Nearly six months after promising to “build twice as many homes every year,” on Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carney followed the path laid out by virtually every other left-leaning politician in the country by launching a new government bureaucracy intended to increase the stock of affordable (read: socialized) housing throughout the country.
You’ll be forgiven if you’ve heard this one before. Promising affordable housing is a favourite pastime of the federal Liberals, largely because most of the impediments to building new homes fall outside Ottawa’s jurisdiction. It’s far easier to spend gobs of taxpayer money and create giant new bureaucracies than to actually deal with the reasons why Canada’s housing supply has failed to meet demand.
In 2017, the Liberals launched a $40-billion “Nati