Orders of the Day

Hon. R. Kahlon: In this chamber, I call continued second reading for Bill 44, Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act.

In the Douglas Fir Committee Room, I call Committee of the Whole on Bill 38, International Credentials Recognition Act.

In the third House, committee room C, I call Committee of the Whole for Bill 40, School Amendment Act.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 44 — HOUSING STATUTES
(RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT)
AMENDMENT ACT, 2023

(continued)

R. Merrifield: In continuation of my comments, this isn’t about wanting density. It’s about where it goes.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

We face a multitude of barriers stifling the birth of new homes, from development cost charges in Metro Vancouver that threaten to hoist an additional $25,000 per unit onto the price tag of a new home to the frustrating entanglements of regulations that deter small landlords from offering their properties for rent. We cannot ignore the stringent step code for the new buildings that, while aimed at sustainability, inadvertently pile up to about $50,000 to the cost of each new home or unit.

[1:35 p.m.]

Nor can we overlook the development approvals process review that highlights severe backlogs, a startling lack of authority for crucial agreements and a burdensome referral process to the Ministries of — I don’t know — Transportation, Environment, Agriculture, Forests, and water boards. Each one of those approvals can take a year, two years, three years.

Let’s consider the individuals, the human faces behind these initiatives. Well, there’s Teresa Chhina, a housing outreach worker who, in a cruel twist of irony, finds herself without a home. There’s Batuhan Özer, caught in a dystopian struggle akin to the Hunger Games, just to glimpse a single apartment. Then there’s Paula Hudson-Lunn, 71 years old, scouring for housing in Nelson, a city with a rental vacancy rate hovering at a dismal 0.6 percent.

The most harrowing statistic of all — this is pretty interesting: our birth rates. It’s one of the major driving forces behind our immigration policies. Those are plunging to a 15-year low. The dream of parenthood is now shadowed by the nightmarish costs of living in our province, evidenced by the story of Michelle Cyca, a new mother compelled to move far from her support system.

We’re doing this to them. This is what the NDP policies are doing. It’s about the cost of living. It’s about the cost of housing. It’s about how we are asking people to live. It’s about the lottery to get the $10-a-day child care spot or even a spot at all. This is what we are doing to our younger generation. They’re choosing not to have kids.

Recently I was on a phone call. My husband overheard just the last part of my conversation, and he asked: “What were those numbers that you were talking about?” I said: “Oh, that’s the cost of child care right now.” He looked at me, his eyes actually welled up with tears, and he said to me: “Really? Really? Our kids are never going to be able to have kids. How could they afford even a two-bedroom condo and the price of child care?” But this new bill is going to solve all of that.

Well, I decided to do some math on it. A lot that is under 280 square metres is going to yield three units, and over will yield four. So let’s do the math on one that will yield four units: 280 square metres is 3,000 square feet. We’ll be able to, with setbacks, etc., probably occupy 65 percent of the lot, which is 1,950 square feet. Then you take 87 percent of that, which is the optimal efficiency of a building with internal penetration. Now we’re down to 1,696 square feet.

Then we multiply that by three stories. Let’s hope we can go three stories next to all those single-family homes. That’s 5,089.5 square feet. Then, as the minister has stated, each of those will have a parking stall. So we’ll take off the parking for that, divide it by the four units, and we have left 872 square feet per unit. That’s what we’re doing.

I actually am not that much of an advocate of single-family housing, but let me tell you why single-family housing exists. It is one of the most flexible zonings, it is the fastest to build, and it is the least cost per square foot to build. So we are taking out of the mix one of the products that is absolutely the least expensive per square foot to build, and we are now putting one of the most expensive in its place.

Coupled with the fact that these homes are not properly serviced with the schools, parks, transit, amenities, etc., yeah, I don’t blame the next generation. Why would you want to have children at all?

Homelessness, too, paints a grim picture of this government’s tenure: a 34 percent increase since 2017. These are not just numbers. This is a searing indictment of policy failures. These are not just street entrenched. These are seniors that are losing their homes and turning to the streets.

I recently had a phone call from one of the shelters who said: “You have to find the senior citizens housing. They can’t stay at the shelter. It’s not safe for them.” But they had nowhere else to go.

Turning to the specifics of Bill 44, what we see is a glaring void, an informational vacuum with no policy manual in sight until this legislation is etched into law. This isn’t just putting the cart before a horse. There is no horse.

[1:40 p.m.]

What of the practical details: setbacks, height restrictions, parking and lot coverage? They remain as elusive as the affordable homes we are promised. This bill, absent of detail, is a hollow shell, emblematic of a government all too comfortable with grandstanding but devoid of substance — a government that, when the Premier speaks candidly, confesses to a lineup of unsolved crises.

The Premier confessed as much at a gathering of NDP insiders at the Broadbent Institute this September: “We’re not going to solve the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the health care challenges. We’re not going to solve all these issues in Columbia between now and the next election.” After seven years, what will be eight years of this government, two terms of a majority, they’d better be able to say that they’ve solved some of those crises.

And what of implementation? Large portions of this legislation won’t see the light of day until the next term, while our citizens yearn for relief now. The NDP would have them stalled in the waiting room of bureaucracy. What’s going to happen between now and when the regu­lations come in? City councils won’t know what to approve. Planning staff won’t know what is actually allowed.

We have to remember that housing isn’t simply a matter of numbers or construction. It’s about communities. We need parks, schools, transit, services to occupy this growth. Otherwise, we’re not building homes; we’re stacking boxes. This government speaks of suburban densification yet it remains silent on the critical infrastructure these communities depend on.

We are here for density. We love density. B.C. United thinks density is great, as long as it is smart density — density in the right areas, planned density, density where it belongs. High-density construction should be prioritized in the areas where it’s most crucial, steering clear of the inefficient spread of urban sprawl.

Home ownership should be attainable, with residences conveniently situated near transit systems, allowing for a seamless journey to work or educational institutions. These are precisely the types of housing developments we need to promote.

Our blueprint is coming, and it’s going to be way better. It’s going to actually fix housing. I’m so excited about it; I can hardly speak. We’re committed to avoiding the pitfalls of states like California, unlike this NDP government with this bill, where uncontrolled sprawl has led to chronic congestion, turning commutes into multi-hour ordeals.

This proposed legislation’s, Bill 44, changes aim to escalate average density in suburban localities. In Kelowna, suburban sprawl and increased density are discouraged in the OCP. Quadrupling the density of the suburban neighbourhoods could cripple our infrastructure.

Let’s talk about schools for just a second. The schools in my riding are all above capacity. Our high school has so many portables and is so loaded, we need, desperately, another high school. What happens if every, single, single-family lot becomes four? What happens to all of those elementary schools and middle schools and high schools? This plan conspicuously lacks the necessary blueprint to underpin such extensive housing with adequate infrastructure.

The NDP appears to be at a loss regarding the financing of these imperative amenities. Without a comprehensive plan to diminish taxes, cut down on unnecessary bureaucracy and reduce fees, the dream of affordable housing remains elusive. Because as our leader of B.C. United says, if you want to make housing more affordable, make it less expensive.

The company that I founded builds housing in four provinces. B.C. is, far and away, the most expensive place to build housing.

[1:45 p.m.]

Not because a 2-by-4 costs any more or less in Winnipeg, in Regina or in Edmonton but because of all the bureaucracy, red tape, requirements, restrictions, guide­lines, DCCs, cost charges, amenity fees, etc.

Provincial intervention is necessary. The current administration, though, is very misguided. The NDP seem to be stuck in a loop of regurgitating previous announcements that have spiraled beyond their initial budget projections. They don’t know how to build — not on budget, not on time. So why should we believe that they can actually fix housing?

Well, you’re right. The Premier is right. They can’t fix housing. And the people of British Columbia are growing weary of their narrative, continually witnessing the reiteration of old promises without any substantial increase in affordable housing stock to show for these declarations. Broken promises.

Where do we go from here? How do we keep the dream of housing ownership alive? How do we keep the dream of affordable housing alive? How do we keep the dream of attainable housing alive?

Well, this NDP looks backwards. But the B.C. United caucus? We’re poised to look forward. We will be presenting a comprehensive plan, a blueprint for a future where homes are abundant, where they’re a fit for every family, every senior, every individual, regardless of income — a plan that sees beyond the horizon to a province where everyone can afford to dream, to build and to live.

We’re not going to stand idly by as the hope of affordable housing fades into the twilight. Why? Because British Columbians deserve better. They deserve certainty, and above all, they deserve a home. That’s our promise, a pledge not built on the shifting sands of rhetoric but on the solid ground of action and results. This is the commitment of the B.C. caucus to you, British Columbia.

I look forward to committee stage on this bill.

A. Olsen: I rise to speak to Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023. I’m the designated speaker for the B.C. Green caucus.

It’s important that I frame my comments today in the experience I’ve had over the past 15 years as an elected representative of my community.

First, I’m still the kid who grew up in W̱JOȽEȽP, Tsartlip Reserve, the young man that the people of Central Saanich elected as their district councillor and now the MLA for Saanich North and the Islands.

This speech ranges across those many years, the thousands of hours of coffee meetings, community meetings, duly convened meetings, Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities conventions, Union of B.C. Municipalities conventions. This speech is the result of the cumulative work of those 15 years as an elected official in this socioeconomic system, this political system, this bureaucratic system.

This speech incorporates the conversations about form and character of neighbourhoods, the imbalance the settlement and land use patterns of past decades has created, patterns that largely excluded housing forms for people who couldn’t afford a mortgage, people who can’t afford to participate in the market housing system — all our friends, family and neighbours, who contribute to the fabric of our society, the front-line health care workers, construction workers, trades, seniors and our children.

I know my colleagues at the local government council tables across the province have been the easy target of senior governments, who need to look at themselves for propping up systems that have produced the exact results that we face today.

It is troubling that we are so intoxicated with this belief that the socioeconomic systems that I’m going to talk about in this speech must be perfect, must be just one or two tweaks away from working as we envision them. If only we do a little bit more of what we are doing, without having to face the pain of immersing ourselves in the machinery, we’ll get different results.

[1:50 p.m.]

I think the summary, for those that don’t want to hang around here for the next two hours, is we’re getting exactly the results of the system we’ve created and nurtured.

My experience at these tables has me growing increasingly restless, feeling a desperation to speak to the housing affordability crisis that is a direct result of that economic system — a real estate market, a full, free market and the glorification of a toxic individualism that has been elevated above the village, the community, that drives much of the North American beliefs about our economy and how, for the sake of this specific speech, housing product is developed and distributed.

I’ve decided to prepare these remarks for this speech because I have quite a bit to say on this topic, and it is critical that they be organized a little.

For example, I don’t think that it’s helpful for me to stand in here and use strong language like I did last week, “Decommodify the housing market,” without providing context as to what the internal philosopher has been ruminating on. I did that in my Bill 35 speech, and I regret that I ventured into the area without providing some context and some detail.

What I’m about to say here will likely be challenging for many to hear. Human civilization is facing existential threats. Climate change, extreme weather, soil-scorching wildfires, heat domes and atmospheric rivers are costing society infinite billions of dollars and countless lives — many who died in isolation, suffocated in the heat of their ill-equipped apartment — thousands whose lives were washed away when the river broke the 100-year-old dike that we knew, a decade ago, needed to be upgraded, that the local government prioritized but that didn’t deliver enough votes for the provincial and federal governments to pay attention to.

Whether we are prepared to admit it or not, the experiment of the last 150 years attempts to answer the underlying question: how much of the abundance of the earth can we take before it breaks? Another question: how long do you think it will take for humans to break it?

The collective connection and reverence our species had with the biodiverse ecosystems we lived in has been broken. The village has been abandoned, and each individual unleashed to live their best lives. The village has been replaced with the strip mall, suburban cookie-cutter, stick-frame neighbourhoods that were never sustainable — the gluttonous fossilization of the land, urban sprawls, pipes and asphalt — filling the market with cheap, affordable housing for everyone.

In Victoria, we covered all the flat land quickly. If it wasn’t for the genetic remnant that the agricultural land reserve emerged from, all that land would be covered already too — so urban sprawls across the mountains. It creeps westward, deforesting and pulverizing mountains to push more pipe and asphalt, to fill more markets with more cheap, affordable housing for everyone, plus quite a bit of market appreciation and inflation.

The strawberry fields and salmon creeks that we built on in the 1970s and ’80s in Central Saanich, those formerly affordable houses that we’re living in today…. Well, they’re now 50 years old and each $1 million.

The anthropogenic ruin of earth’s critical, functioning ecosystems — the wilful destruction of the machinery that creates life-sustaining oxygen and clean water — is driven by pride, elevating individual pursuits as the highest form of expression. That was really unlocked when our species became enlightened just a few hundred years ago.

[1:55 p.m.]

Now we see the result: bureaucratized care replacing genuine human connection, corporatized human suffering hunched over in a doorway or bus stop by a crippling chemical concoction that is indiscriminately reaping a half-dozen souls in our province every day. Here’s to chasing the North American dream.

In about a century, we’ve smashed our spaceship, ransacked the treasury and turned the controls over to the most reckless narcissists. Unsurprisingly, we face a chaotic climate, deteriorating housing security and food security, and public insecurity. The public health care system is in perpetual chaos, and the public education system is chronically underfunded.

We’ve known for decades that our public infrastructure is decaying, with scarce resources to properly maintain and upgrade our culverts, roads, bridges, dikes, dams, drinking water and wastewater systems. There’s no credible plan to pay for the infrastructure to support the hundreds of thousands of new people predicted to move into villages, towns and cities in British Columbia each year.

The philosophy and the systems that my great-grandparents’ generation designed and built are not serving us as they once did. We need to have a real conversation, not politicians talking with their mouths full of Okanagan apples, skirting the issue because they lack the courage to actually address what’s happening, because it’s uncomfortable for our collective constituents to hear.

It’s not helpful when members of this chamber forget our history, or wilfully try to rewrite parts of it, when we forget that our ancestors who sat in these seats signed agreements to share this land in a way that they never intended to share it.

This was long before there were subdivision lines drawn on the land surrounding these precincts, long before land use zones defined the small chunk of land inhabited by a settler who was beaten and starved out of their own homeland. The names of those colonial men are memorialized on the streets: Douglas and Blanshard. Only the despicable Trutch didn’t survive.

It’s not helpful when politicians leverage these complex issues for political gain, arguing against development cost charges, like I believe the Leader of the Official Opposition did recently, without clearly identifying how local governments are supposed to pay for all this new supporting infrastructure.

It’s not just the official opposition here in B.C. or in Ottawa whose silky slogans, sound bites and aviator sunshades are so convincing, though. Our own government is responsible for leveraging the suffering for their benefit as well.

Remember when the government was going to make life affordable again? That was Ambassador Horgan’s promise. When his consecutive $100 handouts failed to make a big enough dent on the grocery bill, they stopped talking about making life more affordable again. It’s gone from the playbook, gone from the message box.

As you might sense, this speech is going to get a little gritty. I’m going to name some stuff, because even if the consensus agrees that the issues I raise are not as dramatic as I argue them to be, I will have done my job as a member of the opposition in this House, raising the bitter and uncomfortable truths.

We’ve known for thousands of years that food and shelter are basic human needs, and the socioeconomic systems that produce and distribute food and shelter are the most rudimentary connective tissues holding human societies together. No matter where you come from on earth, when your ancestors secured food production and developed a reliable housing system that supported their way of life, human ingenuity was given space to flourish. Our creativity and innovation soared.

With the energy from full bellies and a sturdy roof over our head, we were able to focus the creativity and innovation of incredible human minds and bodies. Some humans dedicate their energy to intellectual pursuits: inquiring, processing and describing their understanding through theoretical models. Others devote their energy to practical pursuits: growing and refining understanding and expertise through hands-on craftship that comes with repetition and experience.

[2:00 p.m.]

The technologies that our societies benefit from today are possible because our ancestors secured food and shelter. They didn’t work or live alone. Our ancestors were in­dividuals within a collective. Each had a role in the survival of the group.

We produced food security together. We shared re­sponsibility for providing shelter together. We raised and protected our young ones together. And we carried within our identities the law that ensured the collective or the public safety and security, with the foundational understanding of how fundamental food and shelter security is to our individual and collective survival, the recognition that flourishing is not possible without it. It is therefore critically important that our modern society develop systems grounded in this core belief that access to food and shelter should be a basic human right.

The Straits Salish people, where I come from, had an interesting system that we could learn from. If you were hungry, you would be fed. Families would welcome you in and feed you with no expectation of payment. Food to satiate hunger was available for friend and foe alike.

But food also had value. You could exchange within your families as a way of balancing your immediate group. And for those who produced a lot of food, you could distribute it regionally for other much-needed products, and the excess could be shared with others, turning it into a capital of sorts by converting it into honour for themselves, their name and their family to be leveraged as needed later.

This is how a compassionate society looks after its peo­ple, by developing a socioeconomic system where food is free but not valueless. Today food for hungry people is not immediately available, even though our planet has never had access to so much food, nor has it ever created so much food waste.

With respect to housing security in North America, the real estate market is responsible for creating unimaginable wealth for those lucky enough to own private property. It is also responsible for producing affordable housing for everybody who needs it. An inherent conflict of interest, the desire to generate undesirable wealth, fuels decisions made in the real estate market. What did we think was going to happen when housing and food security as human rights were put directly in the way of a capitalist private property owner or business owner and their un­limited wealth?

When our legislative ancestors needed a silver bullet to recover from the Great Depression, they created a system to produce individual wealth for property and homeowners. It supercharged continental economic growth with more investment in real estate and jobs in construction. Across Turtle Island, there was a tremendous extraction of critical natural resources and the expansion of concrete, steel and glass urban infrastructure.

For the people born in the fortunate generations, times have been good. If you were born a boomer or a Gen X’er, you are extremely lucky. It wasn’t always perfect. Skyrocketing interest rates in the 1980s wiped out people financially. However, for those generations, it was a golden time. Those generations are the beneficiaries of a remarkable increase in the value of their real estate investments and their personal wealth.

I remember my grandfather lecturing his grandchildren to buy a home. Everyone needed their own home. Those who followed his advice were elevated and used as ex­amples for the rest of us.

From those days in the 1930s, we have entrenched in our political and social culture a trope that was useful in getting everyone to have the same North American dream of property ownership. Every individual needs their own single-family home in a cul-de-sac with the green lawn, a white picket fence and a North American car in the driveway. This was assured because of a cultural device that held up property owners in high esteem.

As we heard in here yesterday — speaker after speaker from the United Party innocently repeating the social construct about renters, the character foil to the obedient individual homeowner in the storyline. Bluntly, renters are a blight in the neighbourhood, not to be trusted.

[2:05 p.m.]

There is a much older proverb. Scholars believe it originates from Africa. We have probably uttered it ourselves from time to time: “It takes a village to raise a child.” It comes from our past, when we valued each other, when we relied on each other, before we broke the complex interconnectedness of all the things, before we sanctified independence, before the enlightened thinkers, the economic philosophers of some 300 or 400 years ago, began defining the individual as the sacred unit.

As I’ve shared about my W̱SÁNEĆ culture, we lived and worked together in an extended family. The village shared the responsibility to house, feed and protect each other. I have no romanticism about this. Despite the accurate anthropological descriptions of a much more egalitarian society that existed pre-contact here in the Salish Sea, it was far from perfect. We were and are human, after all. We warred and engaged in selfish pursuits. However, it was the exception, not the rule, like it is today.

Now every child in the family needs to achieve the North American homeownership dream. The economic system depends on the majority buying into this story. It’s more than a story now, though. Deeply embedded in the fabric of our socioeconomic systems in North America, housing construction, real estate value and mortgage lending are economic indicators that are the engine of North American global dominance. So we are reminded. Families living together — that’s uncivilized. It’s what humans did in the darker ages of human development, before we were enlightened and empowered with a sense of toxic individualism.

We confront the deeply established stigma against inter­generational living. For example, the middle-aged man living in his parents’ basement is mocked as a sign of incompetent parenting, a failure to fully realize an individual’s potential and even go so far in our culture as them being an early warning sign of a threat or danger in the community.

Of course, this isn’t true, but in order for us to have as many people as possible participating in the housing market, these cultural narratives shaped our behaviour, our expectations, our actions.

If we dig deeper into the impact of these little mantras that we tell ourselves, the tentacles of toxic individualism slide into the cracks and undermine the social and cultural structures that have appeared solid for decades. As the children’s pursuit to live their best life forces them to move further and further away from the parents, estranging grandchildren and grandparents, and as the aunties and uncles, the cousin siblings, the niece and nephew relationships grew more distant for the first time in millennia, the family unit was shattered.

The result is a century-old experiment that we are failing to critically analyze and learn from because we’re hoisted by our own petard. We’ve been so convinced that the sacred unit is the individual, when for all but a century of human existence, the sacred unit has been the family, and for good reason.

This government celebrates the billions of dollars that they’re pouring into a child care program. This government also defends the billions of dollars spent on elder care, long-term facilities where our seniors can spend the final days of their lives living away from their loved ones with other old people.

In order not to disrupt the economic systems that depend on this toxic individualism I’m talking about, parents are forced to farm the development of our children out to whoever we can arrange to do it — often not the parents’ first or second choice. It’s often a desperate dash to find anyone who can do it so there can be a second salary to cover the shareholder expectations set up by the exuberant CEO’s promise of infinitely increasing corporate profits.

We are warehousing the care of our elders to facilities run by foreign for-profit enterprises more interested in pumping their annual returns to their shareholders than delivering the contracted care they committed to.

[2:10 p.m.]

Our elders are left lonely, medicated and forgotten, many of them, because of a heartless economic system that forces the offspring to work endlessly to placate envy, keeping up with the Joneses, yet another of the North American references to a cultural notion that is used to keep individuals moving in a prescribed direction.

What would our ancestors say about us farming out the raising of our children and the warehousing of our elders? Before having our children, Emily and I never raised children. We had no idea what we were doing. But I know two people who did, and Emily knows two people who did. Those four people know eight people who raised children before them.

Whenever my children are having a hard time and I don’t have the answers, I bring in the Elders. Not only do they share the wisdom of years’ experience, but they also bring a calming warmth, a strength that is only accumulated through time.

And it’s not a one-way street. When my parents are having a tough time, when they’re tired and lonely, when their body hurts and they feel the wear of decades on their bones and muscles — why, bring in the children. Not only do they have the innocence of youth, but they also bring a bright energy, an endless supply of joyful fuel that is only accessible by the unjaded, unblemished spirit of a child.

It’s not just the vertical relationships we’ve broken, but we’ve detached the horizontal ones as well. Where I come from, there’s a mysticism about big auntie energy and not just in W̱SÁNEĆ territory. The magic of big auntie energy is embraced by my cousins and nations clear across Turtle Island and in Indigenous communities across the earth.

Big auntie energy ain’t no joke. They don’t even have to be your auntie to deliver big auntie energy. They are people in the generation ahead of you that you can rely on when your own parents are not reliable. When our children need to escape their intense and unrelenting parents, they go over to their aunties’ house. Joanie and Heather see the child needs support, put aside whatever they’re doing and just loves the child.

I feel the same responsibility to show love for my nieces and nephews, to support them in their development, to nurture them into adulthood. The emotion that I’m feeling today is the same emotion that I felt when I wrote this. I’m overwhelmed by the beauty of the social strength that exists in these relationships.

I yearn for a society that is founded on this compassionate interconnectedness, where we are connected to those ahead of us and those behind us, where we are connected to those beside us — multidimensional familial community connections.

The philosophy of toxic individualism has broken that. It has feasted on what my maternal grandfather called human nature. Grandda was a deeply religious man, and we all knew what he meant when he would go off about human nature and all the traits that may help us achieve our best selves but may not result in the betterment or the advancement of the group, however defined. And they’re named.

This toxic individualism has stolen our belonging. Who are you? Where do you come from? Not just the passport you carry but who are you? Who are the people that you come from? What is your story?

With increased globalization and the fragmentation of the village around the child, including the land question in Canada and North America, a cultural wave of 21st-century settlerism has emerged. What are the social implications of losing belonging? I think we’re seeing it and feeling it in our society today. We have a different relationship to the place we are if we do not feel like we belong there.

ZIȻOT, my paternal grandmother, gave me this teaching. This visit with her was a pivot point in my life. I’ve talked about it. I was on a dark path. Looking up from her knitting needles, ZIȻOT gave me a job. She talked about all the people, the W̱ENITEM, people who are not from here, that have moved into W̱SÁNEĆ. She talked about how that was the future of our territory.

She encouraged me to share a message to all the people who have come to W̱SÁNEĆ, who’ve set down roots going back to the first settlers, who’ve taken refuge from an atrocity in their own territory, or people who have just retired here from Alberta or Ontario.

[2:15 p.m.]

ZIȻOT wanted me to encourage you to love this place like you belong here.

XÁLS, the transformer creator of the W̱SÁNEĆ, created a worldview that honours multidimensional connections, relationships between the animate and the inanimate, the smallest creature to the largest mountain. And with each transformation, QEN,T TŦEN SĆÁLEĆE — you look after your relatives.

In a law intrinsic in each and every relationship, from all angles, a responsibility for each to look after their relatives, an agreement that your relatives share the same responsibility to look after you — the principle that is at the centre of the culture that makes food both freely accessible and the reason why you can accumulate great wealth and prestige.

If you are in W̱SÁNEĆ, then belong here in W̱SÁ­NEĆ. Fight for it. Be good stewards of it, as if it’s the place you belong. That’s the instruction of my grandmother ZIȻOT.

I have got to thinking about the impact of settlerism, as I will call it here. Clumsily, I’ll define it as a guilt-driven unwillingness to belong to the place you are, resulting in good ally-ship but void of the purpose and responsibility to actually submerge yourself into the social fabric of the community that has accepted you.

I’ll just leave a few questions here. What is the long-term implication of self-imposed settlerism rather than receiving the permission to belong? How are the current trends negatively affecting our ability to effectively build resilient communities?

Most of my grandfather’s grandchildren followed his advice, except for his status Indian grandchildren. More on that in the section to come. But honestly, though, has nobody ever stopped to ask what might happen if we leave food and housing security to markets that never account for the natural limitations of the planet?

At the core of our real estate market is this implicit expectation of infinite growth. But how is that possible? Most boomer and Gen X’ers have the future well-being fully invested in their real estate, just as successive governments — the people in these chambers — encouraged them to do. They did exactly what they were asked to do, and there is a generational assumption that the value of that investment is going to go up.

In the last 30 years, we have been accelerating towards a socioeconomic collapse. The very housing system we deliberately created, supported by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., the system that was constructed to create immense wealth, paradoxically, is now creating poverty.

As fewer and fewer British Columbians are able to access stable, reliable, affordable housing in a community of their choice, or even the community of their birth, they’re forced to make decisions that benefit their individual situation in the short term but may be detrimental to a healthy, balanced society in the long term.

People suffering from housing insecurity, people that can’t afford their food, have to get a second or third job to pay the bills. They have little time to volunteer with their local community group. They’re less likely to be able to go to school and improve intellectually. They might choose to not have children.

People who are suffering from insecure food and shelter are more likely to suffer from deteriorating mental and physical health, constantly stressed out in search of a place to sleep, a bit of food to satiate hunger. We can see what the deterioration leads to already taking shape on the streets of our privileged and wealthy communities.

As people fight to secure their food and shelter, they become desperate. Perhaps their medication to dull the pain of some of their deeply buried trauma or burden of unmet cultural expectations becomes an addiction, and their numbers increase, overwhelming the social safety net. It becomes frayed, and more frequently people slip through. Public security erodes.

[2:20 p.m.]

It used to just be in the Downtown Eastside, in Vancouver. The numbers of vulnerable people marginalized by a socioeconomic system that cannot deliver the promise of infinite growth are flooding to towns and villages across British Columbia, seeking some supper and a safe place to sleep. Our housing system that produced generational wealth for some is now creating poverty.

It’s because the people in this chamber are unwilling to address the reality that the socioeconomic system that is determining production and distribution of basic needs like food and shelter is not designed to ensure everybody has food and shelter.

Individual wealth creation has become more important than the health and well-being of our communities, yet recent polling results are clear. The top priorities of the public are the cost of living and public safety and security.

Are we supposed to collectively pretend that the two are not inextricably linked so as to not impede on all the potential locked away in individual pursuits? This government is not prepared or well enough equipped to transform our socioeconomic system.

At what point does culture regulate this, evolving a social stigma against someone who squeezes every ounce of value out of their real estate? When will we elevate the person who sells for below current market rate, choosing to sacrifice a little for the good of the community?

In all the cataloguing of the issues I’m doing here today, I cannot skip an opportunity to drag our public health care system into this speech. The deterioration of our health care system should be of no surprise to anyone. It was never sustainable, and rather than allowing our leaders to dig into the system and fix it, we enshrined it and worshipped it. Those who designed it were pure in spirit.

Nevertheless, the politically acceptable action was to spend more money on a tool designed to serve a different purpose. The system they designed was the best one they could negotiate at the time, not the best possible design.

If we want to see further proof that our economic system is suffering multifunction failure, housing and food insecurity are symptoms to start with. Look next at the health care system that is designed to treat sickness, not promote wellness.

Poorly oriented, the health care system is left to carry the burden as best it can — pressure building on the social determinants of health overwhelming the physical infrastructure and human resource capacity that cannot keep up. Doctors and nurses come to my office exasperated because they are seeing patients with late-stage disease because of a lack of intervention by effective primary care. Remember Laozi’s proverb: “Treat a problem while it is still small.”

Acute care facilities, hospital emergency departments are understaffed and temporarily closing. The downstream impact of addressing sickness: hospital beds filled with people with hypertension and other conditions better treated in community because they have nowhere else to go.

The Health Minister is all too happy to celebrate spending $8.4 billion to get worse results and to maintain a health care system oriented to sickness when it should be focused on promoting wellness. Physical health is declining. Mental health is deteriorating. Depression and anxiety disorders drive marginalized and vulnerable people onto the streets. Self-medicated addiction, mental illness, brain injuries are all supercharged by poverty and a lack of secure shelter and food.

All things are connected, yet 13,000 individuals, each with a critical role in the fabric of our society, have perished from toxic, illicit drugs because of a cold socioeconomic system that blames them for failing to succeed better.

We are seeing the poverty that our socioeconomic systems are producing. We know there is a widening gap between those fortunate enough to be well leveraged in their investments, those who won the real estate lottery and those who weren’t able to pull their socks up high enough.

[2:25 p.m.]

In Canada, we know what happens once housing creates and perpetuates poverty. It’s not theoretical in Canada. I witnessed this firsthand growing up. If you grew up here, then you did too. You might not have seen it, but it does not mean that it has not been there in plain sight.

Our government has been experimenting with housing poverty for more than a century. Canada has been nurturing poverty through inadequate housing on Indian reserves delivered by the Department of Indian Affairs through the powers they gave themselves in the Indian Act to provide cover for the other system they created to generate unimaginable wealth on unsurrendered territories.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Mr. Speaker: Thank you, Member. Are you finished, Member? Reserve your place. We will adjourn the debate, then we’ll get back to it right after we get a report from the committee.

A. Olsen: I’ll reserve my place and adjourn the debate.

A. Olsen moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Report and
Third Reading of Bills

BILL 40 — SCHOOL AMENDMENT ACT, 2023

Bill 40, School Amendment Act, 2023, reported complete without amendment, read a third time and passed.

Hon. D. Coulter: I call Committee of the Whole on Bill 39, Zero-Emission Vehicles Amendment Act, 2023 in Section C, the Birch Room.

I call continued debate on second reading of Bill 44, Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 44 — HOUSING STATUTES
(RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT)
AMENDMENT ACT, 2023

(continued)

A. Olsen: That is the despicable reality of our country. It’s probably why, in recent years, we have seen Canada’s international reputation tarnish.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

Despite Pierre’s assertion, I argue that the diminishment of our role in geopolitical affairs has less to do with our Prime Minister and more to do with the exposure of our history and about the way we handle our internal affairs.

That’s one of the reasons why I find the debate that’s happening politically, federally, right now so disingenuous. Two systems, side by side, in communities across the country. It’s our blemish. Where the federal government created personal financing mechanisms, initiatives to spur construction and building standards on the municipal side of the road, none of those policies were afforded Indians on the Indian reserve side of the road.

We’ve seen the awful outcomes of this terrible experiment. Historically, when societies did see it, it was fashionable to complain that the Indigenous people couldn’t look after themselves or do better with all the government handouts. “Look at how they take care of their houses,” they’d say. “Look at all their missing and murdered women,” they’d say. “Look at all their children in the child welfare system,” they’d say. Each is the result of a symmetrical assault on Indigenous people to cover for the lie.

The reality is Indigenous people have experienced more than a century of a totally preventable systemic housing fiasco, the demoralizing impacts and effects of a system that continues to plague us to this day. We struggle every day to make the best with what we’ve got.

Every day Canadians have failed to see the deplorable housing conditions on reserves and have explained them away as a poverty issue alone, as a First Nations issue. Both are blamed for the housing. But as the powerful work my mother, Sylvia Olsen, did in her doctoral studies, digging deep into the history of our heart-wrenching political and bureaucratic housing history in this country…. We’ve been wrong. Poor people don’t make bad housing. First Nations people don’t make bad housing. The inexcusable housing conditions in First Nations is a housing issue.

[2:30 p.m.]

Ineffective housing systems, bad housing policy creates housing insecurity, inadequacy and unaffordability, which in turn makes poor and demoralized people. Canadians, British Columbians, would do well to take the current national housing affordability crisis seriously. When housing starts making poverty, things get out of hand quickly.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

Deputy Speaker: Member, may I seek leave to make an introduction? Thank you.

Introductions by Members

Deputy Speaker: I just wanted to welcome Ghizaal Haress, Afghanistan’s first ombudsperson, to the House. She did incredible work in the country of Afghanistan. I was honoured to be able to meet with her and for her to share her work with us and in this chamber. Please, would everyone make her welcome.

I really appreciate that, Member. Thank you.

Debate Continued

A. Olsen: We’ve seen what happens in our society when a gap forms and widens on the socioeconomic strata between impoverished people and the wealthy. We know it is better to have a more diversified strata with a clear path of mobility for people. With a greater distance between the layers, there’s less mobility, more capital for those that already have, more demoralization for those that don’t. That is the toxic stew simmering in our province today.

When my parents moved back to Tsartlip, the housing policy of the day meant that my parents would have to have 100 percent of the money needed to build or purchase a house. Who else in our society in the early 1970s needed 100 percent of the money to create their forever home for their family?

My dad made too much money to get support to build a house on reserve, and there were no mortgages for Indians on Indian reserves at the time, because all that land was owned by the minister that was responsible for us. There were no building standards for what was built. Housing was distinctly not a commodity like it was on the other side of the road.

The House they brought me home to in 1976 was a double-wide trailer that was the result of a loan from my maternal great-grandfather. That’s it. Indians either had to be impoverished, independently wealthy or have a well-enough-to-do auntie or uncle to get a house in their community.

As my mother, Sylvia Olsen, asserts in her dissertation, housing on Indian reserves in Canada was designed to create poverty. The federal government deliberately delivered one failed housing policy after another. Now, why would they do that? I’ve alluded to it earlier. It was to cover for the lie. Politicians in British Columbia and Canada regularly trumpet, on behalf of the public, rule of law rhetoric, at the same time as promoting systems that grow tremendous wealth on vast tracts of land that were never ceded or surrendered.

Indeed, when ministers of this government, members from all parts of this chamber, acknowledge the Indigenous territories that we live and work in, the honour that we feel when we signal our virtue with words and when the Housing Minister tables legislation like Bill 44, perpetuating the zoning and land use system that dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their lands illegally, subdividing and zoning the lands and distributing them to settlers, who were previously starved and violently displaced from their own homelands, you can imagine that there’s a sour taste.

I’ve raised this issue with the Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation. I reminded him that the resource of our territory is no longer fibre from trees or nutrients from fish, minerals from the earth or even much food from the land. The resource in W̱SÁNEĆ is real estate.

[2:35 p.m.]

The land he lives on, the lands that surround these legislative precincts, is unceded and unsurrendered. That is the central lie I keep referring to. The promise governments make to all the individuals is made with land of questionable ownership by our own laws.

In 1975, a packet of documents was published, curiously titled Papers Connected With the Indian Land Question. Do you think the question was answered? Did our legislative ancestors do us a favour and answer the question they were asking in 1875? Even then, even in 1875, it was a land question. It’s a sleazy bit of history, really. You can imagine someone holding the packet of documents, handing it over, kind of one eye closed and a little bit of hesitation on their breath: “Well, you know, it’s not exactly legal, but it’s good enough. We got what we wanted, right?”

James Douglas was a Hudson’s Bay Co. man, HBC chief factor. First, Douglas was a corporate man; then he was governor. Some folks have bristled at my characterization of this province as a resource colony — when I draw comparisons to the level of corporate reach into our legislative and political affairs, when I complain that our current government is being represented on political panels by corporate lobbyists, when I complain about how the government has been captured by industry. It has, because that’s how it was set up.

In 1849, Britain gave title of Vancouver Island to Hudson’s Bay Co. for a decade. There was a condition: promote colonization of the territories. It’s sleazy, because James Douglas knew, when he was standing on PKOLS with my ancestors, that all he needed to do was buy himself enough time. With the W̱SÁNEĆ increasingly anxious about en­croaching settlement, ironically irritated by tree-cutting and by the murder of one of our messengers, Douglas needed time. The settlers were on their way, and in the next 30 years, they would flood into this region.

When Douglas made the agreement with my ancestors to share the land — to share the land — it gave him the space that he needed to fulfil the requirements of the corporate agreement he had with Britain. Former Premier, now Ambassador, Horgan spoke clearly of his belief in Indigenous sovereignty. He talked about rights and title confidently, like he knew what he was talking about.

I reminded the minister that one way sovereign people recognize claim to land is through the right to tax. Since it was never surrendered, I asked the minister why the W̱SÁNEĆ would not be able to recover some of their sovereignty through the collection of revenue from the trade of the most valuable resource in our territory: real estate. Why can’t the W̱SÁNEĆ collect a portion of the real estate transfer tax?

The minister is a lawyer. He knows it is a reasonable request. He fails to recognize the elegantly simple solution that I offer him and the Finance Minister. If not just a basic recognition of humanity, it is a powerful act of reconciliation: the ability to capture a portion of the wealth-generating capacity of the lands of our unceded and unsurrendered territories. Until then, the minister must feel some responsibility for knowingly perpetuating the lie that there is no unanswered question over these immediately surrounding lands — and indeed, most of British Columbia — not just for the sake of closure.

It wasn’t until 2008 that I and my relatives were able to borrow money for housing on our Indian reserve — 2008. That’s quite a head start that this government gave their settler relatives. Centuries-old, outdated ideas, rooted in our government, inform our systems. They are designed, nurtured and fiercely protected by growing administrative bureaucracies. They convinced those people, elected to these democratic institutions, that the only answer is to continue to perpetuate another lie: infinite growth on legally surrendered land.

[2:40 p.m.]

All the political leaders across the country right now seem to agree on one thing, from Pierre Poilievre, Justin Trudeau, Premier Doug Ford to our Premier. They answer the question of how to fix the housing affordability crisis in the same way: build more supply. All we need to do to lower prices of housing is to build more supply than demand. In reality, we’ve not even come close to doing that. So we’ve fallen behind.

Additionally, we expect hundreds of thousands of people to migrate and immigrate to British Columbia each year, adding to the demand of our insufficient housing supply. The way our local governments have been set up to deliver land use planning and zoning, a negative incentive existed for mayors and councillors who are mostly property owners and historically elected only by property owners.

It’s not in the interest of the people who currently own property and want the value of it to increase for there to be more supply than demand. In a profit-driven real estate system overtly driven by greed, why would the owners of a commodity want to devalue it?

People flock to public hearings at town halls to argue against increased density because it will change the form and character of the neighbourhood they were promised when they bought their property there. This past year people in a neighbourhood in Vancouver wrote to complain about a child care facility because they didn’t like the sound of children.

My friend Central Saanich councillor Bob Thompson has a copy of one of the oldest maps of the Saanich Peninsula. It has no lines drawn on it. There are forests and wetlands, watersheds and prairie. It is the land before the first surveyor’s chain began slicing and dicing it into ever-diminishing sizes. The diminishing returns, fracking — each time a section is split, more value is unlocked.

The first settlers arrived to their large farms — Thomson, Verdier, Stelly, their names also memorialized on the neighbourhood streets. You can visit the Saanich Pioneer Society Museum in Saanichton to glimpse back in time just 175 years ago.

In the decades that followed, community development patterns continued to be governed by zoning systems, shaped by governance systems that featured public hearings in front of locally elected officials who were responsible for managing the fence lines between one individual property owner’s rights and interests and their neighbour’s rights and interests.

The system we have was not designed to create housing security operating from a central philosophy that housing is a human right. Up until now, our housing system has been maintained by managing scarcity. A confluence of factors include a decade of skyrocketing property values, high inflation, increasing interest rates. It has squeezed housing affordability in previously unimaginable ways to the point that people who own property argue that opening the taps and creating more supply is necessary, obviously unconcerned that the conditions will diminish their property value too much.

Bill 44 is a remarkable piece of legislation because it fundamentally rewrites the underlying principles of our historic land use planning and development systems. The zoning creates wealth, and it protects the wealth. Just as individual lots have increased in value dramatically, Bill 44 has the potential of multiplying the wealth of those fortunate enough to own those little pieces of land by allowing three or four or six times the density.

While the Housing Minister will be remembered for generating tremendous wealth, he will also be recognized for creating a wider gap between those who have and those who don’t. It’s unlikely that this government is going to hear many complaints from property owners. The vast majority have just received a massive windfall. And by the provincial government circumventing the local government hearing process, the requirements of local governments to bring their zoning bylaws into compliance, there will be little point to complaining anyway.

[2:45 p.m.]

But the scale and scope of the lack of housing affordability for both home ownership and rentals likely won’t be met by this initiative either. So the minister goes ahead and transfers huge wealth to property owners.

The fact that the situation has become so desperate that it is not possible for government to flood the market with more supply than is needed to actually drive these prices down, matched with hyper-inflated cost and high interest rates…. I’m concerned that despite what this legislation is designed to make you feel as a British Columbian, the system will still be effectively managing scarcity. Does this government have any intention to create as much abundance as it needs to drive the real estate market prices down?

When the Minister of Housing was on CBC Victoria with Gregor Craigie, he was asked about emergency shelters — extreme weather warming centres. Gregor asked him several times whether the provincial government would fund these initiatives. The minister kept deflecting back to the key message provided him: “The approach of the ministry is to move away from the shelter model to focus on long-term housing.” No matter how many times Gregor asked, the minister reframed the short-term question and offered a long-term solution.

However, the minister knows that the number of stable, supported and affordable housing units he is delivering is far from sufficient, and obviously, they won’t be available tonight and tomorrow night as the temperature plummets or in a few weeks when another atmospheric river flows over town, as was the compassionate spirit of Gregor’s questioning.

Stemming from our long pursuit of the average person to achieve property ownership, the classist struggle and stigma of the non-property owner — as I previously mentioned, renters — have found themselves on a lower rung of the societal hierarchy in North American culture. When I was elected to Central Saanich council, there was a rule that landlords had to live on the property they were renting. When this issue came up, I was shocked by some of the comments about the potential for the neighbourhood to fall into disrepair, apparently, because of the renters.

Now we expect people to pay 50, 60, 70 percent of their income to rent a home. Over the past 15 years as housing prices steadily climbed, people who could qualify for a mortgage were encouraged to make it affordable by buying a place with a secondary suite so the renter could help the owner pay and afford their debt.

Renters hear their landlords openly talk about how their tenants can’t be trusted, insinuate that they’re terrible peo­ple and that they need to have the power to be able to evict them much easier, all of which has a terrible impact on the psychological well-being of renters, who are constantly living in fear that their housing is unstable.

Now, I know there is some exaggeration in what I’m saying. The vast majority of these relationships, as I learned in that rental housing task force I was on, are good and stable. However, we only hear about the edge cases — the cases of bad tenants and bad landlords. As a result, we need to have the right-sized context for this discourse. Our constant cultural undermining of the renter is one of the destabilizing forces among many in our society today.

The amount of rent people pay is not attached to the amount that they can afford to pay or based on the median salary of the area or based on the fair price that allows them to maintain a balanced life. The amount of rent they pay is the amount the market determines. So people…. Well, they take what they can get where they can get it, and then they scramble. Scramble is not a sustainable lifestyle. People grow exhausted. Burn out. Stress out. They get mad. Society meets wrath.

This is the cycle for those who are born in the unfortunate generations, the people who look at housing and participating in the real estate market as a sci-fi fantasy. The ones the boomers and the Gen X’ers are convinced are unmotivated sloths, people who don’t want to work with the same ethic that they have, people who are choosing not to pick up their socks like we once did to get ourselves ahead. Never mind the reality that these generations cannot save for a down payment for a mortgage because they’re locked into paying their landlord’s debt.

[2:50 p.m.]

It’s clearly inappropriate to suggest the landlord subsidize their tenant, so there are very, very few options here. If you get into the rent trap cycle, there are very few outs. There is minimal mobility from being a renter to being a property owner in the current real estate market.

Let’s be honest. With the volume of supply and the chronological distribution of this new supply that Bill 44 purports to create, paralleled with increasing immigration, renters will still be renters, locked into endlessly paying someone else’s mortgage and hearing how terrible and incompetent they are.

It’s important to ground this discussion in the reality and the acknowledgment that we’ve been building an extraordinary number of commodified units of housing stock in the last 15 years. Obviously not enough to meet demand. Or maybe just not enough of the correct form of housing as a result of a number of factors, including immigration.

Our villages, cities, towns, metropolitan areas have all grown immensely. Construction has been booming, but not all those new units of housing have become homes. At the same time, the new construction was marketed as an investment vehicle, fully turning homes into economic units. This is evident in our vernacular. Whenever we talk about a housing unit, we are talking about an economic unit, not necessarily a home.

That is why the minister can talk about the number of units, behind the ribbons he and his colleagues cut in front of the cameras, snapping up these visual artifacts that represent marginal, even laughable, progress. Ultimately, those can be detached from the problem because he’s operating in an economic sphere of commodified housing units and not from the principle that housing is a human right.

He doesn’t need to know how many unhoused and housing-insecure people he’s targeting to support. He just needs to have the number of units he’s responsible for building close at hand so he can repeat it, ad nauseam, to demonstrate government is doing something.

With construction booming and trades looking for a workforce who can afford to live in a high-cost region, it’s unclear how the minister and this government intend on building all the necessary supply — the pan-political promise, the silver bullet to solve this housing affordability crisis. Who is going to build the magic supply?

A little detour. When politicians offer supply as the solution to the crisis, they’re often talking about building new supply. They want to build their way out of it. However, we’ve been building housing stock for decades. How much of the current housing stock is underutilized? We can’t accurately answer that question, but anecdotally, there are many single-family homes in my communities with one or two people living in houses with many more bedrooms and baths than they need.

This is another difficult discussion that I’m venturing into here, because private property rights are a sacred cow. Identifying this as a potential solution is probably going to be seen as controversial. But why hasn’t government created a program to incentivize single people and couples who are oversized to downsize?

The vacancy taxes are an example of the government using a penalty to encourage some investors to either rent their unit or sell it so it can become somebody’s home. What if the provincial government offered a grant to cover the moving and storage of excess possessions? What if they offered a substantial tax incentive to those who entered the program to right-size their housing in an effort to free up some of those empty bedrooms, either for someone to rent or for the family who needs space for their growing children?

Another idea that I’ve proposed to the minister, if that one is venturing into too much discomfort, is to abandon the notion that B.C. Housing needs to only purpose-build the solutions. Why not have a program that purchases larger homes, larger buildings on the market, and transforms them into multi-home buildings — rental buildings managed by a non-profit housing manager, cooperatives, co-living, strata buildings with their own governance structure?

None of these ideas have found any fertile soil within the ministry, yet they’re all potential solutions that pro­vide housing much more quickly than B.C. Housing has been delivering.

Now back to construction. Just another idea to address the minister’s insistence that the housing affordability crisis will be solved by supply alone. Why not invest in developing modular building systems?

[2:55 p.m.]

Our current construction industry is inefficient. It promotes inefficiency. Trades cannot find employees for the current volume of construction that is needed, never mind the massive increase envisioned by the minister. Construction site management requires an orchestration of trades who drive from job to job across town.

The stigma against modular construction is another one of those strictly classist cultural artifacts. Look down your nose at the people in the trailer park.

Imagine the efficiency, speed and lean manufacturing we could achieve constructing components of buildings in modular climate-controlled factories adjacent to the construction site, modules then transported to the site and assembled like Lego. With modern technology, we could build attractive high-quality product quickly, drastically limiting waste. It’s good enough for the LNG Canada project supported by this government. Why not support it for our housing systems?

We hear the stories regularly. Approved projects are not getting out of the ground. The cost of construction, even after approval, is too high. High costs to borrow construction capital. Building materials have become more expensive. Developers and trades assume more risk building the new supply. All factors that are included in the final market cost of the real estate product.

The financial landscape is challenging the modern homeowner and homebuilder with super-inflated property values, building costs and higher interest rates. As fixed-term mortgages come due and existing homeowners are facing down dramatically inflated mortgage payments, with the majority of those payments going directly to the interest, paying down very little of the principle, marginal homeowners become more housing insecure.

The water is slowly rising. In the next 18 to 24 months, we will see them increasingly unstable as well, with more of them drowning as a result of the economic system that is predicated on maintaining the value of a commodified housing unit rather than the value of well-housed, secure people.

Now, you might wonder at what point I will get to the legislation in front of us. Good fortune to those who wait or to those that are locked in House duty, whichever it might be, as they look at their watches for their escape.

In passing new laws and soon-to-follow regulations on short-term vacation rentals, this government has shown a willingness to experience some political discomfort around housing. They demonstrated this in 2018, when they passed the speculation and vacancy tax. Unlike some I’ve witnessed, this B.C. NDP government was unflinching when they passed that tax.

Bill 44, as best we can see, removes single-family zoning and allows three, four or six densities on a lot and potentially manifests billions of dollars of real estate wealth for those who already benefited from being born at the right time and further widens the gap between those who hold real estate and those who do not.

It dramatically increases the potential impact on outdated, underscoped, unfunded physical infrastructure lia­bilities in every community of over 5,000 people in British Columbia. It removes the ability for local governments to capture critical revenue needed to pay for infrastructure upgrades that are limitations on the scale of approved densification.

Note that there’s another bill for another time. We’ll see how that delivers on that point.

It replaces one-off public hearings with the requirement for more detailed housing needs assessments and frequent community planning engagement processes. It allows secondary suites and suites and accessory dwellings in every community in the province. But it does nothing to require affordability or increased incentives for non-profit, cooperative, co-housing and other rate-controlled housing options.

When I was a councillor in the district of Central Saanich, my job, for my first term, 2008 to 2011, was chair of the water and wastewater committee. This was where I met former North Saanich mayor Geoff Orr and how I was introduced to the physical limitations of our infrastructure.

The infinite growth model needs to have access to an infinite amount of capital to build and maintain all the structural and mechanical resources necessary so that when little Susie turns on the tap and when little Johnny flushes the toilet, the expected happens.

[3:00 p.m.]

The infrastructure built over the last 100 years has done pretty good, but a lot of it is getting old and nearing its end of life. Much of it is undersized. Think culverts meet atmospheric river. The Minister of Transportation remembers what happened then. None of it had an investment program for replacement, nor did we consider applying an inflationary factor in the accounting to accommodate the reality that a new bridge today does not cost the same as the one that it is replacing.

I run into this every day in my constituency office, with respect to B.C. Ferries. I fight hard to make sure that B.C. Ferries supports the beautiful communities and needs of my constituents, and the drive-on experience that I had when I was a kid — when my dad and I would go over to the Pacific Coliseum and watch our hometown boy, Russ Courtnall, play for our beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.

The marine highway system we expect, based on our past experience, has changed. Standards, costs and labour markets are just some of the reasons why the system that we’ve come to expect to deliver in a certain way is no longer able to meet those expectations. This government expects the infrastructure — which, we have known for decades, will be insufficient — to suddenly and magically become sufficient.

Earlier, I shared a pivotal moment in my life, sitting on my seatless couch, my grandmother’s couch. There’s another such moment when I sat in the chair in Gary Nason’s office. He was the chief administrator in the district of Central Saanich, and I was a four- or five-month-old councillor, eager to do all the things. I had a big learning curve, as a kid who grew up on the other side of the line — the side without zoning, planning and development, public hearings, development cost charges, land taxes, mill rates and constituents.

Gary was patient, and he was a great leader and teacher, as was the mayor at the time, Jack Mar. Gary spent time with me to show how the federal and provincial conditional granting systems worked — or didn’t, depending on where you were located. On the federal-provincial side of the equation, they got to collect a vast majority of the wealth from a seemingly limitless tax potential and then distribute it based on their own politically driven priority.

One year we were looking for funds for a fire hall, but Christy Clark was funding park benches. We borrowed the money for the fire hall, and we applied for a grant for the park benches. On the municipal side of the relationship, you just take what you’re given. Even though politically, mayors and councillors are closest to the public, and much of their work is driven from grassroots community advocacy, it’s beneficial if their priorities align with the federal-provincial priority. How else are MPs and MLAs going to cut ribbons?

Sitting in that chair in Gary’s office that day, I realized my path was to the provincial government. Ottawa is too far from W̱SÁNEĆ. At the 2009 Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities, I stood and asked the then Leader of the Official Opposition, B.C. NDP leader Carole James, if she formed government one day, would she fix the broken fiscal system supporting our local governments? She said no, she would not.

When Premier Gordon Campbell took the stage the next day, I asked him if he would change the framework that funds municipalities and regional districts so they were not perpetually chasing funds for critical infrastructure investments. He said, no, he would not. They both kept their promise.

In 2010, I was part of the conversations at the Union of B.C. Municipalities that produced important advice on how the provincial government could secure the fiscal futures for local governments. Thirteen years later, that project is still incomplete, and our infrastructure continues to decay. From the multi-billion-dollar surplus found by the Finance Minister prior to Budget 2023, the Minister of Municipal Affairs announced a $1 billion fund and a new distribution formula, which mostly worked.

[3:05 p.m.]

The exception is to help people who live in electoral areas. Particularly in my riding, the ones in Saanich North and the Islands, on the southern Gulf Islands and Salt Spring Island, were not treated equally to their urban cousins. I shared this with the minister. I shared this with the Minister of Housing. I shared this with this government. Nothing changed.

This program is a hopeful start, but it could run for the next 100 years, and it would still fail to meet the need of local governments, never mind the added pressure that Bill 44 will create.

Going back to Central Saanich and the conditional grants, this is how absurd the current system is. The federal government creates a fund matched and administered by the province. Central Saanich has a critical sewer pump, desperately needing replacement — a high-pressure system, densely populated neighbourhood, adjacent to a sen­sitive ecosystem. They applied and are denied. They applied again and were denied again.

Look, if the government’s model is to borrow for this replacement, then it won’t be long before the community has reached its borrowing capacity, and that will be well before there is suitable infrastructure across the municipality. Overlay this with the pressure Bill 44 puts on that sewer pump. It’s a single-family home neighbourhood, 8,000- to 14,000-square-foot lots, big lots.

None of what Bill 44 has considered was considered when the neighbourhood was originally developed. It was designed for single-family homes. The underground and aboveground infrastructure was not scoped for a 400 percent increase in density, and now the provincial government has unilaterally stated that the neighbourhood can load an extra 400 percent more density there without planning.

Ad hoc, top-down decision-making, designing the future of a place without the context of the place. That’s the reason why it leaves the taste in my mouth that this makes more sense as a real estate investment play than it does making healthy community development. And that is not assuming that the system that we currently have is achieving healthy community development, because it’s not. Not necessarily, I should say.

As I mentioned, the health care system can barely deliver substandard care now, never mind piling 400 percent more people into the same space. The schools in those neighbourhoods are currently running at 95 to 98 percent efficiency. That’s almost the perfect number. That means they’re being funded, and they’re not overcrowded. The buildings are aging, but the condition of the buildings is still good.

This is not the case everywhere in every community across the province. The health care systems and education systems are not funded or flexible enough to handle this scale of change. What is most disturbing is there doesn’t appear to be any inkling that this government has any intention of thinking about the planning that is needed to support local governments in making these investments in their infrastructure.

As a passing comment in the Housing Minister’s briefing material for Bill 44, they celebrate the $1 billion building communities fund and pretend like it will be enough to placate the needs of our local government colleagues. It also mentions a $51 million promise that was made at the UBCM this year.

Both of these numbers are remarkably low compared to the well-known infrastructure needs of our communities. The fact that we have not got a system that was designed to support the renewal of our infrastructure. We just had a history of building it and then pretending like it was going to last forever.

Well, a lot of that infrastructure is coming to the end of its life. That’s why earlier this year, I called on the province to commit to make this building communities fund an annual payment, $1 billion a year, at least until the new fiscal foundation is created to support the growth of our communities as it was envisioned here.

I can’t think of a better way to actually put the onus on the provincial government to do the necessary work and to commit to the necessary work to opening up the resources so our communities can actually support the burden that this provincial government is downloading onto them.

[3:10 p.m.]

So how does Bill 44 impact my communities in Saanich North and the Islands? I’ll separate them into three distinct categories: the Saanich Peninsula, Salt Spring Island and the southern Gulf Islands.

The communities on the Saanich Peninsula are the classic definition of urban sprawl, single-family homes, from modest to massive, on large, unserviced lots. The primary challenge I have heard about this change to zoning is the range of issues I raised just previously about the capacity of the urban infrastructure to support the increased density.

I have long recognized that our land settlement pattern through the 1960s to the 1980s, when most of the neighbourhoods on the Saanich Peninsula were developed, was inefficient. The vast majority of the housing stock built on these massive lots is large, single-family homes built parallel to the road, directly in the middle of the lot, with 4,000 to 6,000 square feet of lawn in the front- and backyards. The value of those properties has increased from about $100,000 when they were brand-new to around $1 million today.

The shoreline on the Saanich Inlet, Satellite Channel around Roberts Bay in Sidney–North Saanich represents some of the most expensive real estate in British Columbia — not old-money Victoria, like Oak Bay, but deep pockets, nonetheless. Many of those houses — not all, many of them — are part-time residences, real estate investments, some project real estate, people building a dream home to sell to someone else to live in.

While Central Saanich and North Saanich have had modest growth. Sidney’s commercial area has seen a boom in condo development. My office is in one of those buildings, all of which have been — except the one that I’m in, actually — market product. They provide a little case study, for the Housing Minister, of what happens when property is redeveloped based on a philosophy that if you build more supply, you automatically get lower prices in a market that doesn’t restrict who can enter it or artificially cap the price.

Hundreds of new units have been added to the housing market, and as you guessed, the vast majority of them have been at current market value. The aging affordable housing it replaces is gone, and the people that lived in those spaces have been displaced.

I’ve been around local government on the Saanich Peninsula for 15 years. I’m not the rookie councillor anymore. I know the state of our infrastructure; I know the state of the reserve funds. With hundreds of millions of dollars to repair and upgrade the infrastructure, I know that without the capacity to raise those funds through development cost charges, which are usually applied at rezonings, or a fund — reliable, from the provincial and federal governments — to support the infrastructure, Bill 44 is little more than a government appearing to do something.

On Salt Spring, things get more complicated. I know the Premier and his Housing Minister know this, because they’ve been involved in several meetings where the problems and the challenges have been described with clarity. Salt Spring has more than 12,000 full-time residents. It’s the largest unincorporated community in the province, managed by federal, provincial and two local government bodies. The CRD provides the services. The Islands Trust, which operates on a preserve-and-protect mandate, does the land use planning. It is somewhere between the 25th- and 30th-largest community in the province. There are about 200 municipalities in the province.

Historically, land use zoning on the island created mas­sive, multi-acre lots, serviced by a patchwork of locally run improvement districts that manage local water and sewer, or the properties were individually serviced by wells and septic tanks. The roads are owned and managed — with all due respect to the Minister of Transportation — somewhat poorly by the province. B.C. Ferries provides the transportation connections to the rest of British Columbia.

[3:15 p.m.]

Salt Spring finds itself in a rurban purgatory in British Columbia. It is considered rural when it needs to be urban, and it is considered urban when it needs to be considered rural. Its connection to the capital regional district is both beneficial and a drawback, and its inclusion into the Islands Trust wraps it in an argument that is grounded in a legislative policy designed to address problems of 50 years ago, not the problems of today.

That is not the dog whistle that people on both sides of this deeply entrenched battle between growth and no growth may think that it is. It’s not. There’s no such thing as infinite growth. Salt Spring Island is an island and has real limitations on the number of people that it can carry.

Again, with unlimited money, energy and ambition, we could build unlimited water desalinization plants, waste­water treatment facilities and new pipes everywhere to accommodate infinite growth. However, as the Premier and the Ministers of Housing, Transportation, Health, Mental Health and Addictions, Education, Public Safety and Finance have all made clear to us, there’s not an infinite supply of cash for Salt Spring. There’s not even a modest amount of money, nor a desire to create land use and community planning that could facilitate it.

Instead, we have B.C. Housing fluttering around the island, claiming that they are going to purpose-deliver 24 or so modular units of supported housing, and somehow that will create housing stability for the thousands of people who are currently housing-insecure — trades and other working professionals, front-line workers that are needed for the basic functioning of a community. They even suggested that since they were building these supported units, the emergency shelter was no longer needed.

We fought back and let them know that the need is so much greater than their paltry offerings that they announced nearly two years ago and have yet to even break ground on. Just as we warned, B.C. Housing has run into the wall of bureaucracy and the real physical limitations, including purchasing modular units that were not suitable and had to be renovated. This project has ground to a halt. Now people have just turned the site into a campground.

I facilitated dozens of meetings with the Housing Minister, the Premier, local elected officials and B.C. Housing officials to plead with them to take a different approach with Salt Spring Island. I pled with the Health Minister and the Mental Health and Addictions Minister for them to spend some of the billions they brag about spending in these portfolios. Each of them shrug and tell me there’s nothing they can do.

Perhaps it’s time for this government to have their words reflect the body language and just admit to the people of Salt Spring Island that the bureaucratic administration that is being managed here is so broken that there’s nothing that can be done for this community. I don’t believe it, but we need to start to see real action. My local government colleagues are exasperated. They need this government’s support, not the understanding and well-wishing.

On the outer Gulf Islands — Pender, Mayne, Galiano, Saturna, Sidney, Piers — 60 of them, each of these communities face similar issues as Salt Spring but each to their own contextualized extent. All of the issues I’ve raised regarding Salt Spring exist on the other islands. The challenge they face with building four to six units of affordable housing is inexplicable: hundreds of hours of volunteer time, like Sisyphus endlessly pushing the boulder up the mountain, each obstacle navigated re­vealing another obstacle.

I only separate the southern Gulf Islands from Salt Spring because the scale and scope of the challenges they face are dramatically different. The call to the provincial government remains the same.

We can celebrate opening a child care facility on Mayne Island together — I know that members of this government leaned heavily into that one — but if there’s no housing for early childhood educators, if there is no housing for teachers in the public school and no action is taken to address the systems that continue to fail those communities, then what progress has been made?

[3:20 p.m.]

Bill 44 does nothing to create or incentivize the construction of affordable, rate-controlled, non-profit, co­operative and co-housing options that would allow more upward potential for people in the rental cycle.

In the second reading speech made by the minister in support of Bill 44, there was only a passing reference to affordable housing that may be possible if someone chooses to build it, an admission that this exercise is an exercise in market housing. It does not qualify any of the wealth that can be extracted from turning a $1 million home into three, four or six $1 million homes. It doesn’t say: “Look, if you’re going to take this golden handshake from the Housing Minister, then you have to produce a percentage of units that are below market value.” It doesn’t do that.

Every single unit of housing created through Bill 44, with the exception of the few that choose to build below market, will go into the real estate market with the assumption that we will get a different outcome than the one that we’ve been getting since social stability became the sacrificial lamb for the housing market. It’s remarkable.

I have a constituent who read Les Leyne’s article quoting me talking about decommodifying housing and remarked that I sounded socialist. Another person suggested to me that I wasn’t compassionate enough about the effort and hard work they’ve invested into buying their home. I’m sorry that our society hasn’t got over the fears of socialism. It’s a long history, but in the end, it’s the constructs of capitalists protecting their individual interests.

We’ve seen a rise of ill-informed memes that have clearly found a home at social media university where the curriculum clearly fails to accurately define socialism and communism and Marxism. This speech is not about socialism. It’s about reimagining an interconnected world where we look at each other and we agree that it is better for all of us if each of us is securely housed.

Decommodifying housing is not about destroying peo­ple and their economic security. It is the opposite. It’s about rebalancing markets so they serve, not dominate, the humans and human societies that constructed them.

It made little sense for us to strip the natural resources that sustain life on planet Earth, and it makes even less sense for us to defend socioeconomic systems that do the same thing to our communities and our societies. But that’s exactly what we’ve done.

I think we need to recognize the damage that toxic levels of individualism have done to our communities, to our planet, to our quality of life. People are struggling to keep up — keep up with the demanding expectations, keep up with the bills, keep up with the Joneses, struggling to have good food energizing them, sturdy shelter over their head.

Housing and food are human rights. It’s what a compassionate and just society promises to their people. And if that doesn’t motivate you, well, worry not because it’s also good economics. The instability created by food and shelter insecurity, by the housing system designed to create wealth now creating poverty, is going to be far more costly for us all.

We need to have the difficult and uncomfortable dialogue about resetting our expectations from the returns on our real estate investment. We need to destigmatize renters as second-class citizens. There needs to be a massive re­alignment so that rent and mortgage payments, property value, are aligned with what people who live and work in the community can afford to pay without bankrupting them, without limiting their decisions about post-secondary education and their desire to start a family.

This topic is hugely toxic because there are so many hopes, dreams and promises, expectations and wealth attributed to it.

[3:25 p.m.]

But government needs to get creative about how we can recognize some of that wealth that people have built over the decades in other ways, through other means, just like the W̱SÁNEĆ people did by having free food but food with value, not stigmatize or leave people behind who weren’t born at the perfect time.

HÍSW̱ḴE SIÁM.

A. Walker: I appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak to Bill 44, which represents some of the most significant changes that we’ve seen in the way housing is regulated in this province, probably since the Agricultural Land Commission was brought in in 1973.

I’ve shared stories in this House before about some of the challenges that renters in our community face, whether that’s seniors who are living in their cars, relying on the pool to get cleaned up, relying on where they park to ensure that they’re safe, or whether that’s people who are working, sometimes two people in a household working jobs and living in trailers and campgrounds just trying to get by, not getting ahead. The housing challenges in our provinces are real.

I say this without irony, but when you talk to a parent who lives in a school bus who is raising a child to go to school that isn’t able to every day make sure that that child has lunch, a lot of this comes back to housing and security. For those that are in campgrounds…. In many ways, they’re the lucky ones.

The housing challenges have meant that homelessness in Oceanside has increased by 20 percent in the last two years. It is very timely to mention that we don’t have a cold weather shelter in Parksville or Qualicum Beach, so those folks that are unhoused right now are going to look for a dark and cold and wet winter ahead.

I appreciate the impetus for amending the way housing works in British Columbia. I think, fundamentally, the intentions of this act I agree with. The idea that local governments have to plan for not five years’ worth of growth, but 20 years’ worth of growth — there’s tremendous value in that to ensure that official community plans align with the housing needs of our communities and to focus the community building exercise around official community plans instead of individual spot zoning.

There are some significant values to that, but the challenge is that there are lots of pieces in this bill that I think communities like Parksville-Qualicum will have some real challenges with. In our community, most people live in single family homes, so this will disproportionately impact communities like French Creek more than other parts of the province.

I’m just going to quickly run through the bill here and what some of the changes will mean in our community. The first one that jumps out is the limitation on local governments to be able to rely on previous protections when it comes to enabling this new small-scale multifamily housing. That means in a single family lot, we can now expect to see three or four or six or more homes, depending on what the regulation states.

Previously, prior to this bill, local governments, when they were adopting zoning, could rely on some protections that would limit growth, limit density and limit investment into housing in areas where the protection of the natural environment, it’s ecosystems and biodiversity were important. That’s incredibly important in my community. Englishman River and the corridor that’s there is relied on not just for the fish and all the aquatic habitat, but that’s where we get our water.

The city of Parksville has been working very carefully over the years with the regional district of Nanaimo, with Land Trust of B.C. and B.C. Parks Foundation and all these great organizations to preserve this land.

But once this bill passes, local government will not be able to say no to the density in these areas based on the protection of the natural environment. That will mean that it will lock these areas in to higher densities, and it will drive up value of this land, making it very difficult to renature these areas for the future.

There are regions — and I’ll focus on Qualicum Beach, because it’s my home — where there are protections in place that limit development in hazardous conditions. What that means in Qualicum Beach is we have this sand bank that runs along the highway that, in the event of an earthquake, would pose significant challenges, not just to the people on the highway below, but those that live above, so restrictions exist right now within the development permit areas that restrict density and restrict growth in areas that could potentially be a hazardous condition.

Once this bill is brought into effect, local governments will no longer be able to say: “No, that’s not where we want to see development.” The same thing takes into account floodplains.

[3:30 p.m.]

The development in a floodplain…. Once it is built, it is very expensive to then relocate those people. The ability for local governments to restrict density in those areas is gone. The protection for farming is no longer permitted. The protection of a revitalization area with a commercial intent is no longer permitted. The protections of former character covenants…. Of course, we can recognize that does drive up the cost of housing.

In communities like Qualicum Beach, which have spent generations and invested heavily in the character of our village neighbourhood, there is a desire to be able to maintain that.

I find it shocking that even the ability to promote energy conservation, water conservation and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not things that can be considered by local government, once this act comes into effect, when it comes to these new, small-scale, multifamily housing units.

The other challenge is when it comes to heritage properties. Again, they — local governments, our town councils, our city councils — will have much less power to protect the historical buildings in our communities when those could be used for housing.

The next item that jumps out to me is: when you have an official community plan that designates an area for density, or just an area for development, if the application is in line with the official community plan, the local government is no longer allowed to hold a public hearing.

On the surface, that’s probably not a bad thing. I mean, we really want to focus a lot of our planning processes into the official community plan and take away from the spot, one-off public hearings, where neighbours come in and talk about traffic and parking and some of the things that we hear when we’re on councils. The challenge with eliminating the need for public hearings for rezoning for anything that aligns with the official community plan is it has the risk of dramatically politicizing the official community plan process.

We do not want to be in a situation where communities are really underestimating the development that they would see in a downtown area, where we want to see development, just because they lose control over that type of development. That is a concern I have, but I think it can be moderated through policy.

The official community plans that communities have will now be required to anticipate the housing needs in our communities. That is an incredibly useful thing. Reflecting on members who have served on town councils, who have taken the time to go through the planning process, we want to make sure that these official community plans…. They are long; sometimes they’re 300 or 400 pages long.

They should talk about the growth, that they can anticipate where that growth will be and what that will look like. This bill will require that every five years, the housing needs assessment will be received by council, and within a year of that, that councils then go through the official community planning process again.

I think that makes sense, the idea that the official community plan is aligned with the housing needs assessment. But the challenge is: when you look at a bill like this, where everything is mandated as opposed to encouraged, where we’re really using the stick on something like this, it runs the risks of unintended consequences that can’t be foreseen.

A perfect example is chatting with a mayor — I won’t say which community in my constituency — when this was introduced. He said: “You know, we’re going to make sure the council changes our growth containment boundary to align with our downtown core, so none of these rules apply.” When you have rules or laws that mandate local government do something, you run the risk that…. These are creative people that will find ways around it that will have a detrimental impact on creating more housing that we desperately need.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

The act states that these new rules will come into effect June of next year, which will likely mean anything between now and June of next year will be put on hold. There’s a tremendous potential for up-zoning and more return on investment. So there’s a chance that we will actually see a reduction in development over the next little while, while the regulation is being developed and until this act comes into effect.

One of the things that’s interesting in the way this is written is if you have an existing single-family lot, if there’s a house that doesn’t have a suite in it, councils have to accept that. If there is an additional building, councils have to accept that there could be a suite in that.

The process right now, if somebody wants to put a suite in their yard…. In Qualicum Beach, in Parksville, these are encouraged right now. It goes through a public engagement process, where the neighbours can talk about the impact of having a two-storey suite in their backyard that overlooks the neighbouring yards, and it becomes a more collaborative process.

[3:35 p.m.]

When you require that local governments have to ac­cept these things, there will be unintended consequences in communities that will create animosity between neighbours.

There’s a provision in here that the maximum units, if you are near a bus stop, is more than the minimum. So we’ve heard the minister refer to the minimum new single-family zone to be three or maybe four units. I’m not sure. Regulation will make that clear. And near a bus stop, it will be six or more units.

In a community like mine, where the bus stops change, it creates an interesting situation where you could have a lot that has six units on it that is all of a sudden legally non-conforming as these bus routes change. I would hate to see…. As this act states so many times that things “must” be done instead of “may,” I would really hate to see communities come together to try to have less bus stops to try to ensure that there isn’t density that comes into their neighbourhoods. And that’s a significant risk.

When we have rules that mandate local governments do something, and those governments represent a community that doesn’t want to see these things, they will get creative, and it will have impacts on our communities.

Now, these rules won’t affect every single-family lot. There are some carve-outs here. Land that is already protected under the Heritage Conservation Act…. Those will not be applied here. What I find interesting is the heritage designation process. If your property has been designated by a local government before the act comes into effect, it’s fine, but you won’t be able to protect those properties after the date.

There’s also a requirement that for this to come into effect, you have to be connected to a water and a sewer system operated by a local government. It doesn’t have to say that that water system has enough water to serve the neighbours. It just has to be connected.

It also doesn’t apply to lots that are more than one acre, and we’ve heard that, through regulation, there will be additional changes that will come from this. It provides government with the ability to define what an urban containment boundary is. It allows government to define regulations around what bus stops could be and the sighting and the size and the dimension and location of the housing units.

Basically, the things that matter to people in my community…. You know, what’s the setback? What’s the maximum coverage on a lot? What are the height restrictions? These will be set through regulation later, which creates some challenges.

This act is going to be coming into effect June of next year. If these regulations were a little bit more thought through, we would be able to start that zoning process in our communities to see the types of housing that this government wants to see. But by having all of this in regulation that comes in after the fact, we’re going to see a lag between when the act is coming into effect and when some of these housing units will come through.

The zoning bylaws are also changed in the sense that local government has to accept these numbers of units in these single-family lots. They have no choice. They must. But it also changes the Local Government Act to require that councils accept all zonings that meet the permitted use and density within the official community plan.

It would be interesting to see what that looks like in practice, but it could very dramatically change not just the process for what is approved, but as I said before, when you go through the official community planning process, local governments may be downzoning things just to ensure that they are not going to see the types of development in their community that would happen without their control.

The provision that has come up in question period is the parking provision. So if you live near a bus stop, local governments will no longer have the ability to require off-street parking. I think, in most circumstances, that’s probably reasonable. We want to ensure that people get out of their cars and create less car-dependent communities. I see that as a plus.

The challenge is, again, that local governments are not allowed anymore to even have a conversation about what that off-street parking looks like. We want to encourage people to take a bus. But if you create a neighbourhood where the density is so much that people can’t park in their own communities, it makes it very difficult to raise a family in a community where you have to walk several blocks every time you hop in your car.

Qualicum Beach…. Much like many other communities in this province, they’re car-dependent communities, and that could create some challenges for folks.

There are some additional powers that have been granted to the minister. I won’t go through these. The act is important in the sense that it’s creating an opportunity for housing, but a lot of these powers are going to be coming through regulation.

[3:40 p.m.]

If a rezoning is taking too long, as far as the small, multifamily sites or even in general, it provides power to the government to step in, to mandate local governments to move forward with that zoning. Oddly enough, that power is no longer applicable after 2031. I’m not sure what happens after that point, but maybe that’s the end of our housing crisis. It provides for additional powers here and then goes through the Vancouver Charter.

In our communities, the challenge with this upzoning is that it doesn’t take into account the strain on our infrastructure. We know that this will impact communities like Parksville, Qualicum Beach and French Creek more so than other communities, because this is how our communities were built. They were not planned for four units on every lot in these subdivisions, which means we don’t have the water infrastructure. We don’t have the sewer infrastructure. To require this on government without really planning it through is going to have some significant unintended consequences to the ratepayers.

To dramatically upsize the water service or the sewer service in a community that’s already established is a very expensive undertaking, and it will refocus government from focusing on their downtowns, where we want this development, into these other, more car-dependent communities, which I’m not sure is really what the goal of this act is.

Local governments know best about their own communities, and they are the ones that are able to listen to the needs of their community. In French Creek, for example, we don’t have the water units for any new developments, full stop, regardless of these new rules. If somebody wanted to subdivide a lot and put a new home in, there is not enough water in French Creek for that. We’ve seen the water aquifer go down substantially, both in quantity and quality. To force local governments to rezone these properties to allow for four or more units in a community that doesn’t have access to the water is incredibly shortsighted. If you have a house that when you turn on the tap, water doesn’t come out, that is not a home.

When we look at the wastewater treatment plant, there’s a $123 million investment that’s going to be required for that wastewater treatment plant. When the Minister of Municipal Affairs did her tour on the Island, announcing different investments in the areas, the regional district of Nanaimo was overlooked. This is a significant investment that is going to be required in order to see more homes built in our community. It is just not acceptable to leave that to local government. So $123 million for a community as small as ours is a significant burden, and it’s holding back development.

The other challenges are not just…. When we talk about infrastructure, it’s not just water and sewer. We have infrastructure like the hospital in Nanaimo. We have seen some investment from this government, and I appreciate that: the new high acuity unit, the new intensive care unit. But that’s six net new beds.

If we dramatically increase the population in the cities of Nanaimo and Parksville and French Creek and Qualicum Beach, we’re going to need to see more investment in our hospital. Local government has stepped up. They have the ability to pay for a patient tower and a catheterization lab. But the province isn’t coming to the table to do their 60 percent of this investment.

When I was on council, we always heard about downloading. I thought: “This is great. Local government is in a position to be able to best represent its community, tax directly and be more responsive.” But when you have a provincial government that is forcing local government to build more homes, but doesn’t come to the table for the wastewater treatment plant and doesn’t come to the table for the hospital, it’s putting an unfair burden on communities like Parksville and Qualicum Beach.

That also extends beyond just health care. It’s getting into transportation. Traffic is something we all live with. On our island, for whatever reason, we don’t have interchanges at many of our major intersections on our highway. The more we build up, the more that pressure is going to be felt.

I think there are some misconceptions, as well, when we talk about increasing density, that that’s going to necessarily lead to more affordable options. We have two communities in the constituency side by side, Qualicum Beach and Parksville. Parksville has been growing at a fairly good clip. We’ve seen apartment buildings go up quite dramatically. Qualicum Beach has been pretty quiet.

Even with that dramatic growth, we haven’t seen the cost of rent go down. In fact, the average cost of rent with this development has gone up. My concern, as we look to increase housing density, is that if our goal is to increase affordability, this may not get us to where we need to go.

[3:45 p.m.]

Of course, there are the environmental concerns. People move to Qualicum Beach, and they move to Parksville, because they want to live in a community that is in nature. If we increase the parcel coverage dramatically, we’re going to see the deforestation of our communities. We’re going to see a lack of tree canopy, which, again, creates some challenges for our environments, whether it’s Englishman River or elsewhere.

It’s not just about habitat. These natural assets are absolutely integral to ensuring that our stormwater is able to repenetrate into our aquifer, which we rely on for our drinking water. So when we talk about environmental impacts, it’s not just that we don’t want to see change. It will have a dramatic impact on our ability to be able to provide water to our community.

I’m going to go through some of my notes here. I see I’m running out of time.

I think it’s important that when we talk about our housing changes, that we talk about some of the alternatives that we could be doing in our province. When we focus on densifying suburban regions, which is what this act does, it takes the planning energy away from the downtown cores, which is where we want to see that density. It’s where we want to see that investment.

In our community, I can just imagine, once this takes effect, the impact it will have on our planning department, neighbour against neighbour, asking: “What is allowed? Why can they do this? How do we stop it?” Our planning departments are only so large, and if they can’t focus their energies on our nodal communities, we will not see the growth where we want it, and that means that we will not see the vibrancy of our downtowns.

These are where people go for experiences. We go to cafes, we go to bookstores, pubs. It’s about bringing people together. If we’re forcing more people to live in more suburban areas, all we’re doing is relying on our cars. That’s not the future that I think that this government, and it’s certainly not the future that I want to see in our province.

When we look on Vancouver Island, we have a lack of Crown land, which is a challenge when we want to look at provincial investment into public housing. But we still have a corridor that runs the length of the Island. The Island Corridor Foundation currently owns it. It’s being broken up, and that rail corridor could dramatically link our nodal communities together in a way that creates communities that are interconnected, that don’t rely on cars, that can see density go up in places that people would accept them.

I would certainly hope that, as we see other housing bills move forward and other investments into housing on the Island, this government looks at that that corridor as not only for movement of goods but the movement of people, so that we can build communities that don’t rely on the automobile.

As I mentioned, in this province, 93 percent of the land is owned by us: taxpayers, people in the province, yet I haven’t seen an initiative for a new community in our province since the failed attempt just on the Malahat there. This is a tremendous opportunity for the province to really show leadership in housing. We want to see walkable communities. We want to see communities that people can use active transportation, communities where we have 30 percent of the land dedicated to nature.

We can do that from scratch. We have parts of Vancouver Island, parts of the valley that are owned by the prov­ince that really wouldn’t even require significant investment from the province. It’s just a matter of granting developers the right to develop communities in participation with First Nations with a clear vision of what we want the future of British Columbia to look like.

I think downloading the density into suburban areas, onto local government is…. I mean, that’s one way of building more homes, but I would much rather see purpose-built communities that people from around the world would look at and say: “That is the future of housing, and that’s what we want to see in our own community.”

The member for Saanich North and the Islands mentioned the idea of prefabricated homes. We see in California and Washington State some companies that have set up very impressive, premanufactured home opportunities where they can, in a factory setting, build a four-, five-, six-storey apartment building, flatpack it, ship it to a site, and, in less than a week, have an entire apartment building built.

If B.C. Housing used an initiative like that where they prebought 10,000 units and then asked local governments where they want them, I can assure you that there will be communities that say, “Yes, please. Right here.” The province can get that money back.

It’s not like we’re talking about massive amounts of money that will be invested and not recuperated, but we could set up a structure where that money is then brought back into government and government is made whole so we could see housing built quicker, more cheaply, with quality homes that people could move in in a very quick way.

There are some great programs that exist right now through B.C. Housing. HousingHub is a good program. The challenge is that it hasn’t really kept up with the rates of inflation and some of the challenges that developers are facing.

[3:50 p.m.]

I would hope, as we discuss Bill 44 and the massive densification of our suburbs, government would also look at some of the programs that already exist in our own province that aren’t really working to their maximum potential.

When B.C. Housing does commit to make a presenta­tion to a local council, as we saw in Parksville recently, I hope they would show up. Local governments want to work with government. They want to work with B.C. Housing. They want to address the needs in our community.

We saw recently that the city of Parksville invited B.C. Housing to come and answer questions. “Where is it that we are going in our community?” “How are we going to address the need?” With ten minutes of notice, B.C. Housing said: “We’re just not going to be able to make this meeting today.”

It’s about working together. This need is significant, and we will not get there alone.

The last item I want to quickly mention is the first-time-homebuyers grant. We talk about the ability to dramatically densify our suburban areas. But when you’re a first-time homebuyer and you look at that cap…. It says $500,000 is the limit, and you will not be eligible for the grant otherwise. Even with laneway suites, if we set them up as stratas, in our community, you’re still looking at a half a million dollars. I would hope the government would look at this first-time-homebuyers grant as an opportunity, adjust the levels and ensure that we can get first-time homebuyers into homes.

I just want to reiterate that I fully recognize that we’re in a housing crisis. We see not just seniors. We see everybody struggling with this. Families are having a hard time paying their mortgage or paying their rent and looking after other bills. As we hear from the opposition all the time, B.C. is now the most expensive jurisdiction in all of North America. That’s not something to be proud of.

While this will increase the number of housing units in some of our communities, it doesn’t address the core issue, which is that housing is just completely unaffordable for many people in our communities. As the member for Saanich North and the Islands mentioned, this is a windfall for those that own homes. For those who don’t own homes, it may not provide that avenue to get into home ownership.

We need to ensure that there’s business certainty. It’s not local governments that build housing. It’s not the province that builds housing. It’s builders that build housing. And when the rules change or when there are proposed rules and the regulation is not made public and there are things that are said in public that maybe are different than what’s in the act, it creates uncertainty.

We want to see builders build in our province. We want to make sure that the rules don’t change, that they know what to expect and that they will lead this process and get us to where we need to go.

Up until this point, this government has listened to the UBCM. We are at a higher level than the local governments, but the fact is that we’ve got 161 municipalities and 27 regional districts.

When you talk to the elected officials that are in these governments…. They know what they’re doing. They lis­ten to their community. They’re responsive. They’re responsible to their community. They’ve got great ideas. We want to make sure that as new housing bills come forward, their voices are part of this process, because we’re not going to get through this alone.

We want to ensure this is a collaborative effort. All levels of government, whether it’s local government, provincial, federal, First Nations…. Even with the school boards, there are opportunities there for housing on school grounds.

We want to make sure that we do this collaboratively. We need to work together, we need to listen to each other, and we need to show deliverable action so that people in our province can see that we’re going in the right direction.

B. Stewart: It’s a pleasure and an honour to stand in this House, again just talking about Bill 44, the Housing Statutes Amendment Act.

Thinking about some of the other speakers that I’ve heard here today, I have to say that it was something for me…. I think about the drastic, dramatic change that this Bill 44 brings into the House.

Quite a lot of years ago, I used to sit on the Advisory Planning Commission for the regional district in Kelowna. I remember the rules. I think it was bylaw 871, if I’m not mistaken. It had all the rules about heights and variances and things like that. My goodness, we had a lot of challenges with people that always wanted to creep and do other things like that.

This bill is so broad in terms of what its mandate is and what it’s doing. I can’t help but think about the fact….

Everybody in British Columbia is talking about housing. It’s kind of like affordability…. Housing doesn’t have any affordability. Why has that happened?

[3:55 p.m.]

I look at what the government is proposing with Bill 44. One of the things that I think…. What has happened here is…. Government’s reaction has been in the wrong direction, in my opinion. The reaction has been to try and control it through B.C. Housing, government entities, rules.

I know I’ve spoken a lot about…. Bring out the playbook instead of the rulebook. I think that in this situation here, this bill, given the way that it’s written and the fact that when it comes out…. It is going to so dramatically change things with local government that it’s going to create a lot of problems. I mean, the problems I can just envision, in terms of how cities are going to deal with things like infrastructure.

I couldn’t help but think about, years ago, when I joined my father. We were planting vineyards. His planting regime was 495 plants per acre. Of course, today we’re planting over 2,050 vines per acre. When we do that difference…. It didn’t get there all at one time. It involves a lot of planning and research that goes into that.

What does that actually mean? I’m thinking about the infrastructure that’s in communities, which is already built for a certain amount of density, and what that is.

Now, I know that there’s $51 million being talked about and being proposed for infrastructure. I don’t think that the government has a number on that. I think that number is very light, and I think that communities are going to be faced with simple things.

I mean, if you know a little bit about pipes…. They have a certain amount of flow, based on pressure, that they can carry, whether it’s a two-, four-, six- or eight-inch pipe. Under pressure, they can deliver so much water. But over time or over the length, there’s a friction loss that occurs so that water and things that are under pressure diminish over time, and that has to be taken out.

I don’t see any suggestion that there’s going to be a comprehensive review of some of these issues that communities are going to be faced with. In time, I’m sure that their engineering departments will collaborate with their planning departments, and they’re going to come up with this. I mean, they’re already talking about — they know at a high level — really what the cost is going to be.

Take sewer. I mean, in front of my house, just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the streets torn up. Actually, it has been longer than that. It has been since the start of September. They’re putting in a new storm sewer. I mean, the size of the pipe went from a measly 12-inch, whatever that is in millimetres — probably about 200 millimetres — up to a 900 millimetre pipe. It’s a huge pipe. It costs a lot. It takes an awful lot of…. You know, forget about the disruption but just the cost of changing that infrastructure and planning it out.

What I really wonder when I look at this is…. I think that this is the type of thing…. You’ve sat down. You’ve figured out: “If we increase the density, we’re going to get housing.” The consequence of making those types of rules, in terms of local government, is going to be not only immense, but it’s going to be untenable.

I look at some of the things that I mentioned — the planting density and things like that. When you lay out a community…. I mean, these communities, the Vancouver Charter and other communities, have been around for well over 100 and some years. Even Kelowna was incorporated in 1905. They’ve been built with the premise…. As they expanded and grew, they had to upgrade the infrastructure. They move out, and they have different pathways, etc.

We’re talking about something that’s being downloaded on top of all of these communities that now fit into this criteria. They are going to have to accept this. I think it’s about 60 communities. It’s an overnight transformation that is going to be put in front of city planning departments, engineering departments. They’re not going to know what to do. The fact that even the responsible cities have said: “Let’s build a zone over here where we’re going to encourage this type of high density….”

I know, in the city of Kelowna recently, we talked about the short-term rental market, and there were whole areas set aside specifically for that particular focus. But in this particular case, it’s not. It’s generalized by saying that if you have a single-family lot zoned R1 or R2, it’s going to be upzoned immediately. How is the city…? How is any council or city or planning department expected to deal with it? There’s no capacity.

[4:00 p.m.]

The other thing about this is…. When I look at the problem…. I think we’ve tried to regulate our way out of this by creating rules. We should be doing the opposite. What we should be doing is finding ways for those…. I’m not going to call them the word that’s often used. But the property development companies that actually have the capacity know how to deal with this, how to build something affordably. And the fact that they get an opportunity to focus in….

Maybe the cities are forced into identifying areas in the city where this is going to occur so it makes sense. Yet actually, one of the things that is in here is about increased densification around transit-orientated communities. That’s quite different in Vancouver than it is in Kelowna or West Kelowna, where we have a limited amount of transit and infrequency of transit.

If you’re expecting people in downtown West Kelowna all of a sudden to be able to hop on the bus and be able to get out to shopping centres or where their kids are going to school and stuff like that, the things that they like to do — go to the arena, play hockey, gymnastics for the ones that like that type of activity — it’s not very practical in communities such as the Central Okanagan and many communities here in the Lower Mainland.

We’re surrounded by the ALR. We’ve got ALR chunks all over the place, acres and acres. That was kind of mentioned by one of the speakers. I think it was the member for Saanich North and the Islands, and he’s talking about the fact that this is that big a change, that it’s that magnitude, and it is.

I can assure you that the ALR was a surprise to many, and it’s taken…. Now since it’s been in for about 50 years, the situation is that there’s no going back and taking out…. Originally, there was an appeal process that has essentially been ended by this government in terms of how much you can build on agricultural land, whether you can have a second residence. It’s limited to local government, the province and First Nations being able to make application to look at changes in the land reserve.

But I can look at the city of Kelowna. You can drive down through areas that are very built up, close to shopping and the highway transportation system, and there are huge swaths of agricultural land that are not going to be developed. I know the land commission, and I don’t disagree with that.

However, I think the idea of putting the pressure, just because Springfield Road in Kelowna happens to be a bus route and it’s close to these other things, that people can function in our community and get around…. It’s built up of neighbourhoods to adjust and adapt to the land commission.

I can remember former mayor Jim Stuart in Kelowna pushing hard to get Benvoulin Road upgraded from two lanes to four lanes because of the neighbourhoods and the connectivity and the fact that it went through agricultural land — let alone the permitting process to do that, but let alone building out the infrastructure.

We’ve just gone through a massive expenditure in an area where we farm in Kelowna. It was over $90 million for the city to put in a split water system to separate agricultural water from domestic users because it’s in a farm area. Some of the land was excluded under the land commission, and people have built houses there. The bottom line was that they were finding water was expensive to treat, so what they wanted to do is to put the domestic users on a system that is treated and agricultural users, like ourselves, on untreated water. That’s fine. But it cost $90 million.

Where’s the $51 million going to go? That was one portion of the city of Kelowna. It doesn’t include Black Mountain irrigation, Glenmore or the other small ones like the Rutland water utilities and stuff like that. There are, I’m sure, literally hundreds, if not thousands, of examples where this is going to occur across the province.

When I read through and I think about all the attempts at what this bill is trying to do, it’s attempting to fix something that hasn’t been able to be fixed in the past. Actually, I don’t recall the consultation going on with communities about how this is going to happen. Maybe it’s assumed that we can turn Vancouver into Hong Kong overnight with the density of that magnitude.

Having lived for 3½ years in Beijing and travelled extensively in these large cities….I heard the member for Parksville-Qualicum talk about the treeless kind of environment that we might be leaning towards. I can assure you that in China, they had a different plan.

[4:05 p.m.]

There are not many birds, or none at all, and of course, there are no trees downtown. The fact is that you end up with these concrete jungles. They do have parklands and stuff like that, but the reality is that it takes away from the character that the people, these communities that have been there for generations, have built up.

What we’re talking about is taking away the fact that there wouldn’t be any public meetings, the fact that the zoning would be automatic, etc. I know that this bill is not expected to come into play until after the next election, but one of the things we’re really needing to do is to make certain that there is some middle ground on this. This is a sledgehammer trying to be used to fix something that just needs some common sense.

The other thing is that when I think about this…. Okay, we’re talking about the commitment to build 114,000 new homes. That was the commitment of the government when they got elected in 2017. I think the number is about 15 percent of those 114 that are actually built. It’s a far cry from what…. You know, aspirational goals are fine, but if you don’t have a plan — I mean a plan to actually get there, meaning you start on that first day — what are you going to do, to do that?

What are the capacity gaps? Is it the land? Is it a case that the zoning is wrong? Where do you need to do it? I know that we need housing all over the place, but what are we doing to try to break down that barrier so that we can get somewhere closer to those 114,000? I see that now it’s up to 130,000 and a different date.

At the end of the day, I still go back to the planning. You know, we farm roughly 450 acres, and at a very intensive density, but it’s taken decades and years to build that out: land preparation, making certain that the water systems are there. In the last water system upgrade, because of the magnitude of the field, we spent probably close to $350,000 just to filter the water so that we’d have enough water of a good quality that would not plug up the emitters on drip irrigation.

I mean, it takes planning, whether it’s levelling, laying it out or having enough supplies, the posts, the plants, etc. Many of those things are coming in from offshore.

When we do that with the housing market, do we have the developers? Do we have the contractors that can lay in the pipe, to do the servicing, the updates and stuff like that? I think the problem is that what this legislation, Bill 44, doesn’t address is: how do communities transition to where they can increase density? What communities are doing a good job?

I know that the mayor of Burnaby was in the news this morning talking about it. They’re frustrated because they thought they were doing all the right things, building highrises, etc. Of course, there are sections and swaths of their city that still are one-zoned, and Burnaby has been around for a long time, outside the city of Vancouver. At the end of the day, what’s the gold standard? Or who’s got even a silver — or whatever the standards are — and says you need to be more like Burnaby or somebody else like that?

I think that what is, sadly, lacking here is that…. Okay, if we find a way to upzone, where’s the capacity? In the development community, we already have problems. I know the Minister of Transportation is in the House here. He and I have spoken in estimates about this. How is it that the Ministry of Transportation and a couple of other ministries are part of the problem in developing within 800 metres of the centre line? Essentially, it’s taking up to two years to get developments approved in that.

What I’m saying is that the province has to be part of the solution on all of these fronts. They can’t just kind of arbitrarily put that in and then expect that these things can happen, even the good developments that you want. I think that that’s an important part of what we need to talk about.

I’m worried about the fact that the effect of what we’re doing here is not going to get the outcome that people are really looking for. I mean, we’d like to have more affordable rentals. We’d like to have more housing. We’d like to have it in all the different areas where people can expect to be able to buy. We’ve chosen, intentionally, to add improvements in climate protection and the built environment. I know the built environment is a big part of CO₂ emissions, about insulation and those things.

[4:10 p.m.]

The building code has moved to a step system. It’s moved up so quickly that it’s added over $50,000 per unit, in today’s costs, whether it’s glazing or some of the other things. I’m not certain it should have been done. Is the system for Fort St. John or Fort Nelson the same as the one on the Sunshine Coast or in the place of Vancouver? There are climatic zones in this province. I think that’s one of the things we’re missing.

In this particular bill, Bill 44, it talks about building…. We’re going to create 130,000 homes over the next ten years. It doesn’t actually tell you how, other than the zoning part of it. By contrast, CMHC says that we actually need to build 610,000. Well, the population of British Columbia will be well over six million by that point.

We’re going to have to think about where all the population is going to go. Do we want to have, the way I described, a highly dense community or city like Hong Kong or some of the other cities? I mean, there are lots of them — Kuala Lumpur, Singapore. I have spent a fair amount of time in all of those cities. The reality is that they’re all very different, and a lot of them do have differences you can actually see. Is that what we want for the Lower Mainland, built around the ALR and stuff like that? I think we have to look at this.

Where’s the infrastructure to supply this or to backstop this with transit? I mean, I know transit-oriented development is desired. It’s Bill 16, I think, earlier in this session that we passed…. The idea was that we were going to make that a priority so the Ministry of Transportation could easily make that happen. I totally agree. I don’t think that there’s a problem there.

However, the transportation links…. I know we’ve announced, or the government’s announced, the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension. But what about the other communities that are…? Every day on Highway 1 heading out to Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Langley, it’s gridlock. The reality is that if we want to absorb the 610,000 extra homes, we’re going to actually have to do something more in transportation. It’s going to take a huge amount of planning and infrastructure to do this.

We do need to work as more of one entity working on this, but we can’t work where we’ve got the GVRD pitting against each community, the 31 or 33 different jurisdictions that are in there. The situation is we have to be able to make certain that we can get to a place where the services are there.

I know that the government probably isn’t particularly proud of the highest rents in North America. But on top of that, we also have…. Well, the highest rents in North America. A townhouse is up 33 percent, just in terms of costs; and a single-family home, approaching $2 million.

The targets are only about 75 percent of the real need, according to CMHC guidelines. Robert Berry, for the pro-density group Homes for Living, said in the Vancouver Sun that the NDP is taking the politically convenient route with moderate targets that don’t solve the core issue. Brendon Ogmundson, the chief economist for the B.C. Real Estate Association, notes that if targets are met, they fall short of what’s needed for affordability. These are a couple of experts. Certainly, I know Brendon Ogmundson myself, and I know that he’s not throwing these words around.

The reality is that we have to really come together if we want to find a long-term solution in this that’s going to make a difference in terms of availability, affordability and to make certain the communities don’t become completely destroyed by the fact that we’ve put in some convenient tool that the government’s using as a hammer, as I said, or a sledgehammer, to making these things happen, in terms of getting the building done.

Too often I hear from the government that the development community is evil in some way. There are good and bad people in the world, and I think we heard that on Bill 42 the other day. As a matter of fact, it was brought up again today — about the renters that are maybe bad renters. Well, there are bad landlords too, and we acknowledge that in between. In development, there are people that…. Clearly, there needs to be rules and guidelines to keep them in line.

[4:15 p.m.]

On the other hand, we’re never going to get to where we need to get to unless we can make certain that we bring along the best developers, encourage them, provide incentives and being able to work together to do that. They are trying, but once we get going on this, where is the provincial government, in terms of helping bring in the people that can do the plumbing or the earthworks or the other things like that? We have a role to play in this in terms of attracting the people that can actually physically do the work. We can’t build all of these homes without the people that are here — carpenters.

I know that there’s a whole business about legislation about fast-tracking and doing that, but I do think that there is the minimum standards when it comes to these things. We have to make certain that we have journeymen in all the different professions to make certain that the housing is safe, and not just taking somebody that says: “Oh yeah. I was an electrician back where I came from.” There is probably an expectation under CSA that our standards are going to be met.

Recently Metro Vancouver announced that it was going to triple development cost charges on new housing, adding up to $25,000 to the cost of a new home. I think that that’s unprecedented. I know they face cost pressures, but we have to be more innovative in terms of what local government is doing in getting to the end result, which is actually faster approvals and making certain that everybody knows what the rules are.

One of the things that I was most impressed by at UBCM was a seminar I attended with the city of Kelowna, the city of Vancouver and Microsoft. It talked about the fact that they wanted to see what they could do about improving the processing of building permits, so they took all the building permits they had and they said: “Okay, let’s see what we can do in 24 hours with all of the applications we have.” They made a list of not exceptions, but they said if it meets these criteria and it’s zoned properly or whatever, we’re going to improve them.

They were amazed at how much they could actually clear of a backlog by doing that, but then they said: “Well, what do you think we could do in 24 seconds?” They went ahead, and they started working on a process that is actually implemented right now, today, where you can scan the documents, fill out the applications online, and if you have everything, you’re actually going to get your permit right away. They’re taking this software, and they’re going to share this with every municipality in British Columbia sometime before the end of 2023.

Not every community is ready to go with that type of approach. However, it gives them the technology and the ability to improve processing times. Why can’t we use that in other areas? Why can’t we look at the way that what makes us take so long to get certain things done or whatever? What are the ways that we could innovate? Those are the types of things I think with the local communities that we should be working on.

Bill 44 brings in the sledgehammers I talked about before, saying we’re going to impose this on you. I hap­pened to look. I think it’s 142 units per hectare they’re talking about under that. Well, just looking at some of the cities that are out there, they’re far below that. I know the city of Kelowna is at 17 units per hectare.

Well, they could do better, but the reality is that they have devoted an awful lot of time to concentrating development in the downtown core, where they do have transit walkability, and what they’re trying to do is make it in a logical manner, moving out from the centre of the city.

I think that when it comes to the other things that we want to do, we need to still attract people to our communities. We don’t have the workers now. What’s it going to be like in five or ten years if we can’t resolve this housing thing? It’s not going to get cheaper by just being able to increase density. We have to have all hands on deck — the developers, the people that are doing the building, the people that want to live there and are going to get paid a living wage to work there but can afford what it is that we’re offering.

One of the things about the details in this particular legislation, Bill 44…. Obviously, there’s a lot of vagueness about what it is that is in the legislation. Most of it or…. Moreover, there are large portions of this legislation that won’t come into effect until after the next election. So what does that mean?

[4:20 p.m.]

It means that, really, we can say that we’re doing something, but we haven’t actually delivered on it. I think that after this amount of time — and by the time the next election rolls around, the government will have been in place for eight years — I would assume that it would be reasonable to think that the government should have been able to make progress, not just legislative progress but being able to really deal with the elephant in the room.

The interim housing needs report doesn’t need to be completed until after the next election in December of 2024. The OCP plans don’t need to be redesigned until December of 2025. I guess when I read that, I’m kind of thinking that we’re going to be stuck in this rut, if you want to call it, for at least another year and a half, maybe even longer. We don’t even know how we’re going to fix this in terms of the magnitude of all the infrastructure that this is going to impose on communities.

Let’s talk a little bit about taxes and the cost. Over the last seven years…. I know that the government doesn’t like to hear this, but there have been 29 new and increased taxes that have been added. Some of the taxes, like the speculation tax, were supposed to create and free up more housing, etc.

What really has happened is that the situation is that the speculation tax did…. It targeted those people. But things that have really added to the cost of buildings, etc.… I know that there is a large debate on MSP, which was in place, was about to be reduced by half, but the situation is it’s been replaced by the employer health tax.

What about the employees that have now five paid sick days? They’ve also got minimum wage that’s gone up. I’m not saying that that shouldn’t be happening, but these are government-imposed costs that have been put onto the construction industry and the building community and the people that are putting in the pipes in the ground, etc. Frankly, if you want to know why things aren’t affordable, you’ve got to look in our own backyard, and that’s some of the things that we’ve already made.

I call it a massive amount of new taxes and stuff like that. It’s not just taxes. It’s about the fact that goods and services…. We talked about fuel costs and things like that, but the carbon tax has more than doubled in the last seven years. That’s a tax, and that adds to the cost of getting concrete or building materials or any of the…. Even the smart builders that use prefabricated buildings and stuff like that have to add that cost to what they’re building.

I think that what we need is more competition, and that’s what we’re going to be advocating for. I know that as we move towards, inevitably, another election, we’re going to have a plan that’s going to be exciting. It’s going to talk about green urban density over unmanaged sprawl.

Our record speaks for itself in terms of the fact that these housing problems don’t happen overnight. They take time to develop. But what’s happened is that we need to get back to where we have an environment where people want to do the things that they need to do, and incentify. We need councils to do that. We need smart, thoughtful legislation that’s going to help make certain that these things are going to take place over the next few years.

We’re not going to solve the problem in the next ten years. There’s no single solution that’s going to solve these problems.

Thanks very much. I look forward to committee de­bate on Bill 44, finding out all the solutions to the questions that I still have.

C. Oakes: It truly is my pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill 44. I think all members in this Legislature want to find solutions for housing, for people across British Columbia.

I think what you will hear today, at least certainly from our side, is a thorough review of the consequences of legislation, such as Bill 44, being brought forward, that is in fact creating a level of uncertainty in British Columbia, that is causing a loss of competitiveness in British Columbia and ultimately is having a significant impact on people, on housing, on services, on the labour force in British Columbia.

[4:25 p.m.]

Look. There are many members in this House who proudly served on their local governments. I can share with you that I had the great privilege to serve on city council in Quesnel for two terms. I also had the privilege to serve on the North Central Local Government Association, and later I had the privilege to serve as the minister responsible for local government.

So some of what I bring to this conversation today is perhaps a little bit of a reflection on some of the experiences that I had through those multiple privileged opportunities I had to serve but also just a review of the disconnects in this legislation.

The first, which I’m going to identify as one of the most significant barriers to outcomes by the NDP government, is the operational silos that we continue to see in multiple pieces of legislation, regulation and policies that come forward in this House. This understanding, or lack of understanding, of the various complex legislative frameworks that exist in multiple ministries and how they should be connecting or ensuring that there at least is some oversight in this….

I will start with my greatest surprise, which is the lack of understanding of how local governments work and the legislative frameworks that govern local governments. The policy that’s brought forward in this legislation — not only is it, in essence, a downloading on local governments…. I encourage all local governments in British Columbia to pay attention to this piece of legislation and future pieces of legislation because it’s going to have unintended consequences in your community. But just the framework or disconnect that this government doesn’t understand….

In the press release to this legislation, it talks about two particular acts. It talks about the Vancouver Charter and the Local Government Act. But it fails to even recognize the Community Charter.

To the government, just a reminder that the Community Charter provides the statutory framework for all municipalities except Vancouver. So here you have brought forward legislation…. So am I to understand that under the Community Charter, all municipalities are actually outside the scope of this legislation that has been brought forward?

Municipalities, when you’re looking at the densification, have a significant role and opportunity to play on that. I know that for many members who have sat in local government, one of your first briefings you get, that policy manual you receive when you are newly elected, is about the roles and authorities you serve as elected officials and as local governments — your responsibility.

One of the changes that came in place, at least during the time I was in local government, is around the local government capital assets framework, and particularly looking at the community life-cycle infrastructure costing responsibilities and fiscal demands that local governments need to review. So community life-cycle infrastructure costing helps local governments estimate the entire life-cycle costs of infrastructure such as water, sewer, transportation; for different land use patterns — for example, compact versus low-density development.

New development and land use planning decisions require careful consideration, as they affect the scale, scope and type of infrastructure needs. The full financial impact of these decisions will influence the long-term community sustainability and resilience. The community life-cycle infrastructure costing tool can help local governments better understand the long-term cost implications of these land use decisions.

[4:30 p.m.]

So local governments have been utilizing these tools, but now, all of a sudden, you have a piece of legislation that’s coming forward that changes all of the predetermined work that has been completed by local governments to build business cases for the development of more compact, complete, connected and centred communities. They have been doing that, and the tool fosters integrated, informed decision-making, with the potential to deliver more cost-effective and resilient land use decisions.

Today’s legislation — I am curious around how the com­munity lifestyle infrastructure costing will be im­pacted.

Then we move into the other aspect of local government, which is the mechanics of asset management. The asset management policy is the foundational piece of local government’s approach to asset management. It is always desirable for a local government’s operation to be guided by consistent, applied policy and documented procedures.

Well, this legislation, all of a sudden, says, “Okay, we’re going to throw that out the window,” but I don’t know, around the policies, if you actually can, with what is being brought forward today. The asset management policy sets out direction and guidance for staff undertaking asset management across the organization in a systemic and coordinated way, and in a manner that supports the local government’s goals and objectives.

There is an asset management strategy that summarizes the local government’s asset management plan to provide an overall corporate view of longer-term financial requirements: adhere to a risk-based approach, where critical assets are prioritized; consider the costs and benefits over each asset’s life cycle and strive for financial sustainability; include an appropriate level of stakeholder engagement, including potential users; outline a set of objectives and key performance indicators related to maximizing asset benefits and information management; and identify functional and conditional requirements for assets and to be reviewed regularly.

An asset management plan is an activity plan that in­forms the local government’s financial plan. It defines the activities required for a particular significant asset or asset group, maintenance, refurbishment and ultimate replacement, and identifies the associated costs. These asset management plans are routinely updated through ongoing condition monitoring and should become increasingly accurate over time.

Well, you just took all of that and created significant uncertainty and lack of clarity for local governments across this province. Major capital asset groups include transportation, drinking water, sanitary sewers, stormwater, buildings, parks, vehicles and equipment. An asset management program is an ongoing process that a local government uses to identify asset needs, such as maintenance, rehabilitation, replacement and financing, based on updated inspections and condition assessments at specified intervals. Such a program is generally led by a local government’s engineering program.

The financial sustainability of local governments is driven around this asset management plan, but now we have a piece of legislation that is…. I’m not sure how they’re going to be incorporating the work that has been done in the past, because all of a sudden….

I could be wrong, but when you’re increasing the den­sity in communities where you may have an asset management framework in a local government that sets forth, “This is what we have for the needs for water, sewage, storm drains, all of that infrastructure, and now we are densifying through a piece of legislation that doesn’t have any correlation or connection to frameworks that are required by local government,” that is going to be a significant challenge. I’m not even sure of the legalities of how that will actually be considered.

We talk about local governments, and we talk about the infrastructure requirements that local governments are required…. There is significant work that local governments do to make sure that they’re meeting their responsibilities that are set out in the Community Charter, the Local Government Act and the Vancouver Charter.

The next piece goes to: why is this government not taking a far more proactive approach on actually fighting for British Columbia at the federal level?

[4:35 p.m.]

I went back through my notes from my time in local government. Then when I served as the minister for local government, in 2013, we went to Ottawa, and we got $2.37 billion for the Build Canada fund. That was specifically designed understanding that if you want housing in communities, you needed to make sure that you have all of the infrastructure I just mentioned in communities.

It’s one thing for the provincial government to say, “Look, we’re going to build housing,” but when there is a disconnect in understanding that there is going to be required funding to make sure infrastructure is in place, that’s a huge disconnect.

If all of a sudden now that conversation is being said, “Okay, local governments, we’re going to download this on to you, and you can work with the building community to come up and recover those costs,” I can understand why we’ve seen a significant reluctance of capital coming into this province, of investment coming into this province, because of this level of uncertainty and basic lack of understanding on how local governments actually work.

I went online prior to standing up today to actually look at…. If I’m a local government, and I go on to…. There is the website that we used to have where you can access gas tax funding for local infrastructure projects. And guess what. There’s nothing open right now.

So here we have a piece of legislation that is before the House that’s going to have significant consequences on local government, and lo and behold, if you go on to the website to find out if there is any financial support for local governments to move this forward, there’s not. So I can understand why local governments who are tuned in to this piece of legislation are incredibly concerned about this.

Look, there is only one taxpayer. Whether it’s the federal government, the provincial government or the local government, we all have to collaborate and work together to make our communities the best that they can be and ensure that we have services such as running water, sewage, storm drains, all of those things that are required in communities.

The fact that there is…. I don’t know if it’s hubris. I don’t even know what to say when repeatedly in this House we have a government that likes to hold everyone else to account for what is happening in communities. They download, but they’re not there to collaborate. They’re not there to help actually solve the problem.

We’re tired of rhetoric. We’re tired of not having outcomes. Quite frankly, I’m tired of the fact that there is no housing for people in British Columbia because of the policies, the decisions, the uncertainty that this government is delivering. We can do better. We have to do better.

I have a few solutions that I would like to present today before this Legislative Assembly. Look, I have heard multiple times in this House…. In fact, I heard today members of the NDP who talked about: “Well, what did you do?” So I mentioned the fact, in 2013, as a new minister for local government, we went to Ottawa and made sure that we got $2.37 billion to help support infrastructure in British Columbia. Part of that was $148.5 million in clean water and wastewater fund that enabled local governments to build infrastructure necessary to ensure British Columbians have reliable access to clean water.

We also looked at the cumulative effects framework and included policies, procedures and tools to improve the asset and management of cumulative effects in decisions related to local governments.

[4:40 p.m.]

We looked at how we could create a more accessible action plan. We had Accessibility 2024, a ten-year action plan to make B.C., the most progressive jurisdiction in Canada for people with disabilities. We made sure that as we were building our communities and our housing strategies, we had a plan that encompassed everything from how you look at building the community…. Where’s the labour force to make sure that that building happens, to make sure that the types of communities that you are building are inclusive and accessible?

Let’s talk about the other challenge that this NDP government has not quite attuned to understand what is going on, on the ground. That is about our workforce challenges.

There are decisions that this government makes, and yes, every government makes priorities to understand the investments that are needed to have results. Well, I am proud to stand in this House and talk about a five-year B.C. jobs plan that clearly connected all pieces to how you grow the economy, to make sure you are connecting it with investing in people and getting them the skills that they need but understanding that part of that jobs plan is investing in communities, making sure you’re building out communities, making sure you’re investing, as I said, in water and transportation infrastructure and making sure that you don’t leave people behind.

I look at our communities right now in British Columbia, and, boy, do I see a lot of people left behind. I cannot believe we are living in a province where the outcomes are so incredibly poor. Go to any one of our communities and look at what’s happening right now. While the government likes to blame every other person, they need to look at the mirror. They need to understand that the policies and the regulations that they’re putting in place are leading to the consequences that we’re seeing right now in our communities.

I stand before this House because there are definitive things that this government can do to make sure that the services that people require in our communities are there.

Let’s start talking about skilled-trades seats across this province. This government likes to talk about the investments that they’re making. But let’s actually look at the seat counts. Let’s actually have a clear picture of how many new seats are actually out there right now for the skilled labour force.

You know what, in my community, one of the most successful programs we had was? It was called the Shoulder Tappers program, and it was a program designed to go into elementary and high schools to talk about the incredible opportunities that there are in the skilled labour fields, whether it’s construction, whether it’s electrician, whether it’s automotive — you name it. The NDP government cancelled this program. They cancelled programs that made sure that our kids understood the incredible opportunities there were to be a skilled labourer in this province.

So it should come as no surprise now that after two terms, we don’t have the people to actually build the houses that we need. It’s great to bring in legislation that continues to confuse and to create uncertainty. But have a look at the fact that there were things that this government cancelled, that we are seeing, today, have real consequences in the fact that we do not have the skilled labour workforce to build the housing, the density that is required.

There are a few programs that this government could certainly bring back. And how about growing the seats in communities right across this province? Why not start looking at our rural colleges?

Do you know, in other jurisdictions in the east, that they’re investing in rural colleges? They understand that the challenges that rural colleges and post-secondary institutions are facing right now….

[4:45 p.m.]

Inflationary costs are very real, and what has happened from an operational perspective…. Post-secondary campuses, specifically in rural communities, are having to reduce a lot of these programs that have significant costs to them.

So it should come as no surprise that if it takes six years to complete your carpentry program, a lot of those people decide that, “You know what? I can’t wait six years to get the college credits needed or the skills credits needed to complete that,” so they’ll make a different decision. That is certainly something that this government could look at.

Another thing I was proud we did to help support communities that were facing those significant growth opportunities was the Northwest Readiness program. I was proud of that program, because you know what we understood? We understood that local governments required capacity and that when you’re looking at the type of growth that is happening in some of these communities, often, whether it’s the planner department, the engineering department, look….

In a lot of these communities, those services are…. It’s pretty hard to find, especially in some of our more north­ern communities. You know what we said? We partnered with the University of Northern British Columbia, the planning school, and said, “Look, we are going to invest in making sure those students — that we connect them up to these local governments where that capacity was needed, and we’re going to invest and grow that program.”

Every time this NDP government stands up and blames municipalities, I think of that program. I think: why has this government not considered for a moment that perhaps if they invested in, I don’t know, additional seats and some of the planning schools in this province, provide incentives for those planners to go into local governments…? That would be one way to streamline and actually see results in our communities. It was something that worked.

I can share with members of this Legislature that those members that went through that planning program in UNBC are now some of our CAOs — some of our leaders in many of our municipalities in this province. It worked. So instead of pointing the finger and blaming people, start looking at solutions. A good place to start looking at solutions is looking at some of the incredible opportunities we have in our post-secondary sector across this province.

I hope that this legislation will be bold. I hope that this will look at some of the incredible projects that I’ve had the ability to review, such as Vancouver Community College, a pretty significant opportunity for this government to look at how you can have densification near transit lines. I encourage this government. That would be great. That would be something really positive to look at.

I hope that if my comments today have any takeaway, please look at the plan that the Vancouver Community College has put forward, because I think it’s a solid one. I think you should talk to UBC, and I think you should talk about the transportation options. I think that there are some really good opportunities there around densification and looking at how that whole region and how campuses can be these incredible communities. I encourage the government to go back out and talk to these post-secondary institutions.

I’m asking this government to stand up for British Columbians. Stand up. Go to Ottawa. The last Build Canada negotiations, the bilateral agreement, was done in 2013. I had the privilege to be a part of that. It was a ten-year plan. Guess what. Where is the next Build Canada plan? Where is the next plan to make sure local governments have access that they need to actually build that incredibly critical infrastructure?

[4:50 p.m.]

Sometimes the decisions around infrastructure development and local governments are difficult, because one size does not fit all. I can share with members of this House how difficult it is, as a small community, to come up with the necessary funds that they require to put in critically important wastewater, wells and drinking water.

I just heard that Prince Rupert is on a boil-water advisory. I’m pretty sure I heard some victory laps from the government on how well they’re doing up in that area. Why are they on a boil-water advisory? I can go across this province, talk about the communities, the local governments that I met, and create the list of the structural challenges that are needed.

I guess, as I close my comments, the other challenging piece of this legislation is that it talks about the requirement to look 20 years out. I am a supporter of long-term planning. I think that’s critically important for us, but from an asset management perspective and from the frameworks, the bylaws…. I just had a brief look at the municipal requirements and bylaws, the requirements even around the Supreme Court hearings, the practical aspects and responsibilities that local governments have.

I’m not sure how a piece of legislation comes forward and says, “We want your 20-year plan,” when even the accountability framework — where I started my speech today, or my discussion — talked about five years. In the official community plans and the asset management plans, they’re all in five-year cycles. All of a sudden, this is a provincial government that says: “Well, you need to plan for 20 years.”

Who knows what that’s going to look like? Who knows — when you look at the investment, the reinvestment, the asset-management piece of all of that — how a local government now gets downloaded, with limited capacity? Quite frankly, there aren’t enough planners in this province to even help local governments get to what this legislation is meant to do.

How are they going to move this piece of legislation forward? Planning capacity, engineering capacity, is a significant challenge across this province. There has been no movement from this government to address that.

It’s one thing to bring this type of legislation forward; it’s another thing to make sure that you’ve done the cross-ministry review. Clearly, that has not happened, understanding the responsibilities in the local government ministry. I know that there are a few other ministers who’ve had the local government file in this House and know the realities, the consequences and the legislation that this piece of legislation is now going to supersede, if it even can.

Local governments are critically important in this prov­ince. I think this government needs to listen to them and understand the consequences of the decisions that they’re making. As well-intended as this legislation may be, the consequences of what they are bringing forward are going to create continued uncertainty and are going to have impacts opposite to what they’re trying to achieve.

J. Sturdy: I am pleased to rise today to speak to and participate in this important debate. It truly is one of the most important debates in British Columbia today. The housing issue intrudes on virtually every conversation that you have, be it around the dining room table, at the campfire or in any of the meetings that many of us have on a daily or weekly basis.

[4:55 p.m.]

Just last week, I met with all three of the librarians in the Sea to Sky, talking about the future of libraries in our society and our region, identifying major issues, challenges and opportunities.

Of the issues, affordability was the dominant one, be it fuel prices, lack of transit or food costs. Ultimately, housing was the number one issue: the cost of housing, the cost of rent, the cost of development, and implications for staffing the library — specifically the examples of recruitment that have gone sideways. Recruit them, and they come in, they start, they work for a bit, and then they’re just forced to leave. Then libraries or businesses have to recruit again — lost opportunity, costs to businesses and costs to libraries.

It’s interesting to see what those impacts of housing are on the visits to libraries as well — increasingly, people spending all day in the library because they’re living in their car and it’s a warm, clean place. They’re running their businesses out of there, to some degree. They may be getting more privacy, ironically enough, in a library than they get in their own home or the place that they live. With multiple people living in a room, you’re lucky to have a room to yourself in the Sea to Sky, and you’re paying $1,500 for that privilege, for a room.

Zooming, for example, is really interesting. This is something that libraries are increasingly having to manage. They have to account for people who are holding Zoom meetings or business meetings in libraries, in coffee shops or in public spaces. They need to be able to facilitate that. This speaks directly to how desperately housing is needed.

Housing is top of mind for every British Columbian, and we need to ensure that we’re making the right deci­sions for those that are living here now and, truly importantly, for those who will be living here in the future.

Everyone in this chamber knows that we need to build more housing, but after seven years and a couple of elections, this government has repeatedly failed to do so. This province needs a better housing plan than what the NDP is offering. After multiple terms, multiple years and multiple promises of 114,000 government-built homes, 15 percent of those homes are all we have open today — a shocking lack of results. I think that amounts to about 17,000 units out of a promised 114,000. Pathetic, I would say, but that’s not new.

The price of housing is higher than we have ever seen. Whether you’re a renter, an owner, a senior or a young person, right now too many British Columbians are struggling under the weight of steadily increasing costs. After seven, going on eight, years, the government hasn’t been able to take action that’s effective, and it doesn’t take responsibility — in fact, it frequently deflects.

B.C. now has the worst housing affordability in North America. Rent now costs over $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver. The price of a Surrey townhome tripled from $300,000 in 2012 to close to $1 million today.

The government is claiming that Bill 44 will help build 130,000 homes over the next ten years. Over eight years, the result was 17,000 homes, of their 114,000-home promise. So the idea that we’ll build 130,000 homes over the next ten years is stretching credulity.

[5:00 p.m.]

CMHC is suggesting that we need to build over 600,000 housing units, by 2030 here in B.C., to restore affordable housing. Certainly, I can believe that, in working through my own assessment on this. Considering that the federal government is suggesting they’ll be bringing in half a million people per year….

This is sort of my back-of-the-envelope calculation. So half a million people per year — B.C. is likely to see a third of them, which is about 165,000. Stats Canada suggests we’re seeing about 9,000 births here in B.C. — a quarter or 35,000 to 40,000 new British Columbians born in the province each year. So it’s, essentially, over 200,000 new residents of this province. If you divide that by three people per house, about 65,000 to 67,000 units a year will be needed just to keep up.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

Now, that doesn’t deal with the people who are currently underhoused. And in the best year ever, we saw just over 47,000 units built. So at best, we’re about 20,000 units a year short in terms of supply — 20,000 units a year short, just to keep up. Again, that’s not really dealing with the underhoused.

Given that interest rates are where they are and housing starts are dropping and quickly, we’re in quite a difficult cycle right now, and it’s certainly not looking at all positive. B.C. has the highest rents in Canada and the worst housing affordability in North America. The ownership of a townhouse is up 33 percent to $1 million; a single family home, approaching $2 million. These housing targets that have been set in this bill will really only achieve, or are set to achieve, about 60 percent of need.

Some comments that have been published just in the last few days about this legislation are that it’s a politically convenient route with moderate targets that don’t solve the core issue. Or the chief economist for the B.C. Real Estate Association notes that even if targets are met, they fall short of what’s needed to achieve affordability. I don’t think there’s much question about that.

As part of this legislation, the DCCs, or the development cost charges, will be expanded to include other costs that local government is required to deal with in development scenarios. Then the community amenity charge process — which has always been a bit suspect, as time has gone on, as it gives local governments a chance to extract additional funds out of development — will, I understand, be formalized and incorporated and tied together with DCCs so that there is not a chance to overcharge.

I think, ultimately, it’s a good initiative. The CAC amendments will certainly be, I think, supported by the building community. But does this, and how does this, affect affordability? It certainly doesn’t, or it’s unlikely that it will, contribute to making housing less costly, which has got to be our objective here, nor does an increasing reliance or advancement or embracing of increasing building step codes.

[5:05 p.m.]

Ultimately, the implementation of step codes for new buildings is going to add significantly to the cost of a home, due to the complexity of these new buildings — these high-tech mechanical systems, ultra-high-performance types of technologies, building insulation, new requirements to make building much more complicated — and will increase the capital cost of these buildings.

This is a real challenge in many respects. There are two choices you have. You can have a higher capital cost and a lower operating cost in the long run, when it comes to energy, or you can go with a lower capital cost and a higher operating cost. A higher capital cost just means a higher barrier to entry. It’s a choice, and it’s a choice that is increasingly being taken away from people.

It also is difficult to imagine that any individual will ever be able to build their own home, as we make housing increasingly complicated. Historically, this is how many people built equity. The new building requirements are very complex, and they really prohibit the homebuilder from being able to enter into the market and take advantage of their own sweat equity.

I don’t know if it’s…. Clearly, GHGs are one of the things we’re trying to limit. I think there are ways we can do that. Clean electricity certainly can serve our purpose there. But increasing step code requirements are putting housing out of the reach of many.

You know, I have to admit a certain self-interest here in that I built my own house. I built it well, but it’s not a complicated house. It’s electricity and an efficient wood stove in rural B.C., no new added carbon. It’s a low-impact house; it’s low-tech materials. It was very inexpensive, but in the future won’t likely be possible.

Another piece I was hoping we were going to see some change on was an opportunity for inexpensive and innovative solutions like tiny homes and an allowance for tiny homes. We were hoping to see them incorporated into an upgraded building code, and that hasn’t been seen and doesn’t look likely to be seen in the short term. This, again, gives access to housing in a very affordable way.

Some of the consequences of housing affordability or lack thereof: despite the 35,000 to 40,000 children born in British Columbia annually, birth rates are at a 15-year low of kids born in B.C. In part, certainly, it’s around housing affordability or being underhoused. It’s a real concern for residents around the province. It’s a real concern for residents of the Sea to Sky because the dream of homeownership is fading fast.

Having children in a one-bedroom is not really reasonable, and to think it is, is really out of touch. The cost of kids — I think as we all know, or many of us know — is already astronomical, and then having kids in a small apartment is virtually impossible.

It’s a conversation in my house. I have two daughters, both live in small units, in their early 20s. The opportunity to have kids is affected by…. The decision to have kids, perhaps more accurately, is affected by housing, by where they live and the housing costs being increasingly out of reach.

[5:10 p.m.]

In terms of the specifics of the bill, largely, it is an en­abling bill. Certainly, this is a pretty standard procedure, again and again and again, we see from this government, a bill that enables them to provide the details later. This is a major gap, because we have no ability as a Legislature, as a democratic institution, to explore the details and the specifics of a bill.

Nearly all the details on this legislation, how this legislation is going to be implemented, are supposedly going to be contained in a policy manual, which will be published sometime early next year, with any luck. This missing policy manual is said to include important information, which is information like the practical details on things like setbacks and height restrictions and parking — although some of the parking issues have been covered, or at least there’s an expectation that they’ll be waived — and lot coverage.

These are details that developers and communities in my region have certainly asked me about, and I wasn’t able to answer. These are important details and details where the rubber truly hits the road, and this is what communities need to see. This lack of detail makes this bill little more than campaign literature — empty an­nouncement, no details, no tracking and, if history is any indicator, poor results.

Some of the details that are important to communities in the Sea to Sky, like Whistler, are these types of issues, be it parking or other restrictions. There’s an approach that could…. In fact, this bill in many ways could fundamentally destroy what Whistler is. Whistler meets the criteria. It’s over 5,000 people. I think it’s about 12,000 or 13,000 people. All the subdivisions in the community are in the urban containment boundary. Most lots are larger than 280 square metres. But what differentiates Whistler is a building cap, a desire to not see sprawl, a desire to contain development into the community.

They have about 63,000 bed units. They do have nightly rentals. Incidentally, the Airbnb, or the nightly rental legislation that we dealt with the other day, isn’t applicable in resort communities like Whistler. They do allow nightly rentals in certain zones, but many are single-family lots in Whistler — fee simple lots, increasingly owned as second homes. Unfortunately, residents are increasingly priced out of the market.

Now, I see that this is a…. It seems like it’s something of a contradiction, but for the last 30 years, Whistler’s had an employee housing policy objective. The goal was to house 70 percent of the employees that work in the community in the community. Frankly, they have been successful. I think the number is closer to 80 percent, so 80 percent of the people who live there work there.

Over time, this has been successful, through the Whistler Housing Authority, where there’s a limited number of employee-restricted ownership options. Then there’s an ever-increasing number of employee-restricted rental options. Then there’s the Whistler Valley Housing Society, which is beginning to deal with social housing.

However, because of the limited number of fee simple, unrestricted properties that are increasing in value, because this is a basic supply-and-demand issue, it is a long-range concern.

I’ll certainly acknowledge that in a globally attractive community, a single family…. For example, today I had a quick look online. A single-family lot, a house in Whistler, is…. I mean, an old Gothic in Emerald is worth $3.3 million; a lot in the subdivision of Alpine is $1.9 million.

The minimum house you could find in Whistler is about a million and a half. Heck, a parking spot I saw for sale in the village was $189,000. These are pretty incredible numbers, but this is a unique community and a global resort.

[5:15 p.m.]

What happens if this legislation is imposed on Whistler? Well, it could be incredibly and unbelievably im­pactful on this community. The bed cap would essentially be gone. We could see a quadrupling, or doubling, certainly, of the population.

The building lot price may potentially come down, but builders will certainly be salivating at the opportunity. With no speculation or vacancy tax or foreign buyer tax in Whistler, the builder could take a 10,000-square-foot lot for $2 million and put four houses on it at $2 million each. I’m sure that would not make the place more affordable, but it would have some really significant unintended consequences.

As Dan Wilson of the Whistler Centre for Sustainability said to me…. I thought this was quite interesting. He said:

“I’m quite concerned with the cookie-cutter approach being suggested and recognize that this will do very little for affordable housing in Whistler. Instead, this policy may be one of the greatest development giveaways in Whistler’s history and undermines most options to create affordable housing from infill with the condition for affordable housing.

“As proposed, the legislation will only result in significantly more vacation homes and add to peak visitation in Whistler with­out fixing the affordable housing situation and employee shortage.

“As you know, the development pressure and cost of housing in Whistler is some of the highest in the province, and Whistler needs additional tools, not this policy as suggested, to find solutions.”

Honestly, I find it hard to disagree with that. In the case of Whistler, certainly, I couldn’t agree more.

So Pemberton and Mount Currie aren’t affected, as they don’t meet the population criteria. Squamish will be impacted. But they have been focusing on increasing density for several years now, actually more than that. If you’ve visited Squamish lately, certainly you’ll see that that’s true.

But there are consequences of some of these pre-designations, and we’ve seen this in Squamish in the way of OCPs that have been pre-designated and have unintended consequences.

For example, around the downtown of Squamish, there’s an older neighbourhood there with older houses. But it’s designated through the OCP for higher density.

Interestingly, B.C. Assessment, rather than looking at zoning as an assessed value, looks at OCPs now as an assessed value. So B.C. Assessment, based on OCP designations, not zoning, are pushing up B.C. Assessment evaluations. Long-time residents are getting property taxed out of the residence because instead of being taxed as a single-family home, they’re being taxed for the potential of having a multi-storey building.

It’s actually having the net effect of having residents who have lived there for a long time being forced out and being bought out by developers. This could proliferate without amendments to B.C. Assessment’s mandate. I’m sure this is not the intention, but it could be a consequence as increased densities are designated in OCPs.

Parking is another issue that can be a real concern. I certainly get the Vancouver and CRD focus on this issue. But there needs to be some understanding that parking…. We understand that parking, or lack of it, has been a tool for local governments to limit density. But we also need to recognize that not all communities are created equal.

In snow country, street parking is already at a premium. Often it’s limited to one side of the street or the other in the winter. Without those limits, snow clearing would be almost impossible. Already, there are massive piles of snow and buried cars and fire hydrants that need to be constantly dug out. Significant density increases without accounting for parking is frankly unworkable, specifically in snow country.

[5:20 p.m.]

What about servicing and infrastructure? The mention of $51 million for updating plans…. I’m not sure that that’s enough, but it will certainly be welcome. But servicing costs for increased density will be in the billions. Where is that coming from? All communities in the Sea to Sky are already pushing the limits of their capacity.

Sewage plant upgrades are pricey, as this House knows. I mean, I think if we look at the North Shore sewage treatment plant as an example, which is quite an example…. I think it originally was budgeted at about three-quarters of a billion dollars. Now it’s pushing, I think, closer to a billion and a half, maybe more, and still not close to being finished.

What about potable water? Increasingly a challenge. I think of the ongoing stage 4 water shortage, or maybe it’s even stage 5, on the Sunshine Coast with really no end in sight. Yet more density will be coming to Sechelt and Gibsons at the very least, with not enough water.

Transportation. My colleague from West Vancouver–​Capilano was spot-on. Upper Levels is regularly backed up for kilometre after kilometre. Second Narrows Iron Workers Memorial is getting an upgrade. Interestingly, it’s an upgrade to the foundations of the bridge as an anti-collision matter for shipping so that a ship doesn’t take out the bridge by mistake. But the capacity….

Think about this. The capacity off the North Shore has not changed in 60 years. The Lions Gate Bridge was built in the ’30s; the Second Narrows in, I guess, the early ’60s, late ’50s. The capacity hasn’t changed in decades and decades.

An Upper Levels transportation assessment was done a couple of years ago and came up with a couple of ideas. The big one was to put the buses onto the shoulders of the highway. Well, that was it. That was the big idea. Hard to believe, but there it is. Of course, you’d need a new, expanded crossing of the Cap River, but that didn’t make the list.

What we need on the North Shore before we see any significant or additional increase in density on the North Shore is some sort of commitment to rapid transit over Burrard Inlet. I think, at this point, we’re expecting to see that not before 2050.

Then, of course, regional transit in the Sea to Sky — it’s certainly my favourite topic — connecting Mount Currie with Pemberton, Whistler with Squamish, with Britannia Beach, Furry Creek, Lions Bay and into Vancouver. We have an MOU with local governments and First Nations. We have a funding formula, but there’s resistance in this government and no funding increase to B.C. Transit.

A regional transit commitment is truly what’s needed, especially for communities like the Sea to Sky, which are dependent on a single road. There is no workaround. There’s no alternative route. There’s just one road. I think we all understand more density means more congestion, which means more transit. This government has demonstrated little interest in improving transit in the Sea to Sky, and it’s hard to imagine how these communities can succeed without a willing provincial transit partner.

In conclusion, we all know and believe there’s a need for more housing. Population growth and house and rent price escalations demonstrate that in abundance. Having the highest house prices in North America is no point of pride. Having rents that impoverish people must end.

We need density. We need infrastructure. We need im­proved transportation networks, and what we have here, unfortunately, is a shell of a plan — few details, lots of rhetoric, a delegation to secrecy through orders-in-council and an intention to kick the can down the road for a couple of years. The housing report will be coming in 14 or 16 months after the next election cycle and updated OCPs in a couple of years from now. This is an empty promise.

So many questions for the committee stage. Unfortunately, I have little hope that they will be answered. “It will come in regulation,” I’m sure we’ll hear. It will be the consistent response. But we shall see, and I’m not optimistic that we’ll see any real solutions here.

On a final note, I hope to see that if this is a signature piece of legislation, government will determine that it’s worth speaking to.

R. Parmar: The member from Sea to Sky asked, and I’m pleased to stand up and talk about Bill 44, an incredibly important piece of legislation brought forward by our government. I would say that this is the type of legislation that got me involved in politics.

[5:25 p.m.]

This is the type of legislation that talks about the need of a generational issue impacting people in Langford–Juan de Fuca, people all across British Columbia and, in fact, people all across Canada. I think that’s why this legislation and much of what has been introduced by the Premier and the Minister of Housing this fall and certainly work that’s been ongoing since we formed government in 2017 is being looked at across the entire country as a model of the direction we need to head in.

There are a lot of places that I want to go in regard to why I support Bill 44, this legislation. A lot of the stories that that come to mind are those that that come from door-knocking, whether that was during my by-election campaign or just this past weekend, when I was door-knocking in the Sooke Lake manufactured home park in Langford — a place where I’ve been door-knocking for well over 15 years, talking predominantly to seniors but also those that are low-income individuals who are literally living paycheque by paycheque, trying to make ends meet, pay their rent and live their life.

When I had an opportunity to talk to them about this legislation, short-term rentals and all of those other pieces, they were pleased. They were pleased to see a government taking action. They’re pleased to see a government that is taking action and that has put the priority and focus on them. That’s the key piece here.

We often hear members from the other side talk about the urgency and talk about the actions that need to be taken, but when we introduce legislation — this legislation doesn’t come as a surprise; the Minister of Housing has been talking about it for quite some time — unfortunately, from what it sounds like, they’re not going to be supporting it. You know, they may have a different direction.

The member for Kelowna-Mission talked about them releasing their own plan. Well, I certainly look forward to seeing that because, in the past, when you go back to 2012, the Leader of the Opposition was a minister back then. He was the Minister of Finance.

According to CHMC housing numbers for rental units, the B.C. United built just over 2,500 units of rental housing. In 2017 — we can kind of split that one, because we formed government halfway through 2017 — we built about 9,400 units, and in 2021, we built 13,000 units. There’s clearly a discrepancy between what they accomplished and what we’ve been able to accomplish just in our short time as government.

In regard to this legislation, I just want to first talk about Langford, one of the fastest-growing communities in the entire province and, I think, a community that welcomes this type of legislation. I want to give kudos to the former mayor, Stew Young, who has been a leader in this province, a leader in this country, on building housing. He has removed red tape. He has removed the ability for people to slow down housing development.

I often joke about the fact that when people first asked my family why we moved to Langford, people used to laugh at us. Now I say: “Who’s laughing?” It is a beautiful community, and I want to give Stew a lot of credit for what he was able to accomplish in regard to upzoning back when this wasn’t a conversation, when we weren’t having conversations around upzoning and finding ways to be able to streamline processes.

I know the new mayor, whom I’ve had some conversations with, and his council are also going to be focused on this. He sees, and his council does, too, the need to continue to build more housing. Again, Langford, I think, has been the provincial model.

I think if you’d asked the Premier, the Minister of Housing or others, Langford would be one of those ones that you would look to as a jurisdiction that has done its part but still has more to do in terms of building housing of all types. Certainly, in the conversations that I’ve had with people on the doorstep — in Langford, in particular, over the last number of days — they’re excited about it.

I was just on Strathmore Road, on Thursday night, door-knocking and talking to folks who have bigger lots and who now have the luxury of not having to go through a fulsome rezoning process to potentially look at upzoning their units — the fact that they could, potentially, now look at quickly building a garden suite or a laneway home.

[5:30 p.m.]

For the seniors I had conversations with, it allows them to be able to age in place, certainly, with costs going up. It’s also an opportunity for a lot of young families to look at what’s ahead for them in, again, what is the most beautiful community in the province.

As I say that, I have no disrespect to the other incredible communities I represent, one of which is Sooke. Sooke is an incredibly beautiful community that’s growing at a very similar pace to Langford.

I’ve certainly, since becoming the MLA for Langford–​Juan de Fuca, had a lot of conversations with small-scale developers, and in particular builders. I want to give a shout-out to the Sooke Builders Association, who’ve taken much of their time being able to bring me up to speed on the issues that they’re facing with municipal permitting processes and also just with the ability to speed up development. They certainly shared with me their frustrations with permitting, whether that was municipal or provincial.

I’m proud of the work, on this side, that we’ve done in regards to streamlining those permitting processes, in particular, the work led by the Minister of Housing, the Premier and the Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship to be able to kind of create this model that allows them to streamline permitting applications, which is good news for these builders, because they’re simply trying to build homes.

When they saw this legislation, they saw an opportunity not to have to go through unnecessary rezone hearings and, in fact, now have the ability to be able to speed things up and start developing and start building homes for people. Because that’s what they got involved in. That’s why they got involved in building homes. Certainly, in the challenging times we live in, profitability is a key piece to them. They’re not doing this for charity.

But I think the key piece that they were looking for was speed and synergy and the ability to be able to help create more supply here in Sooke, and I think that’s a good thing. I think I’m looking forward to having conversations with the mayor and council in Sooke, as well, in regard to the need to be able to speed things up, and I hope that they welcome this legislation as well.

I’ve also had conversations with Al Wickheim, who’s the regional director for the Juan de Fuca electoral area. He has the gift of a lifetime to be able to represent East Sooke, Otter Point, Shirley, Jordan River, all the way out to Port Renfrew, rural communities that have certainly been impacted by the housing crisis and the housing challenge.

The amount of conversations I have with people from the Lower Mainland, Surrey, Vancouver, Richmond, possibly even into the Fraser Valley that are moving to the Island and in particular to the Juan de Fuca electoral area, buying larger lots, one to two acres, who now have the ability to be able to upzone and potentially look at multiple families living on one site — again, being able to do so because the Juan de Fuca electoral area’s population is over 5,000. So they’ll be a part of this.

When I’ve had conversations with Al about the direction that our government has been heading with the introduction of Bill 44 and other pieces of legislation, he sees the value and the ability for us to work together on creating more housing, but he also reminds me about the need for services. We have a lot of conversations about water out in the Juan de Fuca electoral area and the need to ensure that we’re having conversations that allow us to be able to find that balance.

But one of the things that I’m particularly proud of is the record that our government has had in investing in Langford–Juan de Fuca. When we talk about housing and the need to build more housing, certainly in Langford–Juan de Fuca, and in particular in Langford and Sooke, we’ve done a great job of that.

We’ve just recently opened…. We had the Minister of State for Infrastructure out in Sooke not too long ago where we announced the completion of a $120 million highway expansion along Highway 14. That has been well received by the people in Sooke who are commuting day in and day out to get to work, to drop their kids off at soccer practice, and all the other things that families in Sooke do.

I often talk about the fact that we’ve invested over 2,600 new seats in our schools, the largest expansion of public education in the Sooke school district’s history. We’ve invested, just last week, in 400 seats, an expansion to Ruth King Elementary, an expansion to David Cameron.

In particular, why I’m excited about that investment in what really is the downtown core of Langford along Goldstream Avenue and Veterans Memorial is the fact that we’re seeing a lot of density along the corridor.

[5:35 p.m.]

We’ve got the 95 bus — the RapidBus. My thanks to the Minister of Transportation for bringing that on. That RapidBus is leaving Langford and heading here, just outside the Legislature, and vice versa almost every 15 minutes from dawn till dusk. That’s good news for people in my community.

Just a few short weeks ago, we had another investment announcement where the feds and the province were coming together to announce a significant announcement to be able to create HOV lanes along the Old Island Highway, again, a really important transportation corridor in our community that allows us to be able to ensure that people are moving quickly.

I often talk to people and encourage them to use the 95 bus, but I know that they’ve expressed the fact that, while they welcome it, sometimes it can be challenging that the bus is in the same lane as the other cars. I know that the Minister of Transportation and others in our government are working on making sure that we’re expanding HOV lanes across the province.

One thousand units of affordable housing is a key piece. I had an opportunity to get a sneak peek at affordable housing units that are going to be opening up in Sooke. In fact, this fall/winter period is going to be one of the largest expansions of affordable housing in the district of Sooke’s history. We have an incredibly important project on Charters Road, 75 units, and another 180 along Sooke and Drennan.

Of course, we have the Hope Centre, which was owned by M’akola Housing, an incredibly great partner that we have across the province that’s building hundreds if not thousands of units across the province but is also doing a lot of work in Langford–Juan de Fuca.

Again, Kevin Albers from M’akola is probably one of the best in the business at what he does in terms of building housing, and his entire team, in fact. So I’m pretty thankful to him and his team for the work they do.

When I talk about this sort of legislation being brought forward to speed things up, he certainly welcomes it in the conversations we had and, in fact, says this will allow him and many other business developers — again, the Sooke Builders Association, the West Shore Developers Association — to be able to continue moving forward with the building of affordable housing units.

Health care is obviously a big piece when I have conversations with people about the need for more housing. We need to ensure that we have the health care supports there. That’s why I’m proud of the work that our government did to be able to open up an urgent and primary care centre in Langford and the fact that we are now investing in a community health centre in Sooke that’s underway.

These are all really important investments that our government is making in the community that I have the honour of representing in this place. I’m really thankful for that. Much of that credit goes to my predecessor who did this work to ensure that we have the services to be able to help and sustain housing development. That’s why this legislation is so important to ensure that we can have more housing but also supports and services.

I’m really appreciative of that. I know that we’ve got a lot more to do in regards to that. We have, I would say, in the last 100 days that I’ve had the honour of being the MLA for Langford–Juan de Fuca, made some pretty significant announcements along that.

But I take offence to the comments made by the member for Kamloops–North Thompson when he said: “The member from Langford can crow about the results in the Langford area. I look forward to seeing what type of capital spending he has now that the Premier doesn’t live in Langford. After the abuse that we saw over the last six years of prioritization in Langford, he’s got a rude political awakening coming.”

I would say that comment he made in the House yesterday is a slap in the face to the voters of Langford–Juan de Fuca and absolutely unacceptable. The people of Langford–Juan de Fuca have been building housing, and they have got a lot more housing on the way.

For the member across the way to say they don’t deserve 2,600 school seats, don’t deserve a new urgent and primary care centre, don’t deserve a new community health centre in Sooke, that the $120 million investment that we made in partnership with local and federal government in the expansion of the Sooke highway, the fact that we four-laned much of Highway 1….

We’ve made investments on the Malahat and a whole host of other things. For him to say that was six years of prioritization in Langford and abuse that we saw over the last six years…. I hope he knows that whoever is going to be the next candidate in my riding is going to have to wear those words next time.

[5:40 p.m.]

If the member for Kamloops–North Thompson has an opportunity to come to Langford, I certainly welcome it. I’d certainly offer a tour to him so that he understands those investments were necessary. We had a period in time, 16 years, when those investments were not being made. In fact, I got involved in politics to fight for new schools because of the fact that we couldn’t get schools built.

This legislation is good news for builders. It’s good news for, I think, local governments that now have the ability to be able to have strong conversations, whether it’s ensuring that they’re looking at their OCPs and renewing them or ensuring that they’re doing their housing needs reports.

I’ve had an opportunity to have conversations with two of the bigger mayors in my communities, Langford and Sooke, about updating those documents regularly and ensuring that we’re working together on the need to be able to advocate to the other levels of government to make those investments in affordable housing. We need all types of housing in all of our communities across the province.

Also, make sure that when we’re looking at the ability to speed things up…. I represent the Highlands. I don’t want to forget about the Highlands. In the district of Highlands, they still haven’t legalized secondary suites. With this legislation, when it passes, we will.

I have conversations with the mayor of Highlands — I always say the Highlands; I don’t know why; it’s hard to get that one out of my head — about the need to ensure that we’re working together. Certainly, I think probably he and much of his council are going to be helpful in terms of working, in regards to this piece of legislation, and ensuring…. Many of the secondary suites that are illegal in Highlands are now going to be in a process to be legalized.

Again, Budget 2023, the Homes for People strategy. This piece of legislation is about investing in people. I get the sense that the member for Surrey–White Rock might be the next speaker up. I’m looking forward to hearing from him and other members on the other side of the House about what is so evil about this legislation and why they’re standing away from more housing being built.

I had an opportunity to listen to a podcast, the Rob Shaw podcast, over the weekend. Kudos to Rob. I know that the Minister of State for Infrastructure is a fan. One of the political pundits on the podcast, when they were talking about this legislation, said…. Her name is Allie Blades. I think she has a challenging role in trying to represent the perspectives of the right, of the United and the Conservatives. I don’t envy her position.

Allie said: “We first heard about this in April. The NDP government teased the idea and said it was coming this fall. Here it is. It’s happening. You won’t hear any opposition from me on this one. We talk about housing and affordability being a big problem. This is an aggressive way that the NDP have approached this when it comes to the overall change of what the Lower Mainland potentially could look like. Listen, I know that change is hard, but homelessness is even harder, guys.”

She goes on to say: “I think the B.C. United have talked about this. Pierre Poilievre has talked about this too. Create different zoning near transit stations. And this is exactly it. I think we’re all on board.”

I don’t know if she got the message that you guys are not supporting this legislation. But I hope you do.

Deputy Speaker: Through the Chair.

R. Parmar: I know that there will be opportunities during committee stage to talk about the important pieces within the legislation. It’s a large piece of legislation. Certainly, on behalf of the people of Langford–Juan de Fuca, this legislation means more homes for people and an ability to speed things up.

I want to thank the builders in my community for the work they’re doing, and I want to thank the mayors and councillors and our regional director for the work that they’re doing to speed up housing development and also to advocate for the necessary investments their communities need to thrive. I’ll certainly be there working shoulder to shoulder with them to ensure that we get those necessary investments.

I’ll conclude my remarks there by saying that Bill 44 is a piece of legislation that I’m really proud to be able to stand in this House and support. I think it’s going to be a piece of legislation that years from now we look at that is hopefully going to ensure that jurisdictions all across Canada and North America make the necessary investments and make the necessary changes to ensure that we have more homes for people.

Thanks very much for the opportunity, on behalf of Langford–Juan de Fuca, to be able to stand in this House and support this very important piece of legislation.

[5:45 p.m.]

T. Halford: I always find…. I’m in this place to speak to legislation. It is a great opportunity, and it is an absolute privilege. I’m sure we all share that in this House.

When I first started in October of 2020, I would say the majority of files that came into my office were health care related. I would say now that the overwhelming majority of files that come into my office are housing related.

In fact, in White Rock, we enjoy a population that is…. There’s a large senior base there for housing. It has also been a challenge too. A majority of those seniors are on fixed incomes, and a lot of them have faced challenges in terms of making ends meet for rent, the mortgage payments, obviously, with the rising cost of groceries and other things that we continue to see.

When we’re talking about the importance of housing and what goes with it, specifically with this legislation…. When you look at the area of…. I’ll talk about White Rock in a second, but I’ll focus on Surrey.

We talk about some visions. In Surrey, I think we’ve seen some growth, a lot of growth, in a good way. If I look at the revitalment of Surrey centre…. If you look at where the new city hall is…. It’s not new anymore, but it’s new over the last decade. If you look at the growth that has happened there and the development that has happened there and the businesses that have happened there along the SkyTrain route…. I think that people would look at that vision and say that has been positive.

Surrey, as I said, is growing exponentially. In my area, where we call home, we have seen growth, and we have seen some challenges. I think they’re challenges that can be dealt with.

If you look at housing in my area, in South Surrey, I’d say there are probably about 1,000 more detached homes. If you go close to the truck crossing just off of 0 Avenue, what I hear is that one of the major challenges is that when we’re doing important development, that development needs to be done in that area. It’s good development with good family homes.

There’s no transit there. There’s no public transit. You actually have to cross; you have to walk down 8th, which you wouldn’t want to do. You have to cross Highway 99; you have to cross King George. The nearest transit stop is at what we call the old Pink Palace. I don’t know what it is now. I think the Hilton bought it. We call it the Pink Pal­ace. That, for our community, is the nearest public transit.

That area has been growing for ten to 12 years. We look at the fact that when kids are trying to get to school, get to their jobs.... There are new Canadians that live there. We have no access to public transit whatsoever.

If we talk about areas in terms of Crescent Beach or Ocean Park, along that area…. You look at the increased traffic there, and you look at the decreased public transit.

Like I said, there’s a lot of seniors in my riding that rely on public transit. Part of the frustration they’ve had, with coming back from COVID, is that the system isn’t what they need it to be.

We talk about the transportation challenges. I’m going to talk about the education challenges in a minute.

I’ve always said…. We enjoy the fact that we have a lot of people in this House that have served at various levels of government, whether it’s federally…. I think the previous speaker before me served on the school board.

[5:50 p.m.]

We’ve had elected councillors and elected mayors that have come to this place and that still currently serve in this place. I think that’s a good thing. I think that shows…. I will say I think municipal government is probably the hardest, most challenging level of government. I’d say I think part of the issue is that, for instance….

I’ll use White Rock, for example. We had, I guess, a previous government that ran on an anti-development campaign — so, anti-development, no more development in White Rock. Part of the challenge for that was that developers just said: “Okay. We’re done in White Rock. We’ll take our investments elsewhere.” So when we look at some of the projects that came forth, a lot of them were rentals, and they didn’t get done.

I think that’s probably a frustration a lot of people in this House…. It doesn’t matter what side they’re on, they feel that. When you have good projects that are put forward, that are necessary projects and for whatever reason, they don’t go forward…. And you know the community, the growth, that they absolutely need it…. I think that’s a challenge.

We had one project in White Rock. It was meant for affordable housing. It was meant for affordable rentals. The developer had taken it every step of the way. Then, for no rhyme or reason, it was tossed. You start again, and you start again, and you start again. We saw that for four years.

I think part of the challenge is now, when you look at South Surrey, White Rock, and you look at the issue in terms of trying to get people to come back and actually invest and build? I’ll tell you, I’ve had more developers, more frustrated residents, in terms of not being able to know where the goalposts are. I think that’s a challenge we’ve all faced in this House. I know I’ve faced it, and it’s very frustrating, especially when we see some of the challenges we are seeing here today.

I spoke on the fact that we have a situation where the homeless population in my community has grown exponentially, right? The previous speaker talked about that. Right now we don’t have a warming shelter. We don’t have an overnight shelter. We’ve got bus stops. We’ve got an abandoned movie theatre that people are sleeping in. That’s the reality. That story I think is probably familiar with a lot of people in this House, and we see it every day.

I was lucky to be part of rally to highlight the importance of homelessness in our community. I’m going to get to the bill. It is part of this. The challenge was that these people didn’t necessarily always want to be in a shelter. They wanted to be able to have a home. I think that when we see a continuous overpromise and underdeliver on housing from this government, whether you’re a renter, an owner, a senior or young person, the challenge is that the price of housing has never been higher.

You know, we now look at costs over $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver. We look at the fact that a Surrey townhouse in 2012 was $300,000. Now it’s over $900,000. And we hear that….

[5:55 p.m.]

I think the government said this bill will help build…. I think the figure is 130,000 homes over the next ten years. We hear from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. that says we actually need over 600,000 additional housing units by 2030 to get to a place where affordability may or may not be, but hopefully, in reach.

We’re talking about a government that is saying in ten years, and we’re talking about CMHC that is saying this needs to be accomplished in seven. And by the way, it’s not 130,000 homes. It’s actually 610,000. We have a problem there, right? We have an issue.

The fact is we look at the increased cost to housing and the challenges that brings, and we look at the backlogs, the delays, the regulations. We see the issues — we’ve talked about them — regarding the residential tenancy branch.

The implementation of a step code for new buildings is going to add up to $50,000 per home due to the requirement for advanced mechanical systems and ultra-performance windows. Who’s that passed on to?

We talk about the development approvals process. We see a backlog. We see a massive backlog right now in the Ministry of Transportation for a development within 800 metres of a provincial road — lack of authority. The ministry did create latecomer agreements, and we see a bottleneck in terms of government being able to at least play their part when it comes to making sure that they aren’t part of the problem.

You know, we see the issue in terms of the importance of density. I think we all agree. And I think people have discussed in this bill the importance of density, the importance of having transit wrapped around that density, the importance of having support. In my riding, it’s the Peace Arch Hospital. The development now around that area of Peace Arch Hospital….

There’s been development, mainly on the Surrey side. I guess now there’s starting to be a little bit of development on the White Rock side. But if you look at the people that are coming in, a lot of them are young families. Part of the challenge there is that at least myself and my colleague from Surrey South have had to stand outside and actually protest the closure of a maternity ward.

When we’re talking about the importance of development, which we all understand is essential to what we’re doing, we need to make sure that we have the proper support in place to carry that out. When we talk about the added costs that this government does by adding additional building costs, whether it’s delays, lack of permitting and the backlogs that we see there, we see it’s a major challenge. And we have an issue.

Whether it’s Metro Vancouver’s plan to more than triple fees on new housing…. That’s what makes housing unaffordable. We need to make sure that we are…. Density, I think, is absolutely critical. I think density around major transportation corridors is absolutely critical. But I think we also have to look at the gaps that we have existing as well.

I’ve talked about transportation, talked about health care. We talk about the importance and the growth of Surrey when it comes to education. We talk about some of those areas. When you have, coming in now, young families…. We’ve highlighted in this House the issue of portables. Well, some of those portables right now don’t have heat.

[6:00 p.m.]

This is a piece of legislation that I know at least one government member has got up and passionately spoken to and strongly advocated for his community, which is completely great. I think we should be doing that. But in our community, when we see the challenge that we’re seeing with portables, the fact that they have been doubled, the fact that there have been kids in those portables with little heat, no heat, I think we see some significant challenges.

With that, I’m going to take my seat, and I look forward to future government speakers on this bill as well.

E. Sturko: It is an honour, and I’m pleased to be able to stand up to participate in this important debate on Bill 44.

Housing is one of the most critical files that we deal with in our constituency offices. The member for Surrey–White Rock is correct that we’re seeing more and more people coming because they’re struggling with affordability, with the ability even to find any sort of housing regardless of where it is, in Surrey or other communities.

I wanted to start off, actually, by talking about an experience I had. I’m going to show my age, probably. When I graduated high school in the early nineties, I went on a student exchange. I went to Germany, and I spent a year there. I guess — oh my gosh — that’s like 30 years ago or whatever now.

Even 30 years ago, when you look at what places in Europe, countries like Germany, had in terms of housing and the density that they have in Europe…. It’s not uncommon to see the type of development that has people living in multiple combined dwellings, or they have a lot of townhouses, row housing. A lot of it has been there for hundreds of years, really charming.

But one of the things that they have that we don’t have is that they have in Germany…. It’s called Straßenbahn. They have a street train. Their infrastructure that they have for transportation is amazing. You can get on a train and go from one side of a major city all the way to the other side very easily. They also have a lot of, I guess, interprovincial trains, a lot of abilities so that people can even go into work in different cities and jurisdictions just by riding the rails. It’s a sophisticated system.

Then, of course, everybody also knows about the autobahn, which is a really amazing highway system. I had the opportunity to also go to school there as a foreign exchange student. I got to experience a different school system as well.

The reason why I wanted to bring this up is that it really reminded me, as I reflected on Bill 44…. I started thinking about the things that are important when we’re dealing with things like extreme density, like what they have in Europe. What we’re experiencing now, here in British Columbia, particularly in the Lower Mainland region, is the importance of having that infrastructure, particularly when it comes to education and particularly when it comes to transportation.

Just on the education side, as the Education critic, I can tell you that there have been a lot of things that have been of particular concern. They really are very intricately connected to the housing situation that we have. This year, in Surrey alone, I know that they planned for, I think, 1,500 new students to enter the district. They got well over 3,000 students, so more than double what was anticipated.

They’ve had to add so many portables at this time that they didn’t even have enough crew members or people on staff to be able to hook up the heating. So starting in mid-September, I actually started receiving phone calls, letters, emails from parents all across Surrey who are talking about the fact that not only are their kids in portables, which this government had made an election promise that they would actually eliminate…. We know that that’s not the case, nor was it probably ever a realistic promise.

Nevertheless, like many NDP promises, everything promised, nothing gained, terrible results. Now we have students not only in portables, but unheated portables, ones that aren’t even connected. So now kids are wearing mittens in classrooms.

[6:05 p.m.]

I’m not making this up. I’m not trying to be dramatic. I literally have people writing to my constituency, telling me that their kids had to wear mittens in their classroom in British Columbia, where we’re probably one of the, arguably, richest provinces in the country. Yet we don’t even have the heating hooked up in the portables.

We’ve also…. Someone sent me a picture of what is, I hope, one of the very few, hopefully last…. It’s a portable washroom that’s been brought in. I have a lot of concerns. Actually, I wrote to the school district. I have questions about the portable washrooms, about safety, our kids having to go out and use the washroom by themselves. Are these left open so that any member of the public can go inside, and are kids being supervised when they’re in there?

How this relates, really, to Bill 44 is we’re talking about increasing density. For some communities in British Columbia, and I would say Surrey definitely is one of those, the density that we are experiencing with the newcomers coming, who we openly welcome, we are not in any way, shape or form able to keep up with the infrastructure needed to support those individuals. There’s not nearly enough development happening in schools, not nearly enough coordination among the ministries that are supposed to be making sure that the infrastructure is keeping up.

An example of that, of how the infrastructure is not keeping up, is this government made the announcement of the Langley-Surrey SkyTrain, which, of course, has been something that people, I think particularly in Langley and in Fleetwood and in the Green Timbers area, have been hoping for a long time to see.

But if they had done some coordination and started looking at a big picture scenario instead of piecemealing their legislation and their announcements like they always do, they might have parcelled off some land already for schools to make sure that we wouldn’t have to have, for example, in Surrey, things like proposals for double-decker portables coming to our most densified and crowded areas.

Introducing legislation that will create even more density in areas where we are experiencing situations where we are literally bursting at the seams…. I don’t know how much more our education system, in some of these most-crowded districts, how much more they can take, particularly with the schools when we’re talking about the ever-increasing amount of portables that we’re having, the hookups for those portables. I’ve been told that if we end up getting these monstrosities known as the double-decker portables, they actually need an increased amount of concrete under them to support the weight.

I wanted to mention too, just on the record, that the washroom portables they brought in have stairs. There are no ramps. They’re not accessible. How will we accommodate accessibility so that everyone who has a right to learn can be comfortable in the classroom when we’re having double-decker portables? All these costs are saddled, actually, on the operating budget of the school district.

So when legislation like Bill 44 is brought forward, there should also be concurrent announcements and legislation and planning about how the infrastructure is going to keep up with that, because the school district cannot, on its own, keep up with the influx of individuals who are coming in, looking for a better life, looking to join the awesome community that Surrey really is. We need to be able to have places to accommodate them, their families and their children without putting them in a freezing cold portable.

One of the other things I mentioned about my amazing year-long experience in Germany was about the transportation. It is another bee in the bonnet of my constituents, talking about, even in an area as new as ours is…. South Surrey has developed a lot over the last 20 years, I would say. Especially in the last decade, there’s been a lot of development, new townhomes, but we really don’t have access to things like the SkyTrain. It would have been amazing. Anybody who has to travel on Highway 99 will know, if they have to go through the Massey Tunnel, what a nightmare that is.

[6:10 p.m.]

Again, it’s an example, I would say, of a lack of forward thinking by this government and not keeping up with the infrastructure needed to really support a piece of legislation like Bill 44.

Before this government came into power, we had a plan to build an amazing bridge, the Massey bridge, which would have accommodated multiple lanes of traffic, pedestrians. And it was going to be ready to accommodate SkyTrain between South Surrey and Bridgeport. The current government scrapped that plan, wasting $100 million of taxpayer money for a tunnel that still hasn’t received any environmental approval, probably will never get built and won’t be able to accommodate the SkyTrain.

One of the things that drive me insane when I hear mem­bers opposite sometimes talking about this whole reason why it’s okay that we’re going to have less parking spaces for people…. We’re going to have more density. But hey, don’t worry, because around places that have SkyTrain, it’s going to be all right. Your life is going to be cool because you can just jump on that SkyTrain.

But if you live in South Surrey or White Rock, I guess that’s not including you. We don’t have it. And in fact, this government made sure that we wouldn’t have it by eliminating the Massey bridge that would have accommodated the SkyTrain. Now they are putting forward legislation, with one of the cruxes of their arguments being that everybody is going to be jumping on things like SkyTrain, and they nixed SkyTrain to one of the fastest-developing communities in Surrey, which is the fastest-developing community in British Columbia. It’s madness.

I heard members opposite also talking about health care. And I have to tell you that south of the Fraser — not just in Surrey but other south-of-the-Fraser communities — we are bursting at the seams, like all other hospitals, but particularly when it comes to dealing with cardiac issues.

I know that the minister, who is nodding and catching my attention…. They have made some commitments to go forward with that, and it’s appreciated. But the speed at which this government is delivering those services versus the speed at which they move their gums to make a promise about those — there’s a vast difference between those things.

We’ve been hearing for years, under this government, that we would have the new hospital in Cloverdale. You know what? In the first several years of those announcements, there wasn’t even anything in the budget.

Interjection.

E. Sturko: “Only five years,” the member says. Only five years, everybody. It’s okay. Only five years.

The Chair: I’m not sure how this relates to the bill. If we could bring comments back to the bill, that would be appreciated.

E. Sturko: Yes, it’s related to the bill. We are talking about infrastructure. Thank you, hon. Chair. Because when it comes to building density, like it is spoken about and legislated towards in Bill 44, having a hospital up and running is an….

Interjections.

The Chair: Members, one member has the floor.

E. Sturko: Thank you, hon. Chair. I can tell that the members opposite are very sensitive about their failures on the Cloverdale hospital. Well, you know what? It’s been years. People are waiting, and still we’re talking about one of the most expensive projects in the history of our health care system here, with some of the fewest beds, with no plan for human resources.

Essentially, from what the health care doctors and nurses and people that are working in the Fraser Health system have told me, they actually don’t like this plan for the Cloverdale hospital. But you know what? We’re already going into it. Apparently, they have broken ground on it. And you know what? Let’s get it built. But unfortunately, now it’s not only years behind schedule, but it’s also $1 billion over budget.

One billion. I never in my life would have thought that if someone said: “Yeah, it’s a few more million dollars, you know, changing designs….” But $1 billion over budget on something that’s not built, not even one bit. Bill 44 is densifying our communities. It’s going to be bringing more demands on the infrastructure that’s there, including health care. And we have, in my community, a hospital that’s supposedly underway years behind schedule and already, under this government, $1 billion over budget. It’s hard to believe.

[6:15 p.m.]

One of the worst parts, I would say, about this lack of planning and this inability of this government to follow through on promises made and actually deliver those results is that it just downloads the pressure onto municipalities. What we end up seeing is that they’re constantly creating new legislation to put pressure on municipalities but without providing the funding and infrastructure that are required to get these projects done.

I don’t understand how this government expects cities to function when they are constantly putting more and more pressure on them to provide for services and community that they simply haven’t built up enough infrastructure to support.

We already see it. I can tell you that I already see it in the neighbourhood that I live in, because I live in one of these townhousey areas that has the shopping, has very little green space, to be honest. Each person gets a tiny two-foot square of what’s considered a courtyard.

But what we do get instead of a yard are sump pump and drainage problems, because there are so many — a huge confluence of townhouses, apartment buildings and multifamily dwellings in the same area with not the appropriate amount of infrastructure for sewer, water and drainage. Then we end up having to pay out of our extra fees and stuff that we pay for our condo association, to pay for all the problems that we have with sump pumps and drainage.

These are things that I would honestly anticipate seeing as a result of poor planning, frankly, on the part of this government — bringing forward legislation to increase density without simultaneously increasing access to funding and helping communities plan for the increased stress on their infrastructure.

The member for Surrey–White Rock talked about tran­sit, and that was one of the biggest things when I was campaigning over a year ago, and I would go door to door and talk to people, particularly people that live in the little Douglas crossing area, which is close to 0 Avenue. If they wanted to take the bus, they have to walk a minimum of 30 minutes, if you live near 0 Avenue, to get to the first bus stop.

I heard a member in here the other day talking about: what if a mom has a hockey bag and her kids? “Oh, they’ll take the SkyTrain.” It became a ridiculous conversation. But I think people do want to take transit. I think that they do want to have options, but that’s nearly impossible if you’re trying to, let’s say, push a stroller, take your toddler to Timbits hockey. You have a giant hockey bag, and you’re walking half an hour to a bus stop? Come on.

This is the kind of failure to plan. This is the kind of thing that does not account for the density that’s growing, particularly in places like South Surrey.

I think, definitely when we’re looking at Bill 44, I want to be clear that I’m not against density. I’m not against building up. I live in a townhome complex. I love it. I’ve actually got great neighbours. I think that it builds a good sense of community to have a lot of different families around.

What I am against is building and not supporting peo­ple with transit, with different opportunities for transportation, with making sure that there is accessible parking, to make sure that they have access to other kinds of amenities, to make sure that their kids can go to school even if they have to go in a portable, heaven forbid, because this government didn’t follow through on its promise to eliminate portables. Hopefully, it’ll have heating, because there literally are, right now, portables in Surrey that don’t have heating.

Don’t shake your head. It’s a true story. The teachers of the Surrey Teachers Association brought it forward to the public. I’m grateful for that, because it helps get information out about just how dire the situation is in our community.

Of course, we welcome…. In Surrey, I am really proud that we are one of the most diverse communities in the province. We as a community have welcomed more refu­gees than any other place in British Columbia. We have a tremendous community of newcomers and people born in Canada and abroad, and we’re very proud of that.

We welcome people, but we want to welcome them to a place where they will be comfortable. Their kids can go to school. They have access to transit so that they can get to work. Maybe they are going to be coming here to study.

[6:20 p.m.]

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Certainly we want to make sure that they have access to health care and not just that a person will be waiting and waiting on a wait-list to try to get into a different health authority when they need to visit a cath lab but that they’ll actually be able to visit a facility in Surrey and that those promises will actually be fulfilled — not just empty promises but actually delivering results, because unfortunately, the delivery of results is something that’s been pretty scarce, I have to say, from this government.

Whether you’re a renter, an owner, a senior or a young person, the price of housing is higher than it has ever been. Right now there are too many British Columbians struggling under the weight of the steadily increasing costs. This is a result of the NDP’s inability to build more housing. B.C. has the worst housing affordability in North America, and this is all on Premier Eby’s watch.

Sorry, I withdraw that. It’s the Premier’s watch.

Right now it costs $3,000 monthly in Vancouver for a one-bedroom. Can you imagine $3,000 for a one-bedroom apartment? A Surrey townhouse that used to be $300,000 now costs over $900,000. But I think this is wrong, because the majority of townhouses are now over $1 million in Surrey.

By contrast, what we’re seeing is that the Canada…. Sorry. Rather, this government claims that Bill 44 is going to help build 130,000 homes over the next ten years. But by contrast, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says that we need to build 610,000 additional housing units by 2030 to restore affordable housing. Of course, this plan falls well short of that. The NDP’s housing targets are set at only 75 percent of the real need, and that is well below the federal CMHC guidelines to restore affordability.

Noting the time, hon. Speaker, could I reserve my place and conclude this debate?

E. Sturko moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Reporting of Bills

BILL 38 — INTERNATIONAL CREDENTIALS
RECOGNITION ACT

Bill 38, International Credentials Recognition Act, reported complete with amendment, to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Committee of Supply (Section C), having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.

Hon. R. Kahlon moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until 1:30 p.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 6:23 p.m.