The federal government intends to resurrect a post-war effort to ramp up housing construction across Canada — but with a 21st-century twist.
A consultation process will begin next month on developing a catalogue of pre-approved home designs to accelerate the home-building process for developers, Housing Minister Sean Fraser said Tuesday.
It’s a reboot of a federal policy from the post-Second World War era, when the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. developed straightforward blueprints to help speed up the construction of badly needed homes, Fraser said.
“When many thousands of soldiers were returning home to be reunited with their families at once, Canada faced enormous housing crunches,” he said.
“We intend to take these lessons from our history books and bring them into the 21st century.” … [More in the article]
This was not on my radar of potential solutions to the housing issue, but it’s a very good idea that we know works. The Liberals have been garbage at getting the message across, much of the public seems to have slipped into just not listening to them at all. But they’ve been working on this problem, following the recommendations in the National Housing Accord: https://www.nationalhousingaccord.ca/
Up to this point, I don’t think the problem has been messaging for the Liberals, it’s that they have largely ignored housing as an issue for way too long and are struggling to respond effectively.
No, it’s messaging. They’ve been implementing housing policy steadily since they were elected, much of the policy was passed well before the pandemic, and due to the long development lag on new housing starts, and the catastrophic jolts from covid19, we are only starting to see the effect. This is not a problem that will be fixed fast or with one piece of legislation.
In 2018/2019 we got the national cohousing investment fund, the rental construction financing initiative, the rapid housing initiative, the first time home buyer incentive, the canada housing benefit agreement.
You agree with these, you don’t agree, you didn’t find them effective, you would have picked something else, fine, that’s fine, people always disagree, but “ignored” housing is honestly just a meme people repeat that weirdo policy wonks like me roll their eyes at.