The stage for a snap 44th general election on Monday, Sept. 20.
Party leaders talk affordability in B.C., Ontario
OTTAWA -- Canada’s main political parties say they are putting your pocketbook at the top of their agendas, with varying promises to help make everything from housing to food to mobile phone bills more affordable. Affordability was already a concern for many Canadians before the pandemic hit, but COVID-19 lockdowns and supplychain constraints exacerbated many of the existing problems. That is particularly the case for a housing market made ever hotter by a pandemic that drove more Canadians to want bigger homes and bigger yards, which expanded housing demand issues from mostly big cities to suburbs and even many parts of rural Canada, too. Inflation in July hit 3.7 per cent, the highest annual increase in more than a decade, driven in part by hikes in the prices of gas and food. Those costs are in part being driven by reopening of economies driving up demand, and ongoing supply-chain constraints.
But Statistics Canada’s housing replacement cost index, which is tied to the cost of building a new home, was one of the biggest drivers. It rose almost 14 per cent, the highest increase since 1987.
The Canadian Real Estate Association said the average price of buying a house jumped almost 26 per cent between June 2020 and June 2021.“There is a cost of living crisis in Canada right now,” Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole says in an ad he posted Tuesday to Twitter.Experts across Canada point to supply constraints as the main driver of housing costs, and it’s a problem that is years in the making. ”My take is that there has been less-than-adequate housing construction over the past five decades,” said Murtaza Haider, a professor of real estate management at Ryerson University in Toronto. All three main national parties have now pushed out promises to try to restrict foreign buyers from purchasing housing in Canada . the NDP plan a 20 per cent tax on housing purchases by non-Canadians or permanent residents,. S: