It makes sense for the federal government to include an interprovincial mobility clause when funding provincial housing. 

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on June 3, 2024.

OTTAWA—Half of the residents in Canada’s major cities are ready to move for more affordable living.

Thunder Bay, Ont., is the best destination if you are trying to reduce the cost of housing as a percentage of your monthly income.

According to a Royal LePage affordability study released last week, you can live in that city and pay only 22.2 per cent of your income for a mortgage.

The study polled Canadians living in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver asking whether they would be prepared to move for more affordable accommodation.

Some 54 per cent of Greater Montreal residents said yes, while 51 per cent in Greater Toronto and 45 per cent in Greater Vancouver were willing to move for cheaper accommodation.

Edmonton was the only large city that made the cut as one of the 15 most affordable living locations in the nation.

Not surprisingly, it also polled at the top when people were asked which of the 15 they would move to.

In my own family, my daughter made an affordability move from Toronto to Montreal earlier this year. She purchased a duplexed apartment in Verdun with a budget that probably would have gotten her a shoebox in Toronto.

And Montreal is not even included on the list of potential destinations for affordable housing.

But the reality is that the quality of life in a major urban centre like Montreal often trumps the simple issue of affordability.

I have family living in Thunder Bay, and it is a wonderful place if you enjoy the great outdoors with easy access to fishing, hunting, and hiking.

But if you are an urban type, this most affordable community is somewhat remote. For example, I once took a train trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay, and the excursion took 17 hours. The city is also 700 kilometres away from Winnipeg, which is the nearest community with a professional theatre company, dance group, and other attractions attached to living in major urban centres.

If urban life is important to you, the choice of the cheapest mortgage is not the only reason to make a move.

But the survey does show Canadians that there are options when it comes to housing affordability.

Too bad those options are not built into the country’s public policy framework.

With every housing agreement signed with individual provinces, there is absolutely no incentive to encourage people to cross provincial borders in search of affordable housing.

If anything, the larger the local population, the more funding is focussed on providing services to that population.

When Toronto lays claim to a population larger than most provinces, it is correct.

But it would make sense to encourage people to move out of the GTA in an effort to tackle the affordability issue.

Housing prices in nearby Hamilton have long been a magnet for Torontonians who want to be able to live in an urban centre without spending a million dollars.

The investment in rapid transit between communities also makes the affordability move painless as it includes the possibility of either remote work, or actually commuting to a job in Toronto if necessary.

Just last week the federal and Ontario governments finally signed an agreement which transfers $357-million into provincial coffers for housing projects.

The agreement had been stalled for months because of a dispute over what Ontario was actually spending on social housing, which the feds alleged was less than other provinces.

The new agreement includes an “action plan” that both governments are happy with, but municipal partners in housing are asking to “fundamentally re-think the way that community housing is funded in Ontario.”

That fundamental re-think should involve a deeper dive into portability for affordability.

If it is less expensive to live in Windsor, Ont., or Thunder Bay, as evidenced by the Royal LePage survey, why not encourage people to move to those locations?

A bonus system for municipal affordability would ensure that governments are investing in the communities that provide the greatest housing return.

Why not include interprovincial movement in that equation?

It is cheaper to live in St. John’s, N.L., so why not provide incentives for people who are prepared to take the risk and make that move?

Housing solutions involve thinking outside the box.

Either you get a condo box in Toronto, or more spacious, affordable accommodation elsewhere in Canada.

It makes sense for the federal government to include an interprovincial mobility clause when funding provincial housing.

Canadians should be encouraged to migrate to affordable cities.

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

Social housing should be national in scope, and part of a major income reform. Immigration and refugee support should be regionally based, and there should be incentives for moving to underpopulated regions.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on February 5, 2024.

OTTAWA—Immigration Minister Marc Miller made a $362-million refugee housing announcement last week.

Instead of garnering positive impact, the announcement opened the door for provincial governments and critics to claim that the amount in question is simply too little to deal with the problem.

Quebec is looking for a cheque for $470-million, as outlined in a letter from Premier François Legault last month.

Legault is also asking the federal government to stem the flow of refugees finding their way into the country by land, sea, and air.

Miller’s announcement seemed to reinforce Legault’s concerns.

“I think we owe it to Canadians to reform a system that has very much been a stopgap measure since 2017 to deal with large historic flows of migration.”

Miller is speaking frankly, but his admission simply sets the government up for further criticism.

If 2017 is the date when things went sidewise, the federal government has had seven years to come up with a solution.

Like the housing crisis, the Liberals are taking the full brunt of criticism for immigration spikes.

The link between the two is tenuous at best, but the government doesn’t seem able to convince the public about who is responsible for the housing crisis in the first place.

It is not refugee spikes.

It was bad public policy foisted on Canada when the federal government was convinced by the provinces to get out of the housing field back in 1986.

For 30 years, the provinces had full responsibility, including federal transfer funding, for housing construction in their jurisdictions.

For the most part, they did nothing to fill the gap in social or Indigenous housing, while city hall used housing payments for new builds as a way to finance municipal coffers.

The responsibility for housing was completely in provincial hands for three decades until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the courageous step of getting back into housing in 2017.

The refugee housing problem would not exist if sufficient social housing had been built over 30 years for residents in need. Help should be available to anyone who cannot afford market solutions.

Meanwhile, the cost of market rental housing for those who can pay continues to rise as demand outstrips supply.

That is a completely different issue from the cost of immigration and refugee services.

For the federal government to defend itself against accusations that it caused the housing crisis, it needs a national strategy engaging cities and provinces in the solutions.

There are a few provinces that have continued to support social housing in the past three decades but, by and large, the availability of housing for the poor has not been increased.

The Liberals have worked to tackle child poverty, and some of those direct payments have definitely made a difference.

According to statistics, more than two million Canadians have been lifted out of poverty because of the Canada Child Benefit.

But as incomes grow, the cost of living grows along with it.

The Liberals need a big new idea that goes beyond simply ministers making announcements in their own bailiwicks.

At one point, the government was looking at the creation of a Guaranteed Annual Income for all Canadians.

That idea needs to be dusted off, and the feds need to invite provinces and municipalities to the table to see who can help in what manner with the creation of a guaranteed income.

Basic housing should be a human right for all Canadians, with the guaranteed income built on the cost of housing by region.

Social housing should be national in scope, and it should be part of a major income reform.

Immigration and refugee support should be regionally based, and there should be incentives for moving to underpopulated regions of the country.

A big vision on how to house the underhoused, feed the underfed, and finance the poor would get everyone to the table.

In the current system, everyone is blaming the federal government for a problem that has largely been caused by provincial indifference and municipal greed.

The country also needs to understand what constitutes a basic housing right.

What should be the average housing size for socially funded financing?

Many Canadians live alone these days, which changes the type and size of housing we should be building.

There are no magic bullets. But the federal government needs to think bigger than single housing announcements if it wants to spread the responsibility—and the blame—for the current crisis.

A guaranteed income is the answer.

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 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.

Provinces may not like this budget, claiming encroachment into provincial jurisdiction. But with the municipalities on side, the federal government should be able to start delivering on a national housing strategy.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on April 11, 2022.

The federal budget’s $10-billion housing announcement should be nicknamed Back to the Future.

Most Canadians may be too young to remember the time more than three decades ago when the federal government was solely responsible for housing.

In the post-war period, the national housing drive spawned affordable housing for returning veterans which still stands today. The federal government funded housing for low-income families and seniors at a reduced rate, reflecting their income.

Canada was considered an innovator in the housing field. That progress ended in 1986, when the federal government devolved social housing responsibilities to the provinces.

With the exception of cooperative housing, which remained federal because of a successful co-op lobby, every other housing program was downloaded.

Unconditional cash transfers accompanied the transfer agreements, designed to finance housing initiatives that never materialized.

Even national Indigenous housing initiatives in urban centres were downloaded, with disastrous results in most instances.

Last January, the Ontario government announced a $10-million Indigenous housing investment. The urban-based Ontario Indigenous population is almost 800,000.

With that size of population, and that paltry investment, it is easy to see why the majority of urban aboriginal people live in substandard housing.

The country is still feeling the pain from a decision made years ago that took the federal government out of the housing market.

Justin Trudeau’s government was the first one to promise federal re-entry into social housing during the Sunny Days campaign of 2015. And this budget finally provides the financing to deliver on that promise.

While the two-year ban on foreign ownership is largely a symbolic measure promised during the last election, it will not dampen the speculative real estate market in large cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

Foreign buyers usually have connections in the country, making it fairly simple to bypass this anti-speculation measure.

The budget does provide an opportunity to explore new and innovative housing models. There is no reason why Indigenous urban housing cannot be funded directly through a national Indigenous organization.

The government’s decision to help municipalities navigate the challenges of the building permit system also has serious long-term potential to improve housing stock.

Instead of simply handing a cheque to each province, the federal government will be engaged with local governments, offering the tools they need to get affordable housing into the marketplace in a timely fashion.

It may also help tackle the problem of the pricing differential between large urban centres and smaller communities.

Federal building incentives targeted to assist low-income communities make a lot more sense than simply providing the same amount of money to every project.

Sherbrooke in Quebec, and Windsor in Ontario are currently the cities with the poorest residents in the country.

They obviously need more help than West Vancouver, Westmount, or Rosedale when the government is subsidizing the housing supply side.

By working directly with municipalities, the federal government will also be able to utilize knowledge transfer between provinces in a way that makes sense for new housing models.

The devil is obviously in the details. But one thing is certain: the Liberal government is making good on a campaign promise to invest in housing. This direct investment will go a long way to filling the hole created when the federal government vacated the housing field back in 1986.

The housing crisis is a good example of how a national government can help municipalities and provinces in the pursuit of knowledge transfer.

An innovative housing solution in New Brunswick could easily provide inspiration to northern Ontario. Both are areas with rural and remote communities largely dependent on natural resources.

They can learn more from each other than they could from Toronto or Fredericton.

A federal housing strategy that works directly with municipalities opens the door to a national solution. That does not mean one size fits all.

But it does mean that in the mobile world in which we live, Canadians will finally have a mobile housing platform wherever they reside.

Provinces may not like this budget, claiming encroachment into provincial jurisdiction. But with the municipalities on side, the federal government should be able to start delivering on a national housing strategy.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities got its first direct federal investment in greenhouse gas reductions 20 years ago, it was a $20-million baby step.

That program is now worth more than one billion dollars and is, arguably, the largest driver of municipal greenhouse gas reductions in Canada.

With this budget, the same will soon be happening for housing.

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.