Politics aside, housing plan still offers big help

First, let’s not pretend there isn’t a healthy helping of politics in the Liberal government’s new national housing strategy.

It does address an urgent need — but apparently not urgent enough to get most of the money flowing before the next federal election. Deferring major spending until after the next ballots are cast is a grab from the playbook of the former Conservative government.

It requires buy-in and funding from the provinces, so there is still work to do before the Liberals can truly announce this with their attendant celestial horns.

The Liberals voted down an NDP private member’s bill that would have made housing a human right so they could make the announcement themselves, a garden variety political manoeuvre.

This does little or nothing for the millennial laying awake at night in some Toronto or Vancouver tower wondering whether they can ever buy a house.

It offers nothing for the boomerang offspring who is back in his or her roost in mom and dad’s basement.

And let’s not forget that it will become that much tougher come Jan. 1, 2018, to buy that home, that middle-class dream the Liberals advertise.

New rules will require buyers who are making down payments of more than 20 per cent to undergo a “stress test” to prove they could still afford their mortgage payments if interest rates were to rise two percentage points.

Whether this valuable Liberal constituency feels it has been ignored — absent some expected future government action to help first-time home buyers — remains to be seen.

But there are two bottom lines here.

Yes, affording that new home in Toronto and Vancouver (or Victoria or Hamilton for that matter) is no closer to reality, but the government of Justin Trudeau has embarked on a bold, long overdue strategy to help the marginalized who need that lifeline much more than someone about to rely on the bank of mom and dad.

A strategy with this many moving parts can’t be delivered in months, but key to this 10-year plan is the Liberal promise to enshrine this in legislation, meaning a new government in the autumn of 2019 would have two choices — only one potentially palatable. It would continue with the plan or repeal a law helping put a roof over the head of Canadians. Toronto MP Adam Vaughan, a key architect of the plan, says it is “absurd” to suggest that something of this magnitude can be done without extending into a future mandate.

He argues it is the provinces, mayors and housing advocates who have demanded the stability which comes from a 10-year-plan, and, he argues, when previous governments dove into this problem, they dealt only with the low-hanging fruit to try to most easily grease the skids for re-election.

And over the life of the 10 years, he says, the spending ramps up because rents will ramp up based on the cost of living.

The most ambitious goal in this program could be a $2.2-billion program to reduce homelessness by 50 per cent.

To solve the homeless problem, the first step would appear to be to stop the flow of people onto the street, getting help to kids before they hit the street. Getting them off the street is the most expensive and least humane way of helping the homeless, Vaughan argues.

About eight in 10 Canadians who are technically homeless, but may not show up in government statistics, the couch surfers or the single mom who has moved herself and her children into Grandma’s home, are tough and resilient enough to deal with the situation on their own.

They are known to the government as the hidden homeless, and it is difficult to collect accurate data on them.

They will be the first to occupy any new housing.

Vaughan cites a women’s shelter in the Northwest Territories where some women have lived for years. If a new affordable housing unit is built there, those women would just move across the street to the more comfortable housing, a positive move, but something that would not put a dent in the homeless population.

It is the 17 per cent to 20 per cent of the homeless, many of them chronically without a roof and the face of homelessness for most Canadians, which is where the real work has to be done, Vaughan says.

The middle may feel squeezed as homeownership becomes more elusive.

But first, those at the bottom of the social strata deserve help, and, politics aside, a federal government is finally prepared to offer that help. Tim Harper writes on national affairs. tjharper77@gmail.com, Twitter: @nutgraf1