Gunter: Trudeau's housing strategy has pros, but how will we pay for it?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld)

There are some facets of the federal Liberal government’s national housing strategy, released in Toronto on Wednesday, that make a lot of sense.

No, seriously. I am not currently in the Postmedia concussion protocol as I write this.

Much of the housing strategy is the kind of feel-good gobbledygook we have come to expect from the Trudeau government. For instance, there is a promise to declare housing a “fundamental right” and cut homelessness in half.

And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge to apply “gender-based analysis” to solving the lack of affordable housing means what, exactly? Contractors who receive government housing contracts will need to equip their carpenters with pink hammers?

Still, there truly are a few good ideas.

The Canada Housing Benefit (CHB), for instance, might just help tens of thousands of low-income families find affordable housing (or keep housing they are already living in) without creating ghettos or further distorting already overheated housing markets.

It won’t help 300,000 families as Trudeau predicts. Government programs are never as efficient or beneficial as politicians would like us to believe. And the benefit will end up costing more than the projected $1 billion per year.

But the benefit gets away from the typical move by governments looking to help families, which is to spend billions having cheap units built. This tends to corral low-income families into pre-set neighbourhoods where there may or may not be jobs and good schools.

Under the typical social housing model, the availability of housing determines where low-income families live, rather than the availability of opportunities.

Soon cycles of unemployment, substance abuse, crime and violence, family break-up, school failure and poverty begin to repeat themselves.

The $2,500 annual subsidy of the Canada Housing Benefit would act kind of like a voucher with the money following the tenant rather than the other way around. That should make it easier for lower-income Canadians to move to where they can get back on their feet. At the same time, it won’t encourage the construction of large-scale, low-income housing blocks (another Liberal promise will do that).

The benefit will be applied unfairly, of course, because governments will be only half-good at choosing who receives it. Many who get it won’t deserve it and many who deserve it won’t get it. But even at that, it should work better than the regular social-housing system where contractors are paid truckloads of tax dollars to build human warehouses and bureaucrats get to decide who is lucky enough to live there.

But I have one question for the Liberals: Just where are you planning to get the money for this?

The Liberals are not getting away from the typical social-housing ambitions entirely. They intend to build 100,000 social-housing units and renovate 300,000 more.

And in a move that is cynical even by Liberal standards, the best parts of the overall strategy – including the housing benefit – are being held hostage by the outcome of the next election. The benefit doesn’t kick in unless Canadians re-elect the Trudeau government in 2019.

I also have no doubt the Liberals are trying to sew some confusion. They want middle-class voters, who have been frustrated by having to pay $500,000 for a 300-square-foot microsuite in a condo tower in Toronto or Vancouver, to confuse “affordable housing” with “housing affordability” and think all the billions being sloshed around will somehow help them buy something bigger and better.

But the biggest question is still, just where does a government that is going into debt by $20 billion or $30 billion a year – at a faster rate than any other peacetime government in Canadian history – find $4 billion a year for its housing strategy?

Beware, higher taxes ahead.

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