing.

The latest scapegoat for the hike in housing costs is immigration.

But an in-depth review of the demise of housing availability in Canada should start with a document released by Bill McKnight in his authority as minister responsible for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) back in 1986, entitled, “A National Direction For Housing Solutions.”

At that time the CMHC was also known as “Canada’s housing agency,” but this report was the first step in dismantling a national housing policy in favour of multiple provincial policies.

Back in 1984, the federal government spent $1.4-billion annually on housing. But the McKnight document relegated the federal role in housing to solely one of funder, with provincial governments responsible for building housing and developing sound policy.

The only areas that remained in federal hands, largely because of active lobbying, included co-operative housing developments, urban Indigenous housing, and some housing rehabilitation programs. The rest was transferred to provinces, and it took more than 30 years for the federal government to re-insert itself into the conversation in 2017.

Thirty years of stagnation in social housing construction has certainly come with huge consequences. Now, when a national push for housing comes, the focus is on reducing the number of people who need houses, not decreasing the size of our housing footprint.

The relative house size in Canada is more than double that of the United Kingdom. In the UK, people inhabit an average 818-square-foot home, compared with 1,948 square feet in Canada. China’s average urban house size is 646 square feet.

At the same time, fewer people are living in increasingly bigger homes. So, when we are looking at housing policy, we have to consider that size matters. Simply cutting back on immigration is not the solution to this problem.

If we really want to tackle the housing problem, we need to look at a national housing strategy that does not encourage people to live in overhoused, underutilized structures.

Most older Canadians remember the time when a 500-square-foot house provided habitation for eight to 10 members of a family. Now we have mega homes that often house only two or three people.

The current focus is on building new homes, but renovations should also be included in the discussion. Urban planners are trying to figure out what to do with vacant office buildings and shopping destinations. Landfill sites across the country are also filled with building materials from houses that have been torn down because their inferior building quality was designed for obsolescence after 30 years.

These questions are complex. A single government is not going to fix them. But removing the federal government from responsibility for housing policy in 1986 was a huge mistake that we are paying for today.

It has taken us 30 years to move forward with a fix. Trudeau actually had the courage to reinsert an active role for the federal government in tackling the housing crisis.

That decision happened in 2017. The feds have been back working on housing for the past five years.

A problem that took 30 years to develop will take another 10 to fix.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

First published in The Hill Times on Monday, March 27, 2017.

OTTAWA—Everything old is new again. Two major new investments in last week’s federal budget involve housing and training.

The re-establishment of a federal role for housing makes sense and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. is the right vehicle to affirm national leadership.

The same holds true for training investment. In a highly mobile world, the need for national training investment and strategy should be self-evident. But Canada has lost two decades of valuable time because of wrongheaded former federal decisions to get out of housing and training.

Does anyone remember the constitutional wrangles that almost led to the breakup of Canada? One of the core provincial demands was that the federal government vacate the fields of housing and apprenticeship training as they were deemed to be areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction.
 
Back in 1992, the federal government exited most social housing investment, making an exception for cooperative and urban aboriginal projects. That decision reflected a mistaken national consensus that provincial governments were better positioned to deliver housing at the local level, as they bear responsibility for the management of municipal governments.

During the 1990s, pressure mounted for the federal government to hand over all labour market planning and responsibility to provincial governments via individual bilateral agreements.

That move succeeded in fragmenting an existing national workforce strategy designed to analyze, forecast, and implement national labour market modernizations.

While the rest of the world moved to homogenize and synthesize in an effort to anticipate the needs of emerging global workforces, Canada’s national housing and training policies were replaced with provincial programs that differed in scope and application from province to province.  

So distorted is our national labour market that in some cases, federally funded programs designed to help students can actually attach a provincial residency requirement, blocking applicants from other jurisdictions.

The country also abandoned the development of national assessment tools designed to measure educational and training performance in different provincial jurisdictions.

According to the most recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report on Canadian education, there is only one area where standardized testing applies. That involves Grade 8 students participating in the Pan Canadian Assessment program which includes testing skill levels in reading, math, and science.

Otherwise, a review of most education curricula reveals a hodgepodge of trial-and-error methods designed individually by 13 different jurisdictions.

The Council of Ministers of Education Canada, headquartered in Toronto, manages inter-provincial liaison among Canada’s 13 ministers, who meet once a year to discuss issues of cooperation.

The formation of the CMEC occurred during Canada’s 100th birthday, when it was agreed that even though education is a provincial responsibility, there is a need for inter-provincial sharing.

That being said, there is no national mandate guiding the council, so every resolution and decision is referred back to 13 provincial and territorial ministries for implementation.

In this highly decentralized system, it is no wonder that skills training and employment mobility are often sacrificed to the holy grail of Canadian constitutional division of powers.

The same can be said for housing. It is impossible to ignore the mounting evidence that home ownership is increasingly beyond the grasp of urban millenials in most of Canada’s major cities.

Yet, because of the decision made a quarter century ago, the country’s national housing corporation was stripped to the bare bones, with little more influence than underwriting some higher risk mortgages for potential homeowners.

A national vision to tackle problems of homelessness and under housing, are no longer on the national radar, relegated to largely provincial issues. More money is generally spent on local task forces to study the problem than on concrete solutions to secure different housing solutions for changing demographics.

The major financial commitments included in the budget were welcome. The provinces need federal financial support, and these investments will get the national government back into housing and skills training.

With border turmoil engulfing the United States and the United Kingdom, Canada’s open approach can actually become a huge boost for our economy.

But we have to be smart enough to mobilize at home first.

At the moment, it is easier for many Europeans to move between countries in some industries than it is for Canadian workers to move to new jobs in different provinces.

The time is ripe for a “back to the future” look at housing and training. The issues need to be tackled through a national lens.

In a world where borders are breaking the world up, these two budget measures can actually unite Canada.
Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.