Ahead of what’s expected to be a tight federal budget next month, the NDP is calling for a rental protection fund to stop renovictions as part of what the party is coining its “budget demands.”
But there’s no word on what such a proposal could cost, or whether it can fit into what Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and others have stressed is a “constrained” fiscal environment.
“If we see rents continue to rise the way they are, and if we can continue to see affordable homes being sold off to rich investors, and we’re not going to be able to have affordable homes for people,” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said at a press conference in Coquitlam, B.C.
“So we’ve got to stop that. And the only way we stop that is empowering community to be able to keep those affordable homes affordable. And so that’s what we’re fighting for today.”
Renoviction is the practice where tenants are served eviction notices and property owners renovate the building, often reposting the units at a higher price.
In January 2023, the B.C. government put forward $500 million for its rental protection program to buy affordable housing units to protect tenants from renovictions, with the government saying the province lost more than 100,000 rental units below $1,000 per month between 2016 and 2021.
The first purchase under this program was announced on Feb. 8, 2024 with two housing co-operatives in Coquitlam purchasing 290 rental units with help from a $125 million government grant.
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Speaking on background, two NDP sources confirmed the ask from Singh, with one saying they did not have dollar figure yet for their demand, but it would be based on expanding that $500-million fund to a national scale.
The question remains, though, about what leverage the NDP may be willing to use to try to achieve its budget asks for proposals outside the terms of its supply-and-confidence agreement with the federal Liberals.
A report from Rentals.ca pegs the average rent in Canada for February at $2,193 per month for all property types, a 10.5 per cent increase year over year.
Vancouver is the most expensive city to rent in, with the average price for a one-bedroom place at $2,653 and $3,541 for a two-bedroom unit. But the problem isn’t limited to B.C., and rents across much of Canada have jumped in recent years.
Toronto is not far behind, where tenants pay on average $2,495 for one bedroom and $3,287 for two.
It isn’t until the number nine slot of the list, Brampton, Ont., where a one-bedroom apartment is below the average price for all types of rentals at $2,155.
“That is so out of bounds for people, for people. That’s really a question at that point of having most of your money go towards your rent and having really nothing left over for groceries, for bills, for the other things in life,” Singh said on high rental rates.
The demand from the NDP comes as housing and affordability remain a major focus for voters. Freeland said on Monday that will be a key theme in the budget.
“For me, it’s actually pretty simple,” she said. “It’s housing, housing, housing. Supply, supply, supply, affordability, a strong economic plan that delivers great jobs and a real focus on younger Canadians.”
The Liberals have been pushing their Housing Accelerator Fund as a means to address the housing crisis, saying it provides cities with funds to speed up the process of approving development projects and issuing building permits, with a focus on densification.
Housing Minister Sean Fraser is also working toward a modernized version of the post-Second World War-era standardized housing blueprints initiative with a goal of making it easier to build quickly.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said if elected, his government would tie municipal funding transfers to building permit targets, where a city would receive less money if targets are not met and more if they are. He’s described the current federal handling of the housing shortage as “incompetent.”
This is the third B.C. government policy the NDP has pushed for national adoption this year, most notably getting universal contraception coverage included in the pharmacare legislation.
While pharmacare is part of the supply-and-confidence agreement between the NDP and the Liberals, which sees the opposition party support the government on confidence matters such as the budget, none of the NDP’s budget demands are written into that deal.
When asked about this last week, Singh said he sees the agreement more as a “floor than a ceiling” on policies they can push the government to adopt.
The federal budget is scheduled to be released on April 16, and the government has signalled it aims to cut costs across a variety of government departments.
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