Reality check: Liberals’ housing strategy doesn’t go far enough, advocates say

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants to reduce homelessness by 50 per cent and help 530,000 Canadian families meet “core housing need.”

Those targets were affirmed in the National Housing Strategy announced Wednesday, along with upcoming legislation to make housing a fundamental right and to creating tracking and reporting tools to ensure the government meets its goals.

“Housing rights are human rights,” Trudeau said at a press conference.

The plan includes $40 billion in spending over 10 years, which will help build around 100,000 new affordable homes, and repair an existing 260,000.

It also includes a new portable housing benefit for low-income households – giving families up to $2,500 a year to bring them out of core housing need, which is when a family spends more than 30 per cent of their after-tax income on housing

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Experts say the plan is a good first step, but doesn’t go far enough for a few reasons.

10-year rollout

While $40 billion sounds like a lot of money, it’s spread over a long period of time, Steve Pomeroy, senior research fellow at the Centre for Urban Research and Education (CURE) at Carleton University, told Global News.

“It’s certainly an increase over what we were spending in the past, I think it’s a modest increase, not a gigantic increase,” Pomeroy said.

But he said it’s not enough to achieve the goals that have been set out. To reduce chronic homelessness by half, the government has allotted only around $2.1 billion.

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As for bringing low-income families out of core housing need, $2,500 isn’t enough for certain areas.

In Toronto, for example, where rental costs are higher, the extra $208 a month would likely only bring someone down to spending around 45 per cent on housing, Pomeroy said.

Jeff Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, said the idea of the personal subsidy is a positive one, but it’s not set in stone yet.

“That’s still a couple years off, and it will require matching funds from the provinces and territories, and we don’t know yet if the provinces are willing to step on that,” he said. “So that’s a piece of the puzzle that will take much more work to actually to come into being.”

Trudeau said much of the money won’t be spent until after the next election in 2019 because the federal government needs to take the time to ensure the details are right and that they satisfy myriad local, provincial and territorial needs.

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Morrison said there’s other options for starting right away.

“Some of these other things like the funding programs for repair and renewal, the funding program for new builds, hopefully those are a few things that could be brought on fairly quickly,” Morrison said.

He is still hopeful, calling it the “next generation of social housing policies in Canada.” But he agrees that there’s still a lot of work to do.

“They need to negotiate with the provinces and territories, they still haven’t unveiled the indigenous strategy,” he explained.

“So there’s still a lot to do, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.”

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Partnership with provinces and territories

Pomeroy said working with the provinces and territories is the part of the plan he’s happy about.

“The provinces and territories actually own and operate public housing which is a part of the existing housing stock that required the greatest level of subsidies,” Pomeroy said.

And the money set aside for repairing some 600,000 affordable homes already active in Canada is badly needed, Morrison said.