Look, I hate the conservatives as much as the next guy but this isn’t true. They have specific policy planks about the housing shortage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvFFGoAVeDY
(Warning, PP’s YouTube channel, I don’t know if you want that in your watch history considering how yt might use it for recommendations).
I’ve said before – most of their policy is terrifying and evil. But on the housing shortage, Poilievre’s echoing progressive YIMBYs like AOC. The party has clear and good policy ideas there and the Liberals should steal them to take this weapon away from them, the same way they steal policy ideas from the NDP.
Is he just removing some red tape on SFH, municipal taxes on devlopments and allowing places like the greenbelt to be developed or does he want to change the urban fabric of our cities by removing zoning laws that make builiding multi units and density impossible and force developers to build affordable housing as well as luxury homes? These both can increase the supply of housing but in very different ways that will impact urban fabric and housing prices. The conversation isn’t as simple as build more houses anywhere they can fit. Many of our cities have spralwed themselves into near bankruptcy and adding a new subdivsion and stripmall outside of town will not fix that. We need more variety in the housing market but as it stands it seems everyone is expected to own a minimum lot size with 2 car garage and 3 stories to their house regardless of their actual needs.
I’m a firm green infill YIMBY so I agree with you on the policy stuff there. As for PP, fortunately the greenbelt is provincial so he doesn’t have the right to do so. This is constitutional. And he’s calling out Vancouver, a place where there is no place to sprawl, so necessarily cutting out red tape and unlocking housing would mean upzoning, they’d have literally no other option to allow more housing.
If he wanted to push for that why hasn’t he used supporting language like density and transit? I hope for the best for these cities but I worry the conservative take will just mean more McMansions while SFH continue to be converted into multi units owned by landlords.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=WvFFGoAVeDY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
