CHARBONNEAU – Poilievre’s ‘gatekeepers’ have roots in conservative policies

WHY WAS Pierre Poilievre in a Toronto subway station talking about the lack of affordable homes?

The thread between transit and homes is tenuous.

In his video, Poilievre concocts a comparison between the purchase of a subway ticket and the promise of an affordable home.

He jabs his index finger toward the viewer and says: “You had a destination, that destination was a home.”

He goes on to say that finding an affordable home is no longer possible thanks to eight years of Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals.

The Conservative leader knows that isn’t true.

The policies of the Trudeau government have had little effect on house prices in Canada. They are due to rich investors who prey upon desirable markets such as Vancouver and Toronto.

Canadian house prices are the result of the same supply-and-demand principles that Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives so religiously subscribe to.

“Housing costs have doubled over the last eight years, as government gatekeepers block builders from providing you with a roof overhead,” Mr. Poilievre goes on in his video.

Baloney.

The shortage of affordable housing is the result of deliberate government policy starting with the Mulroney Conservatives in the 1990s.

Between 1980 and 1993, 49 per cent of all rentals built were affordable. Federal tax incentives and loan programs to private investors played a pivotal role in apartment rental construction over that period.

Governments, Conservative and Liberal alike, stopped investing in affordable rental units for a number of reasons: strong wage growth from 1996 to 2006 coupled with declining interest rates and modest housing prices that enticed more renters into home ownership.

But by the mid-2000s, stagnant wages and the growth of low paying jobs along with escalating housing prices pushed people into expensive rentals.

Poilievre would have us believe that the “gatekeepers” are of Trudeau’s making. Except that the gatekeepers are actually builders of a conservative persuasion.

The free market of supply and demand has contributed to high housing prices. Builders have decided that the greatest profit can be made by constructing housing directed towards the wealthy who can afford them and too bad for the rest.

High housing prices exist across the entire country, in provinces run by people like Danielle Smith and Doug Ford. Would Poilievre get rid of the gatekeepers in conservative provinces?

The real solutions can be found in provinces that Poilievre pours scorn on, such as B.C.  This province is getting rid of the supposed gatekeepers. The provincial government has ordered cities and municipalities to rezone single-family neighbourhoods to allow for tens of thousands of multiunit housing projects.

In his journey of tall tales, Poilievre hops on the misery wagon: “Hopelessness sends people into the streets. Drug addicts are dying of overdoses as governments give up on treating them and instead give them more of the poisons that are killing them in the first place,” he says.

Horsefeathers.

In B.C., the safer-supply drug program is giving addicts clean drugs so they don’t buy the fentanyl-laced narcotics being sold on the street that are killing them.

Poilievre goes off the rails with his deceptive videos but it’s his followers that will end up in a dead end.

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.