Ottawa’s housing crisis response displaying a ‘lack of urgency,’ Jagmeet Singh says

We’re going to begin though with Canada’s fight to bring the cost of living under control a fight that has hit a setback after reaching 2.8 percent in June the country’s inflation rate reversed course last month climbing to 3.3 percent what’s driving that number the cost of things we need grocery

Prices are nearly three times the rate of inflation up 8.5 percent from last year the price of electricity shot up 11.7 percent the biggest mover though was the interest people are paying on their mortgages that’s up a record 30.6 percent in the past year because of historic interest rate increases

NDP leader jugmeet Singh joins me now from Edmonton Mr Singh welcome back to Power and politics thank you so much for having me I’d like to begin with your reaction to today’s inflation number sir up 3.3 percent year over year You released a statement earlier today saying the bank of Canada’s policies are

Causing the inflation they’re supposed to prevent could you explain that further certainly the the two main areas where where inflation is up is mortgage payments and rent in addition to that’s housing in addition to groceries and we’ve known for a long time that that the increased interest rates that

Domestically don’t impact grocery prices and don’t have any influence over them and they’ve been the most stubborn to come down because they’re not influenced by domestically set interest rates and so Canadians are feeling that they’re feeling the the pain of their grocery bills continuing to be very high even

Though it’s come down a little bit it’s still over eight percent which is quadruple what the target is for inflation and mortgage payments are up 30 percent they’re significantly higher than before and so what what people are experiencing right now in terms of the pain of this inflationary period a

Portion of that a significant portion is being caused by the very policies of the Bank of Canada so but you’ve been saying for a long time has been that have been traditionally the key tool of monetary policy to curb inflation if that’s the driver how then solved the problem

Well when that’s normally a solution if a cause is something domestic but in the case that we’re we’re facing economists have all come to a strong consensus that the inflation that we’re experiencing is because of the war in Ukraine supply chain issues and the Legacy impact of covid neither of those issues are

Impacted by domestically set interest rates and that’s why the major concerns around interest rates or the major concerns about inflation haven’t actually been tackled grocery prices have not been significantly impacted by increasing interest rates because they’re resilient to that they’re not impacted by the interest rate set by the

Bank of of Canada and we’re seeing that in the numbers and what we’re really seeing seeing in terms of what people are experiencing is a lot of pain when it comes to trying to keep a roof over their head and put food on the table and the Bank of Canada is not actually

Making it any easier so when it comes to as you say housing one of the key elements to all of this you’ve been spending this summer I know traveling the country and speaking to Canadians about this very issue what’s the overall picture you’re getting when we started the tour over the summer

We were in Northwest Territory so in the north we went to the Atlantic provinces spent time in Toronto and the surrounding GTA in Southwestern Ontario spent time in Quebec and what we’re hearing is people cannot find a place to rent the vacancy rates are very very low the rents themselves are increasing very

Dramatically mortgage payments are going up in a very dramatic and fast way and people are having a really hard time when it comes to finding a place that’s in their budget in Edmonton where I am today there is a report that came out almost just under 50 000 edmontonians

Are in core housing need which means that they’re either in a place that’s outside their budget or in a home that doesn’t meet the needs in terms of how big their family is or is unsafe so there’s real needs and people are feeling very squeezed okay there’s

Another new report that came out today in fact on specifically the rental housing crisis and I’m going to be speaking to the authors of that in just a few min minutes but they lay out recommendations for solving this crisis and there’s a key line in their report which reads adding substantial new

Supply to address rental affordability is key to solving the housing crisis and I took that it seems to be at odds with what you’ve said this week in Edmonton Supply is an issue but increasing it in your estimation won’t get more people into homes what then do you see is the main problem

Well it’s not I wanted to be very clear on this it’s not any old Supply it’s it’s the right type of Supply if we just build more private developed homes for sale it’s not going to address the key problem which was identified which is a lack of rental housing we need

Purpose-built rental and purposeful rental that is Affordable and so what I really wanted to highlight is that we need to look at the type of buildings or the type of homes that we’re building we need to see specifically affordable rental and we also need to see non-market housing okay what we heard

From people is that they couldn’t afford the market rent and the market cost of housing and so if we build more Market housing it’s not going to solve the problem of not having enough rental that’s affordable nor will it solve the problem for those that have decent jobs

And can’t afford the the market rates of rent and purchasing a home so what are the things that you’ve talked about in getting to more affordable purpose-built rentals is waiving the federal portion of the ga gsdhst and indeed this this report flags that specifically as one of its recommendations what do you think

About that as sort of an endorsement really for what you’ve been talking about yeah I think that is encouraging and and we we built this idea based on what experts have had suggested so we think that we need to see that type of incentive to ensure that we’re building more purpose-built rental that’s

Affordable we need a good definition of affordability but we also need to see the federal government take a more active role and so far what we’ve seen is a lack of urgency and recently when the Prime Minister was asked Justin Trudeau said well it’s not my job it’s

Not my my responsibility and that is not going to solve the problem trying to point fling fingers or blaming the province or municipalities what we need to do is actually acknowledge that every level of government can play a significant role the federal government has very substantial leverage that they

Can use to build more homes that are affordable we used to do that in Canada after the world wars a lot of the homes that people first bought were post World War homes built by significant Federal Investments we need to get back to that very active role of the Federal

Government to build homes we can’t be blaming as the Prime Minister has done we can’t be like the conservatives that are saying just do more of the same we need a very targeted approach non-market housing purpose-built affordable rental and when to solve this problem urgently is a National Housing Summit something

That you’d like to see well we know that that of course bringing people together to discuss the problem is always helpful but right now we really need that action and we know some of the things that can be done right away we talked about also keeping

The affordable homes that we do have the affordable buildings keeping them affordable within acquisition fund modeled after what the government the ndpu government in BC is doing with that acquisition fund so that people don’t get renovated or Dem evicted which is a big concern we’ve heard that across the

Country people live in a place that is Affordable it’s bought up by a developer they’re evicted the place is renovated it goes back on the market for double triple quadruple what it was before that’s something we want to prevent and we really need to see the Federal Government Act quickly to start building

More homes that are affordable and non-market and on that point I believe you use the word leverage earlier how much pressure are you willing to bring to bear will you leverage your agreement with the liberal government in terms of pushing the government on housing policy well we have been pushing the government

And we’re going to continue to push the government what we’ve shown in the past is that we have pushed for things that are of course in the agreement and things outside the agreement when we got the government to double the GST rebate two years in a row that put more money

Back in people’s pockets that’s something that was not in the agreement and we were successful in obtaining so we’re going to do that again continue to apply pressure knowing that Canadians are expecting some real immediate action to deal with the housing crisis we need that urgency from the federal government

So far we have not seen that eight years of Justin Trudeau things have gotten worse not better when it comes to housing and so we’ll use the pressure that we have the power that we have to put pressure on the government to act

The federal government needs to take a more active role in addressing the housing crisis, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh tells CBC’s Power & Politics, as mortgage interest costs in Canada have increased more than 30 per cent since June.
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