Bafflegab on Home-Building Plays
with People's Lives
Demonstration in Montreal for the right to housing, September
13, 2025
One of the Carney government's success stories is said to be the Build Canada Homes (BCH) program he established on September 14. With a $13 billion budget, this federal agency claims it will build, finance and support affordable housing projects across Canada. What exactly does this even mean? No doubt, "affordable" is what the real estate developers decide, not what people can actually afford. How is his glitz and glitter any different to that of his predecessors who have also done everything in the name of the public good while providing no solutions to the housing crisis.
Since the 1980s under the Mulroney government, the Chrétien government that followed, and subsequent governments since then, massive cuts have been made to funding for social housing.
In the mid-1990s, the Chrétien
government scrapped the Canada Assistance Plan, which required
the provinces to meet national standards for welfare. Those
standards included the right to an income that took into account
a person's budgetary requirements, a ban on discrimination based
on the recipient's province of origin, an appeal mechanism, and
a ban on forcing a social-assistance recipient to work in return
for benefits. All of this was done in the name of "scarcity of
funds" to pay for social programs and the necessity to
prioritize paying down the national debt.
During the Chrétien era, from 1993 to 2003, the only federal government investment in new social housing was an $89 million one-time program in 2001.
In a 2014 "Overview of the State of Homelessness in Canada," prepared for the Mouvement pour mettre fin à l'itinérance de Montréal, Alison Smith points out that in 1996, the federal government downloaded the administration of social housing to the provinces. Ontario then downloaded responsibility for social housing onto the municipalities. In 2001, the BC Liberal government implemented further cuts to funding for social housing.
Alison Smith also points to the nefarious effects of the closure of mental institutions that took place across the country from the 1970s to 1980s. This was justified by saying that people would do better living in the community rather than institutions, but the supports they required did not follow people into the community, with predictable results.
Smith also noted, "Residential schools also closed, and the country saw an urbanization of Aboriginal people. Many of the Aboriginal people who moved to big cities suffered unimaginable trauma and violent pasts, and had been separated from their culture and language. Coupled with racism, Aboriginal people continue to face systemic barriers to housing and supports, and make up a wildly disproportional part of the homeless population in many Canadian cities, especially in the West."
In 2017, the Trudeau Liberals announced they would "reduce chronic homelessness by 50 per cent." Later in the 2019 Speech from the Throne, the Liberals said they "upped our commitment and declared our focus to be entirely eliminating homelessness in Canada." Further commitments were made by the Trudeau government in 2024. None of these commitments and what if anything they achieved have been referenced by the Carney government.
Why does Carney think that Canadians will believe his genius strategy as being any different to those of his predecessors? In essence, the aim is to pay the rich and make individual people and families scramble for the "benefits" which will come their way. It is cynical banker's talk from A to Z.
Besides anything else, Carney and his government, in their arrogance, are in denial of the decades of research done by housing rights organizations and housing experts, who have laid out over and over what is needed to end the scourge of homelessness in Canada.
Carney claims that his newly
minted BCH federal agency will "transform public-private
collaboration and deploy modern methods of construction, as it
catalyzes the creation of an entirely new Canadian housing
industry. It will leverage public lands, offer flexible
financial incentives, attract private capital, facilitate large
portfolio projects, and support modern manufacturers to build
the homes that Canadians need."
"Leverage public lands." Whose lands would those be? "Flexible
financial incentives." Sounds like promo for Canada's banks
disguised to sound like the individual borrower will somehow
benefit. "Attract private capital." The real estate developers
are amongst the most corrupt sectors of finance capital so what
is Carney now offering them after they have benefitted from so
many previous "incentives"? "Facilitate large portfolio
projects." More boardroom-speak under the guise that BCH "will
focus primarily on non-market housing, supporting a mix of
income needs as part of a national effort to double housing
construction, restore affordability, and reduce homelessness."
"Mixed-income," housing invariably means more pay-the-rich
schemes to developers for luxury condos with a small quota of
"affordable" apartments.
A "large portfolio project" is supposedly an ongoing collection of "multiple individual projects, programs and even operations" managed together to "achieve strategic organizational goals and maximize overall value and return on investment."
Carney presents building houses like a brilliant act, uniquely discovered by himself and offered to Canadians as if, now, under his financial genius, the right to housing will be provided with a guarantee because his is a "strategic commitment that balances risk and return by prioritizing, allocating resources to, and continuously optimizing a diverse set of initiatives that contribute to the larger business strategy."
Wow.
Here are the "three pillars" to the BCH's work as advertised by the Carney government.
"First, Build Canada Homes will partner with industry, other orders of government, and Indigenous communities to build affordable housing at scale and at speed. [...]
"Second, Build Canada Homes will deploy capital, create demand, and harness innovative housing technologies to build faster and more sustainably, 365 days a year. [...]
"Third, Build Canada Homes will adopt the government's new Buy Canadian policy and prioritize projects that use Canadian lumber and other Canadian materials."
Making it sound as if building by using modern technology and Canadian resources is a new invention, in announcing the BCH Carney also made public its first four investments and initiatives:
"1. As Build Canada Homes begins to develop public land sites under Canada Lands Company's portfolio, it will prioritize innovative, factory-built housing. To begin, Build Canada Homes will prioritize six sites to build 4,000 factory-built homes on federal land – with additional capacity of up to 45,000 units across the portfolio. [...] This first tranche of sites will be in Dartmouth, Longueuil, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Edmonton. [Presumably Vancouver where the housing crisis is amongst the most severe countrywide comes under one of the "investments and initiatives" – TML Ed. Note.]
"2. To help protect existing affordable rental housing, the $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund will be launched under Build Canada Homes. This initiative will support the community housing sector in acquiring at-risk rental apartment buildings, ensuring they remain affordable over the long term. [...]
"3. Build Canada Homes will deploy $1 billion to build transitional and supportive housing for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. It will collaborate with key provincial, territorial, municipal, and Indigenous partners to pair these federal investments with employment and health care supports.
"4. Build Canada Homes will partner with the Nunavut Housing Corporation to build over 700 public, affordable, and supportive housing units. Approximately 30 per cent of the units are expected to be built off-site, using innovative construction methods such as factory-built housing."
Related to BCH, the federal government announced on September 19 that it would "top up $1.5 billion in loans to the Affordable Housing Fund's New Construction Stream." This is one of the Fund's two "sub-streams" said to offer low-interest repayable loans and forgivable loans.
No mention of what vulnerable people have to do to qualify for one of those loans and who will judge their ability to repay or whether they "deserve" forgiveness. But hey, what else are "sub-streams" for except to cover all the bases? In its plans, the Carney government does not quantify what Canada's homeless problem is, or what are its causes. The cartel parties and the governments they form, including the Carney Liberals, do not talk about rights that belong to people by virtue of their being human, which includes the right to housing as a basic necessity of life.
The Carney government does not even say when his plans will end homelessness in his number one economy of all the G7 (Canada, U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan).
At the end of August, Viet Nam with a population 2.5 times the size of Canada's, announced that homelessness was now ended in that country. In comparison, the Carney government is promising to deliver an "austerity budget" on November 4, with massive cuts to federal public services, while ramping up funding for militarization and war preparations to the tune of hundreds of billions per year between now and 2030.
The cynicism of the Carney government is to pick up on the issue of "affordability," when addressing the housing crisis. Through sleight of hand, the picture is painted that by turning the issue over to market forces, the needs of the people for housing will be met.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) published a calculation of what it calls a rental wage, the hourly wages needed to afford rent while working a standard 40-hour week and spending 30 per cent of income on housing. In an update based on statistics from 2024 on rent for one- and two-bedroom apartments, they found that Toronto and Vancouver topped the unaffordability list with someone working full-time needing to make almost $38 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
In Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary the rental wage for one bedrooms is more than double the minimum wage, the CCPA pointed out. Out of 62 cities, only in eight could one affordably get a one-bedroom while working full-time at minimum wage, CCPA said. The CCPA raised the obvious need to increase the minimum wage as well as for measures to keep rent under control.
Rent 20 per cent below market is defined as "affordable" although it is out of reach for low income families, John Gordon, CEO of National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc., told the Hill Times. He said he thinks the housing crisis is a result of the "financialization" of housing – housing looked at not as homes but as investments. He pointed out that for Indigenous people in Canada many are among the first or second generations outside of the residential school system and do not have intergenerational wealth to pass down through families.
"We just face a greater housing challenge than [the] mainstream. If [the] mainstream is in a crisis, imagine what the crisis is for Indigenous people," Gordon said.
Housing, Infrastructure, and Communities Canada has raised the issue of how BCH will work with "a broad range of stakeholders, including housing developers, Indigenous partners, provincial and territorial governments, financial institutions, and experts in modern construction methods."
The Carney government is selling old wine in a new bottle with his proposals to increase "affordability" to justify pay-the-rich schemes. What is "new" is not how his home-building program plays with people's lives but how it fits into his nation-wrecking agenda. It turns every Canadian, Quebecker, Indigenous person, Inuit and Métis into a personal one-on-one relationship with narrow private business interests on whose mercy they are supposed to throw themselves.
Carney has raised his bafflegab to a new art form. No wonder he is fond of quoting the former Pope who was himself fond of quoting. Carney, in his book Value(s) references a lunch at the Vatican with Pope Francis where the Pope said, "Your job is to turn the grappa back into wine, to turn the market back into humanity." Like the Pope, Carney forgets grappa is not made from wine and thus cannot be turned back into wine, any more than the capitalist market is oganized to meet the needs of humanity.
This article was published in
Volume 55
Number 10 - October 2025
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2025/Articles/M550109.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca