So did Poilievre really build just six affordable housing units in that time?
No.
The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed to the Star that the number came from an answer to an order paper question tabled by NDP MP Jenny Kwan in December.
(MPs are able to pose questions to the government that result in a formal response, often in the form of written answers.)
Kwan had asked for a breakdown of the federal funding that was provided to support the construction of non-profit, community, co-operative and purpose-built rental housing — along with how many of those units were built — while Harper’s Conservatives were in power.
In its response to Kwan’s question, CMHC noted that there were limitations to some of the data it can provide.
During the 2015-2016 fiscal year included in the agency’s breakdown — the time frame relevant to Poilievre’s responsibility for the file — the document notes that across Canada, six non-profit or community housing units were built, all in Quebec.
But while it might seem like the Liberals have found a damning statistic to undermine Poilievre’s record on affordable housing, that’s not actually the case, said Steve Pomeroy, a housing policy expert who previously worked for CMHC.
Pomeroy said the data excludes a sizable number of units for which Ottawa was a funding partner, and only includes units delivered or administered solely by CMHC. In reality, he said the federal government has bilateral agreements with provinces and territories under which housing costs are shared, but the units are ultimately classified as having been delivered by those provinces and territories, not the federal government.
The numbers provided in response to Kwan’s question “include only units funded under programs delivered exclusively by CMHC,” the housing expert said, and “volumes under those programs were very small” in comparison to the number of units built under the bilateral agreements.
Last year, Pomeroy took it upon himself to get more accurate numbers.
Frustrated by a lack of publicly available and accurate data on social housing over the past two decades, Pomeroy worked with CMHC to generate a custom data set that laid out the number of social housing units developed each fiscal year. He shared that data in a brief to a House of Commons committee last month.
He found that in the 2015-16 fiscal year, 3,742 non-profit units and 506 co-operative units were completed with the help of federal funding.
The conclusion? That’s a lot more than six.
Poilievre says he actually built 200,000 homes when he was minister. Is that true?
In that same question period last May, Poilievre had a rebuttal at the ready for Trudeau’s claims.
“Mr. Speaker, actually the number is closer to 200,000, but the prime minister has never been very good with numbers,” the Conservative leader fired back.
But that statement seems to be yet another case of real figures shrouded in misleading context.
Poilievre’s office told the Star that his number came from Statistics Canada data, which shows that 194,461 housing units were completed in 2015.
That number includes different types of housing, like single-detached homes and apartments, but none are explicitly identified as “affordable” — which, Pomeroy said, typically only account for a small percentage of total builds.
He also noted that some of the units completed in 2015 were likely in development before Poilievre became minister of employment and social development.
“There’s housing being built all the time. It’s a market activity,” said David Hulchanski, a housing chair and professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.
“Developers all over the country want to build condos and subdivisions,” Hulchanski said. “With a strong economy, the number is going to be higher, and with a poor economy or high interest rates the number is going to be lower. That’s just the way it is, so it’s a meaningless claim.”
Huchanski and Pomeroy both said that aside from those economic considerations, housing numbers tend to hover around the number Poilievre cited every year, because of private sector development that is unrelated to the government of the day.
“We have exaggerations on both sides,” Pomeroy said.
