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.
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree says Ottawa continues to have “difficult conversations” with New Delhi about the 2023 killing of a Canadian Sikh leader, but the Prime Minister’s Office has declined to say if the matter was raised earlier this week in talks between Mark Carney and his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi.
Mr. Carney ducked a question Tuesday about whether he and Mr. Modi had discussed the killing of the Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, during a one-on-one meeting that day at the G7 leaders’ summit in Kananaskis, Alta.
The Globe and Mail pressed the PMO on Wednesday about whether Mr. Nijjar’s slaying and Indian foreign interference were part of the discussions. Sikh organizations and human-rights activists have also sought clarification on what was discussed.
Mr. Carney’s press secretary, Audrey Champoux, would not comment on Wednesday. She referred The Globe to a statement the two leaders released Tuesday: “Prime Minister Carney raised priorities on the G7 agenda, including transnational crime and repression, security, and the rules-based order.”
After the meeting, the two leaders announced that they would designate new high commissioners and restore regular diplomatic services to citizens in both countries.
Bilateral relations went into a deep freeze in 2024, after then-prime minister Justin Trudeau and the RCMP said there was evidence linking agents of the Modi government to Mr. Nijjar’s slaying.
Canada expelled the Indian high commissioner and five other diplomats over the killing. India denied any role and responded with similar diplomatic expulsions.
NDP MP Jenny Kwan, an outspoken human-rights activist, said in a June 17 letter to Mr. Carney that re-establishing diplomatic normalcy with India when it has yet to account for its role in the death of Mr. Nijjar “sends a deeply painful message to Sikh Canadians who continue to live under threat.”
Major Sikh organizations and human-rights advocates also wrote a separate letter to Mr. Carney on Tuesday, saying the Nijjar killing was part of a co-ordinated campaign of transnational repression that “continues to violate Canadian sovereignty.”
Like another government before them, the Liberals are trying to satiate law enforcement’s perennial desire for warrantless access to personal information in the digital age by linking it to a perceived emergency.
The Conservatives under Stephen Harper did it in 2013, when Vic Toews, the public safety minister, famously said of a Liberal opposition critic that, “He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”
Mr. Toews was talking about the 2012 Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, which would have given police unprecedented powers to monitor Canadians’ internet activities without a warrant.
The bill did not in fact mention children or internet predators anywhere except in its title, and the Conservatives abandoned it in 2013 under a withering public outcry.
The Carney Liberals are now throwing around the words “fentanyl,” “sex offenders” and “money laundering” in Bill C-2, and suggesting Canada’s borders are porous, for the same purpose.
The government’s inclusion of warrantless information demand powers in Bill C-2 may make this the most dangerous lawful access proposal yet, exceeding even the 2010 bill led by Conservative Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. The initial concern regarding the bill’s warrantless disclosure demand unsurprisingly focused on whether the proposal was consistent with Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence upholding the reasonable expectation of privacy in basic subscriber information (there is a strong argument it is not). The application of this new power was generally framed as a matter for telecom and Internet companies, given that companies such as Bell, Rogers, and Telus are typically the focal point for law enforcement seeking information on subscriber activity. However, it has become increasingly apparent that this is an overly restrictive reading of the provision. The Bill C-2 information demand power doesn’t just target telecom providers. It targets everyone who provides services with the prospect of near limitless targets for warrantless disclosure demands.