Housing crisis: Fraser fears builders will hit ceiling of homes they can build, urges rapid industry growth

I fear right now that if we have a perfect set of financial policies, a perfect set of municipal zoning policies, faster, permanent across Canada, we’re still going to hit a ceiling pretty soon on the number of homes that Canadian industry can build. Now, this isn’t the fault of industry. They’re the ones were actually going to help solve the housing crisis in a lot of ways. But we need to help them grow at a pace faster than they’ve experienced over the last number of years. There’s a number of ways that we can help do this. We can continue to support in a scaled up way, new training initiative so we can grow the Canadian home building workforce. We can embrace targeted immigration programs to make sure that those who are coming here have the opportunity to help solve a major, major social problem and create enormous economic opportunities for our communities. But if we continue to build homes more or less the same way that we have over the last number of decades, we’re not going to be able to leverage the full capacity. We have to ask ourselves what kind of a country we want to be and whether we want to ensure that everyone who calls himself a Canadian goes to bed with a roof over their head. We have a 30 year history in this country. The federal government’s washing their hands of the responsibility to invest in affordable housing and my God, are we paying for it today? There’s no need. We have to accept that our communities do not have enough homes for the people who live in them. We take our lead from people who are feeling the impact of the lack of affordability in the housing market. And importantly, we listen to the people who have a history of building homes. We can solve the housing crisis.