The biggest policy failures often start with a faulty diagnosis. Prime Minister Mark Carney and B.C. Premier David Eby’s plan to convert thousands of vacant condo units into rent-to-own housing treats a symptom of Canada’s housing crisis instead of its underlying disease. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, there were 5,849 new and unsold apartments across B.C. in May, with roughly 75 per cent in Metro Vancouver. This is the highest it’s been since the CMHC started recording data 36 years ago.
The basic shape of Carney’s program, announced in Vancouver last month, involved the federal and provincial governments acquiring more than 2,200 of these units through Build Canada Homes and BC Housing. Buying up the surplus and handing it to people who need housing sounded like a common-sense, straightforward solution.
It didn’t take long for the criticism to arrive from every direction. It was a strange moment when parties that disagree about almost everything in housing policy found themselves united in criticizing the same intervention. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called it a “transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the have-yachts.” The NDP came to much the same conclusion from the opposite direction. Housing critic Jenny Kwan questioned why governments were spending public money to acquire distressed condominiums after B.C. had suspended its Community Housing Fund, a program to build affordable housing, and argued the proposal lacked clear affordability targets or meaningful safeguards to ensure taxpayers were getting lasting public value.
A week after the announcement, Carney clarified the plan, admitting that the government hadn’t done a good job explaining it. He has insisted, repeatedly, that no specific transaction is on the table yet and that the government would only buy “distressed” units at a discount, not at prices close to what developers originally wanted. Eby has gone further, insisting the program won’t apply to city of Vancouver developers at all. He said it’s aimed instead at regions like the Fraser Valley, the Okanagan and Vancouver Island, and that units will be acquired at a price below the cost of construction.
