Canada’s Conservative leader says not enough homes are being built to keep up with demand.
Urban centres recorded 223,513 housing starts in 2023, down seven per cent from the year before.
Pierre Poilievre said his party has a plan that would lead to more shovels in the ground faster.
“By requiring municipalities to speed up permits, free up land and cut development taxes as a condition of getting their funding from the federal government,” Poilievre said in an interview during a trip through New Brunswick last week.
Poilievre said a Conservative government would also sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land to increase housing.
One of the key concerns raised by many groups is a shortage of skilled trades and labourers in provinces across the country.
In response, Poilievre said his party would invest more in trades to help address that shortage.
“Too much of our spending goes to non-trade education. We need more union and private non-union training halls, we need more trade schools,” he said.
“We need to put red seal trades material in our high schools so that kids can start preparing for their apprenticeship before they even get out of grade 12.”
When asked exactly how many homes he would want to see built each year, the Conservative leader declined to give an exact figure.
“More, more, more, and I will be making commitments that I can keep,” Poilievre said in response.
“Right now, the government’s making these pie-in-the-sky promises of building six million homes in the next five years when they’re not even building 250,000 a year.”
