Liberals will find a way to disappoint Canadian renters again: NDP

Canada’s NDP Housing critic Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East) issued the following statement in reaction to the government’s housing announcement on Tuesday:

“Canadians can’t trust those who created this mess to fix it. Successive Liberal and Conservative governments made the housing crisis worse by cutting funding for social and co-operative housing and letting profit-driven private developers run the show. Now corporate landlords are buying affordable housing across the country, hiking up the prices and renovicting tenants.

In Halifax, where the Prime Minister made his announcement, increased renovictions under his watch are fuelling homelessness. Recently, developers who recently bought off an affordable housing complex in Dartmouth have served renoviction notices to about 1000 tenants so they can jack up rent. The Liberal government’s efforts to build affordable homes have not even offset the loss of affordable rental homes. This means Canadians needing housing are still actively losing affordable options.

Meanwhile, Canadians can’t count on Pierre Poilievre whose own donors are the same wealthy developers profiting from Canada’s housing crisis. And while he pretends he wants to make things better, when Poilievre was in government for nine years, Canadians lost 800,000 affordable homes. That number rose by an additional 370 000 units under Justin Trudeau which means there’s over a million families that could have had an affordable place to live today.

New Democrats believe municipalities need infrastructure funding to build more homes people can afford, but given their track record, the Liberals will find a way disappoint Canadian families again. The NDP will keep fighting to deliver the homes people can afford.”