Times Colonist

Provinces agree on feds’ strategy, billions will be spent on social, rental housing

- JORDAN PRESS

OTTAWA — Provinces and territorie­s have agreed to fund a key financial pillar supporting the Trudeau government’s decade-long housing strategy, vowing to spend billions to repair and build social housing units and create a new rental benefit.

Several of the key programs in the housing strategy unveiled in November rested on provinces and territorie­s matching promised new federal funding to the tune of $8.6 billion. All regions, except Quebec, now have agreed to match about $7.7 billion in planned spending through to 2028.

Fine print in the plan shows that up to half of what the federal government would count as matching funding can come from cities, Indigenous organizati­ons, charities, or the private sector.

The agreement says that some money spent since the start of the month might also be counted against the $7.7 billion pledge.

The federal government promised to introduce legislatio­n that would make it difficult for a future government to back out of the strategy to help provinces and territorie­s set long-term plans, instead of wondering how much they might receive year by year.

“We know that this is extremely important for provinces and territorie­s that want to plan over the long term,” Social Developmen­t Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said in an interview Monday.

“It’s clear, of course, that future government­s — future federal government­s or even future provincial and territoria­l government­s — could change their mind, but that would be much harder to do with the type of housing agreement arrived to today.”

The agreement signed Monday in Toronto lays out a framework that sets out how money is first going to flow to repairs and constructi­on of affordable housing units, while ensuring no net loss in units, particular­ly for urban Aboriginal­s.

What that means in raw numbers is adding about 50,000 units to the system and repairing 60,000 more, while promoting constructi­on of mixed-income and mixed-use residentia­l developmen­ts.

Spending early on in the plan will focus on these bricks and mortar issues and shift to the $4 billion housing benefit that will become progressiv­ely portable, so about 300,000 households could have the supplement follow them if they ever decide to move out of a social housing unit.

The new benefit wouldn’t be rolled out until 2020, with the first dollars planned to flow in 2021.

The speed with which Monday’s announceme­nt came together caught housing advocates off-guard.

Pedro Barata, co-chair of the National Housing Collaborat­ive, an umbrella group created to lobby the Liberals on the design of the housing strategy, said the agreement “puts real fuel in the tank in moving this forward.”

And Jeff Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Associatio­n, said the framework “removes a major stumbling block” to implementi­ng the housing strategy.

What the framework doesn’t include is provincial and territoria­l blessing for a federal initiative to legislate a right to housing. Duclos said regions had different views on how useful the promised federal rights legislatio­n would be in reducing the country’s housing crunch and the agreement references the idea only as a federal initiative.

The next step will be to sign one-on-one funding agreements so federal money can flow to provinces and, ultimately, municipali­ties.

And Duclos said that in a few weeks, the government will unveil the details of a new $15.9 billion financing program to help housing providers use their assets to leverage additional cash to build new apartments and homes.

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