Too much of the stick and not enough of the carrot
When I was going through university, and for a while afterwards, I worked at a number of cafés.
You get to see a lot of interesting things with those kinds of service jobs, and the memories have stayed with me. I was reading the news the other day when an article brought back a great one. I was working front counter one day when the cook tried a new dish. It was an intricate vegetarian sushi she’d spent a lot of time on, and it turned out that the customer loved it. All the servings were gone in a flash. The owner hurried into the kitchen and said, “We need more sushi! Right away!” The cook, who was working on several other dishes by then, threw up her hands. “Jesus! I can’t pull sushi out of my …”
When I read the Canadian mayors’ response to Pierre Poilievre’s latest solution to the housing crisis, I felt they were saying just the same thing as that cook I worked with, but in more diplomatic terms. The mayors reasonably pointed out that they, actually, don’t build the houses, and they can’t control the rate of building. However, we can likely guarantee that if the federal government withheld infrastructure funding, as Poilievre is suggesting, there will be less houses built in the future. Unless every house comes with its own septic field and well for water and the developers put in their own roads.
Conservatives like to think that the lack of housing is all about bureaucratic foot-dragging and NIMBYism, and with councillors on Hamilton’s general issues committee coming to the spirited defence of a handful of parking spots rather than build affordable housing, I can see where that idea might come from. But cities are wise to be cautious of developers.
One just needs to look at all the stalled developments dotting our downtown, including Hamilton City Centre, the lonely façade of James Street Baptist Church or the partially built tower at 15 Cannon St. W. to see why. Let’s not even mention the Jamesville social housing debacle, which was started with fanfare in 2019, the housing still empty and decaying today as the tents line up across the street from it.
It’s not just Hamilton struggling with getting developers to actually build things. The Toronto Star recently reported that Tarion, the non-profit that provides new home warrantees to Ontarians, as well as theoretically regulating parts of the new home industry, is predicting it will pay out damages of $90 million in lost deposits as builders walk away from projects. This will be Tarion’s biggest payout ever. Tying infrastructure dollars to an industry this turbulent is a recipe for disaster, as the Ford Progressive Conservatives seem to have recently realized. The housing targets in Bill 23 now include new basement suites, laneway housing and longterm-care beds, a shift that is raising some eyebrows, but is allowing money to flow to municipalities that might not have otherwise qualified under a more stringent definition of housing starts.
Private businesses, such as developers, don’t operate for the public good. They’re there to make money. That’s not a bad thing, unless we’re expecting them to solve public problems. This is why we’ve seen all the recent chaos around private/ public partnerships at Ontario colleges, why Shoppers Drug Mart management was recently accused of pressuring their pharmacists to cold call customers for unnecessary prescription checks they could bill back to the Ontario government at $75 each and why, tragically, forprofit long-term-care homes had such high death rates over COVID-19.
If we want things done for the public good, they’re best done by the public sector.
Withholding funds from our crumbling public institutions to make the private sector work faster is not just bad policy, it can be dangerous. And it punishes those often working hardest to make change. While federal and provincial conservatives carry on with the carrot and stick routine, public workers struggle on, with our city staff literally trying to keep buildings from falling on top of us.
Maybe it’s time for all our politicians to put down their sticks and start helping the people who do the work best to rebuild our cities. It’s not like we can pull housing out of thin air.
NOELLE ALLEN IS THE PUBLISHER OF WOLSAK AND WYNN. SHE LIVES IN HAMILTON.