Orders of the Day

Hon. L. Beare: In this chamber, I call third reading for Bill 38, International Credentials Recognition Act.

Third Reading of Bills

BILL 38 — INTERNATIONAL CREDENTIALS
RECOGNITION ACT

Bill 38, International Credentials Recognition Act, read a third time and passed.

Hon. L. Beare: In this chamber, I call third reading, Bill 34, Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act.

BILL 34 — RESTRICTING PUBLIC
CONSUMPTION OF
ILLEGAL SUBSTANCES ACT

Hon. L. Beare: I move third reading for Bill 34, Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act.

Mr. Speaker: Members, you’ve heard the question.

Division has been called.

[2:35 p.m. - 2:40 p.m.]

Bill 34, Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act, read a third time and passed on the following division:

[2:45 p.m.]

Hon. L. Beare: 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 for Bill 41, Forests Statutes Amendment Act.

In the third House, Committee C, I call Committee of the Whole for Bill 39, Zero-Emission Vehicles Amendment Act.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

Second Reading of Bills

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

(continued)

E. Sturko: I’m just going to wind up my remarks here on Bill 44, and I just wanted to read a couple of things into the record.

I know that the member for Langford–Juan de Fuca was talking about development in schools and had some choice words for the opposition. So I just wanted to point out, with regard to Bill 44, really, in my opinion, the lack of ability for this government to implement the type of infrastructure development that is truly needed in order for us to keep up, particularly with the plan for densification that this government is pushing.

In the member’s own riding, actually, Superintendent Scott Stinson said that “there are currently 59 portables in the district, an all-time high.” He said: “We try and guess where the growth is going to be and where we need to put the portables.”

School district board chair Amanda Dowhy said that “as residential development across the West Shore continues to expand, it’s imperative that they be accompanied by new school infrastructure and expansion….” “Having to buy and move portables puts us under extreme pressure on the district’s operating budget,” Dowhy said. “The more operational dollars spent on portables, the less we are able to spend on students.”

“In nine heavily populated elementary schools, much of the multipurpose space normally used for activities like music, art and drama has been converted to classroom space, a step the district called ‘a last resort.’”

[2:50 p.m.]

I know the member for Langford–Juan de Fuca talked about new schools there were opening. In fact, there is a new school that is expected to open very soon. But, unfortunately, that elementary school is going to be at or near its 480-student capacity when it opens in 2025.

This actually reminds me of another little infrastructure foible. You guys might remember the Pattullo Bridge in Surrey, a four-lane bridge being replaced with a four-lane bridge by this NDP government. Here we have growth that’s expected, now, to go, in my community…. It’s going to skyrocket in an already, probably, leading-the-province in growth in terms of population, falling far behind in transportation infrastructure…. Just like this school being opened and already full, they’re going to open the Pattullo Bridge, and it’s already out of date, a four-lane bridge with a four-lane bridge.

Also, I’m hearing now from elected officials in my own community, from our city council. I wanted to read some of the comments, here, of one of the city councillors, Linda Annis, who is on our city council for Surrey, because she also has some concerns about the province’s new housing rules. She says that this province’s new housing rules will put added pressure on infrastructure and schools. A recurring theme. This has all the markings of a very rocky ride for Surrey and its neighbourhoods as land prices soar, costly infrastructure needs replacing and more students enroll in our already overcrowded schools.

Here’s a quote from our councillor.

“‘There isn’t a single existing neighbourhood in Surrey that can cope with four or six homes on one lot without major improvements to infrastructure, such as sewer and water,’ Councillor Annis noted. ‘At the same time, our schools are already overcrowded with more than twice the number of new students showing up in September than originally planned.… Then add in how much land prices will soar when homeowners realize just how much their property is worth if four or six homes can be built on that current single-family lot. When you add those all up, how can anyone say that housing will be more affordable? Rather than one expensive home on a single-family lot, this change means that we could have up to six expensive homes on one lot.’”

She also said:

“‘In Surrey, we are not keeping up with the growth that we already have. Imagine if we have an extra 20,000 students, which isn’t that far-fetched under the new housing rules,’” Councillor Annis explained. ‘The province is building new schools, but not enough and not fast enough. As a result, we are falling further and further behind rather than catching up. These new housing rules only add more stress to a system that’s hardly coping as it is.

“‘The provincial government has made the change, so it should be up to the province to explain how the new rules will create genuinely affordable housing and who is going to pay for all the required infrastructure. The province calls their plan gentle growth, but when you get down to the actual details and costs, it will be anything but gentle for cities like Surrey.

“Is the province coming to the table to build more infrastructure, schools, parks, playgrounds, pools and added transit? Because the unintended consequences of putting six on one lot need to be understood and costed not just in terms of finance but what it will do to neighbourhoods from a community perspective.’”

I couldn’t agree more with our city councillor.

Thank you for the time and for allowing me to speak to Bill 44.

I. Paton: I’m pleased to rise today and participate in this important debate. I hate to bring this forward, but this is another heavy-handed NDP government issue with very little consultation to our local municipal governments and regional districts. Virtually no consultation and overreach to our municipalities.

To me, I feel that this is a coming down on the democracy of our municipal governments and their ability and their years of hard work and planning with their OCPs and their regional zonings in their districts, including my municipality of Delta, where I spent several years on Delta city council. I can tell you that we put in many, many hours of designing our official community plan and coming up with the zonings for North Delta and for Tsawwassen and for the Ladner areas.

[2:55 p.m.]

I wonder, at this point, now, what will become of some of our local councils. Because on Delta city council, a lot of our work at council meetings was dealing with zoning issues, people coming forward with two-lot splits and three-lot splits — very controversial. We spent a lot of time on that. Of course, these often went to public hearing. It looks as though now the general public of my community of Delta will not have that opportunity to come forward and at least speak to these provisions of two-lot splits, three-lot splits.

Of course, now, Bill 44 is suggesting that a single-family lot could be demolished. The house could be demolished and could be replaced with anywhere up to four and possibly even six residences. Again, I’ll speak later to this. Can the municipality — for instance, my municipality of Delta — handle this density and the infrastructure that goes along with adding density to the area?

Housing is top of mind for every British Columbian, and we need to ensure we are making the correct decisions for those living here now and those who will live here in the future. Everyone in this chamber knows that we need to build more housing, but after seven years and two elections, the NDP has repeatedly failed to do so.

This province needs a better housing plan than what the NDP is currently offering. After two terms and seven years in government, just 15 percent of the 114,000 government-built homes promised by the NDP have opened today — a shocking lack of results, but nothing new 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 far too many British Columbians are struggling under the weight of steadily increasing costs. As a result of this NDP government’s inability to build more housing, B.C. now has the worst housing affordability in North America on the Premier’s watch. Rent now costs over $3,000 monthly in Vancouver for a one-bedroom apartment. A Surrey townhouse that used to cost $300,000 in 2012 now costs $900,000.

This government claims Bill 44 will help build 130,000 homes over the next ten years. By contrast, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says we need to build 610,000 additional housing units by 2030 to restore affordable housing. This plan falls well short of that. B.C. has the highest rents in Canada and the worst housing affordability in North America.

The NDP’s housing targets are set at only 75 percent of the real need and well below the CMHC guidelines to restore affordability. Robert Berry of 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.

Even after these changes, there are so many things holding up housing that the NDP refuse to address. One is that Metro Vancouver is planning to triple development cost charges on new housing, adding up to $25,000 to the cost of a new home. The backlogs, delays and regulations at the residential tenancy branch make it next to impossible for mom-and-pop landlords to rent out their basement suites or laneway homes.

The implementation of the 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-high performance windows. We’ve seen, with the village of Lytton, costly archaeological requirements and massive backlogs within the archaeological branch, and they are holding up housing for years, not just for days.

I can give you an example of a situation in my own riding of Delta South, where a builder who is so pumped to get started to tear down a home in Boundary Bay, which is a part of Tsawwassen….

He was all ready to go with his crew. The owners are an elderly couple that wanted to get a new house built on that property. They spent months and months waiting for answers from government, waiting for permits, and when they finally got the permits, they had to spend about $13,000 to bring in an archaeological dig company to do some examination of the ground before they could get started building the new home in Boundary Bay in Tsawwassen.

I’d also like to look at Bill 44, and it’s very interesting. Let’s talk about the agricultural land reserve in British Columbia — Bill 52 and Bill 15 — that put strict requirements for housing on farmland in British Columbia. I think most people in this House would agree that I am a person who really believes that the next generation of young people moving with their family need a place to live on the farm if they want to continue to be part of the farming with their parents and possibly their grandparents.

[3:00 p.m.]

Bill 44 says anywhere in British Columbia over 5,000 people, you can take a single-family lot, demolish that house and replace it with a fourplex or possibly even six. In the words of my colleague from Abbotsford West…. He said: “Isn’t this interesting that you can actually have more houses on a single-family lot in Vancouver than you can on a 500-acre farm in British Columbia where we only allow, basically, two homes on a 500-acre single title farm in British Columbia?”

It’s glaringly apparent that this bill presents a substantial gap that we, as responsible representatives, cannot explore. This gap raises concerns and doubts about the bill’s efficacy and practicality.

I’d like to quote from Miss DeRosa. “Proposed legislation introduced by the B.C. NDP last Wednesday will force municipalities to green-light multi-unit housing on single-family lots whether they like it or not.”

This goes on to say: “The government’s hope is that flooding the market with more units, either to own or rent, will bring down the cost of housing in cities…. However, housing researchers who have studied the strategy in New Zealand and the U.S. are divided over whether it will temper hot real estate markets, pointing to evidence that while such policies can bring down rental prices through increased supply, it also inflates land prices as homeowners jockey to sell to the highest-bidding developer.”

Then I can go on to quote also from Mr. Palmer.

“Henceforth, municipalities will have to plan and zone in line with guidelines set out in a provincial government policy manual. The manual will set clear provincial expectations in terms of setbacks, height restrictions, parking and lot coverage, according to the government’s PowerPoint summary of the legislation.

“However, the New Democrats did not release the policy manual. That will come later when the cabinet gets around to approving the guiding set of regulations.

“Yes, this looks to be another legislative rush job. Many of the blanks will be filled in after the fall session is over, when the opposition is no longer able to debate the contents in the House. Municipalities wondering how this will play out — almost all of them, I bet — will just have to wait for the NDP manual.”

To go further with Mr. Palmer’s quote of November 8:

“The NDP government’s drive to impose multi-unit housing on single-family neighbourhoods has provoked a backlash from local leaders over the lack of detail and the short time they’ve been given to adjust….

“The ham-fistedness of the threat combined with the vagueness of the delivery is forcing municipal leaders to play a guessing game.

“One of the strongest reactions came from Burnaby mayor Mike Hurley. ‘It’s a massive change,’ said Hurley. ‘And I don’t think anyone really realizes how big a change this is, whether it’s good or bad,’ he added, referring to the total lack of detail.

“Because of the six-month time frame, ‘There’ll be no community input for any of this stuff,’ said Hurley. ‘I’m not sure that the provincial government…has the same level of expertise when it comes to planning as cities do…. So, that’s a concern.’

“He scoffed at the government’s offer of a $51 million fund to support municipalities in adapting to the changes. ‘That’s a drop in the bucket’ when spread over the infrastructure and resource needs of some 85 municipalities large and small, he said.”

Then we move on to Mayor Eric Woodward of Langley: “Another mayor who raised concerns like those expressed by Hurley was Eric Woodward of Langley township…. Woodward expressed doubts that communities will be able to densify single-family neighbourhoods ‘without creating significant challenges on sewer, water, school sites, park sites, public safety capacity, road capacity and parking requirements.’”

But this is the only way for our citizens to voice their concern, and the opportunity for public hearings for a lot of these issues is going to be taken away.

Nearly all the details about how this legislation is going to be implemented are supposed to be contained in a policy manual, which won’t be published until after this legislation is passed. This missing policy manual is said to include important practical deal details like setbacks, height restrictions, parking and lot coverage.

[3:05 p.m.]

Like I said earlier, when I was on Delta city council, one of the number one things that took up our time at Monday night council nights, which still do to this day, is people being able to come out and speak about what’s happening in their neighbourhood and challenging the area plan and the zoning bylaws for North Delta, South Delta and Ladner and looking at the OCP.

The opportunity to have public hearings once a month where people could come out and at least democratically get to the microphone and speak about whether they were in favour of a two-lot split or a three-lot split was available. Now with the government overburdening policy here, public hearings will not even take place anymore. People will not have the opportunity to challenge where there’s a fourplex in their neighbourhood, a fiveplex or even six houses added.

This lack of detail makes this bill nothing more than a marketing document reflecting this government’s pattern of empty announcements with no details, no tracking and poor results to date. The lack of essential details in this bill is not in the best interests of anyone in our province. It leaves the public in a state of uncertainty, unable to gauge the true impact and potential conse­quences of this legislation.

It is not a secret that the NDP tends to make announcements without providing the necessary tools for implementing those promises. This pattern reinforces the notion that our government is not adequately prepared to tackle the housing crisis and make life more affordable for British Columbians. What the people of this province need are not empty announcements but concrete well-thought-out plans and strategies that yield tangible results.

The lack of transparency and details in this bill only perpetuates the frustration and skepticism that many residents feel. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that the government we entrust with our well-being provides more than mere words. They must provide comprehensive solutions and a clear path forward. This government has shown time and time again they are not the right people to build housing and make life more affordable in British Columbia.

Another example of a situation in my riding of Delta South…. I know the provincial government is the funding behind Red Door Housing, which are in charge of a facility in Ladner called the Ladner Willows. It has become an extremely disappointing and controversial building that was built for low-income families. Only built in the 1980s, yet it is so deplorable — with mould, with rust, with roof leaks and whatnot.

This facility on Ladner Trunk Road in Ladner called the Ladner Willows has 48 units. Up until now, almost 42 of the 48 have been boarded up with plywood. It has been sitting like that for at least five years now with no provision from the government to move forward and get people back into this facility or have this facility torn down and rebuilt for low-income families in Ladner.

The Premier confessed as much at a gathering of NDP insiders at the Broadbent Institute in September: “We’re not going to solve the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the health care challenges. We’re not going to solve all those issues in British Columbia between now and the next election.”

Moreover, there are large portions of this legislation that won’t come into effect even until after the next election. Interim housing needs reports don’t need to be completed until after the next election in December 2024. Official community plans don’t need to be redesigned until the end of December 2025.

What this legislation also fails to do is fix the massive amount of taxes that are blocking new housing construction, including Metro Vancouver’s plan to more than triple the fees on new housing.

It’s simple. Additional housing costs are the exact oppo­site of what British Columbians need right now. To make housing more affordable, we need to make building housing less expensive.

Unlike the NDP, we want to build high density where it is needed most, not urban sprawl. People want to afford a home that is close to transit and has an easy commute to work or school. Those are the homes that we want to build. That means smart urban density in our downtowns as opposed to the outskirts of town. While building more housing is undoubtedly a priority, it’s crucial that we focus on the right locations.

[3:10 p.m.]

When we speak of right locations, I want to talk about a project of housing in Delta South that I’m very proud of. It’s called the Southlands property in Boundary Bay. It’s the old Spetifore farm that consisted of 537 acres, and, back in 1989, was the longest public hearing ever held in Canada by a municipality.

It finally came back to us, in Delta, about the year 2012 or 2013. The owner said: “Look. I own this 537 acres. It’s kind of fallow farmland. Some of it’s pretty decent. Some of it is poor.” The owner said: “Look. I want to put forward a project for housing in this area.”

We finally came to an agreement, as Delta city council. We said to the owner: “We will give you 20 percent of that 537 acres, the poorest land — the sandy, salty land of this 537 acres — if you will give back to the city of Delta the 80 percent of the 537 acres and also throw in $9 million of money to improve the drainage and irrigation of the 80 percent.”

What a success this has become. A planned housing development in south Delta, in the Tsawwassen area, where we’re not only building condominiums, single-family homes, apartment buildings and townhouses. We’re also adding….

It’s a community now. There are coffee shops. There’s a little store. There’s going to be a Four Winds pub. It’s one of the greatest things that has happened to Delta. Over 350 acres of farmland had the $9 million in improvements to it for drainage and irrigation. I’ve never seen anything so successful. We’ve got three different farmers out there growing potatoes, growing grain and growing corn.

It’s just a great success story. That’s why I think municipalities need to have the ability to design and move forward some of their own housing projects without the government telling them how they should run their business and how they should do it.

People are naturally drawn to Delta as a place to live. Delta boasts thriving spaces, including restaurants and breweries, which people want to enjoy. To promote these aspects, we must strategically plan housing developments rather than allow unchecked urban sprawl. We don’t want to end up like California, where urban sprawl is rampant and traffic jams mean it takes hours to get home.

Residents desire homes that are located near transit options, enabling easy commutes to work or school. The essence of our housing strategy should be to fulfil this need efficiently. This means focusing on development in the right places and ensuring access to necessary amenities. This is very important.

In Delta, we do not have the best transit options. If we’re going to add density to areas of Delta South and areas of Ladner and areas of North Delta, we have to have efficient transit so that people can not have to get in their vehicles and drive to work. They can properly be able to take a bus.

A good example is Tilbury Industrial Park. It employs thousands and thousands of workers that almost cannot get there in any kind of a rapid fashion on our transit system from Vancouver or Coquitlam or Burnaby or wher­ever they happen to come from.

What I’m saying is…. If we are going to add all this density of fourplexes and six houses in our suburban areas, we have to make sure that we have the proper transit facilities, including the new bridge that we were going to put up to replace the George Massey Tunnel. This legislation will increase density to 142 units per hectare, on average, which is a significant increase for suburban areas, compared to 18 units per hectare in Coquitlam.

Can you imagine in Delta? We allow approximately 17 to 27 units per hectare of density, yet this legislation will now allow 142 units per hectare of density. This will not sit well with a lot of people in my rather conservative area of south Delta, Tsawwassen and Ladner.

There are no details or plans to address what is required to support all these homes. The NDP hasn’t even figured out how to pay for the massive cost of this infrastructure. Because of those costs, housing is going to be very expensive unless we get taxes, fees and red tape out of the way.

[3:15 p.m.]

Who is going to pay for the infrastructure — the sidewalks, the hydrants, the DCCs, the water, the sewer, the schools, the upgrades to sidewalks and the upgrades to roads in some of our subdivisions? There is a role for the province to be stepping up to the plate here, but the best they can do is recycle old announcements that are massively overbudget. British Columbians are tired of this same rhetoric and of seeing the same projects rean­nounced but with no new affordable housing to show for it.

The approach to housing development in Delta and throughout British Columbia must be strategic, thoughtful and aligned with the desires and needs of the residents. We aim to create thriving communities with well-planned housing. Unfortunately….

This is something I consistently hear from my constituents. They are frustrated with the current status of infrastructure, namely the Massey Tunnel. As it stands, people may be hesitant to move to my riding because of the congestion they face. It can add on a huge amount of time for commuters and people in the trucking industry. My constituents are beyond frustrated with waiting for a replacement for the congested, seismically unsafe George Massey Tunnel.

Mr. Speaker, I’d like to talk a little bit about the density and new housing going into Ladner. I can tell you that Ladner, as we speak, is currently adding a lot of density and housing to an area right along the Fraser River called Hampton Cove or the Captain’s Cove Marina area. We have a huge amount of new houses going up, as I just spoke about earlier, in Tsawwassen, the Southlands project.

Ladner is a population of about 25,000 people. Believe it or not, there’s only one exit to get out of Ladner — in the mornings, in the afternoons, in the evenings — to meet Highway 17A, if you would like to go to White Rock or to the U.S. border or if you’d like to approach the George Massey Tunnel to get to work or to get to appointments.

With the bridge, we were going to have a second exit coming out of Ladner on River Road. It would simply go underneath the bridge and be able to connect people over by the new casino and quickly get them into the tunnel. We’d have two exits to support the density and building of houses in Ladner and Tsawwassen.

With this George Massey Tunnel replacement, we don’t know it’s ever going to happen or take place. They have killed the opportunity for the second exit out of Ladner with this plan for the Massey submerged tunnel, which, without getting into all the details, is an environmental nightmare. I could speak for three hours just about my feelings on this tunnel replacement.

An Hon. Member: More. More. More.

I. Paton: More, please.

The project included ten lanes.

Deputy Speaker: If the member might speak to the bill, that would be appreciated.

I. Paton: I am certainly speaking about the density of new homes going up, fourplexes and sixplexes, in Ladner and the ability for them to get out and get to work or get to medical appointments.

The project included ten lanes, two of which were dedicated to transit, major upgrades to the Steveston and Highway 17A interchanges, highway widening and the potential to see light rapid transit come to south of the Fraser. The government took all of this away from my constituents when they ripped up the B.C. Liberal government’s plan in 2017. Instead, commuters continue to wait, possibly for ten more years, for this replacement.

Every time I talk about the Massey Tunnel, I feel like I should pull out my notes from five years ago, because nothing has changed. Not a shovel has gone into the ground to replace the aging George Massey Tunnel.

Deputy Speaker: If the member might demonstrate the connection to the bill, that would be appreciated.

I. Paton: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

In conclusion, in contrast to the NDP, we will be offering a real plan that prioritizes green urban density over unmanaged sprawl. Their record speaks for itself when it comes to housing. With the NDP’s continuous lack of results, there is no reason to believe they will be any more successful this time than they have been in the past.

We should be flooding the zone with all kinds of new housing — condos, townhomes, apartments, market ren­tals, affordable rentals; along with building the infra­structure like transit, child care and schools that growing communities need and deserve.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today on Bill 44.

Hon. G. Lore: I won’t speak long to this bill. I did want to rise to voice my support for this bill and the steps forward that it takes.

In part, I’m inspired to stand and speak to it by some of the things that I’ve heard from the opposition. I think it’s pretty clear that we’re going to have formal opposition to this bill from the other side. Some of the things I wanted to respond to are some of the ways in which members of the opposition have been talking about homes for families and people being able to let out their dogs and raise their families in communities.

[3:20 p.m.]

The kinds of housing that we’re talking about in this….

Deputy Speaker: Sorry, Member.

If members could turn off their technology. We’re hearing it, and we don’t need to. Thanks.

Please proceed. Sorry, Minister.

Hon. G. Lore: Thank you.

The housing that we’re talking about in this legislation is family housing. In my community, dense and diversified housing is home to families of all kinds in every community, in every neighbourhood of Victoria–Beacon Hill. I think the attempts to frame this as not good for families to either rent or own is disingenuous when we need diversified housing, when there are opportunities in densified communities to have walkability, to have connection with neighbours. This is not just neutral for family housing. This has the potential to be net positive.

I also was listening to my colleague from Delta South and a few of the quotes that he raised. Since the member for Delta South raised a few quotes from constituents of mine, from organizations in my community, I felt the need to set the record straight.

The organizations the member was speaking to are strongly in support of this legislation before us. They are in support of what they have described to me as bold and positive steps forward. For the member opposite to take quotes from these individuals who believe that this is good legislation, that these are important and significant steps forward, is a misrepresentation.

The member also referenced public hearings, including the longest public hearing in history. I will say the notion that we don’t have urgency in addressing housing needs, that the kinds of consultations and community conversations that happen as part of the official community planning aren’t important contributions is, again, I think, off the mark in terms of what we need to rise to, to address the housing crisis.

I’ve been a part of a number of neighbourhood planning sessions here in Victoria as part of the villages and corridors planning. The proactive outreach that happens during this kind of community planning….

City staff and volunteers are part of groups that do this planning, that pop up at the local pool, that set up coffees in neighbours’ houses to get a sense of what people want their neighbourhoods and communities to look like. That contribution, that kind of community consultation should be recognized as good input into designing our neighbourhoods and should be treated with respect for the time and energy that people give to that.

What we’ve got currently is that there are these neighbourhood and official community plans. People put their energy into sharing their vision for a neighbourhood, their vision for housing, their vision for their city. Then we also do a building-by-building additional conversation.

What I have observed in my time involved in housing conversations in my community is folks who are underhoused, who face housing insecurity, are less able to participate in those one-by-one development conversations. As a parent, I took my then six-year-old to many public hearings on housing. More than once, I was not able to speak because it went well into the night in a way that, again, doesn’t work for families — whereas that input in that ongoing vision of an official community plan sets some of what can be built where.

[3:25 p.m.]

To suggest that one form of consultation should just be disregarded and on a one-by-one basis when we face urgency, when we face the need to honour that consultation and official community plan…. That visioning of what a city should look like and where housing should go is, I think, really important.

Again, just to speak to some of the quotes that were raised in the previous member’s speech. We have housing advocates who have been part of how we got here, part of this conversation to move the needle on how and where and when we build housing. I am very much looking forward to new opportunities, when a single-family dwelling in my community is taken down for something other than an even bigger, even more expensive single-family dwelling to be built.

Let’s be clear. If folks want single-family dwellings, they can build them there. But many families find… For many families, those single-family dwellings are unattainable when it comes to cost. Many families are also interested in townhouses in small, multi-unit buildings because of what they offer for living in communities, for connections to neighbours.

So I think what we’ve got here is not a restriction on what can be built but an opening up of opportunities for more density, for more robust and full neighbourhoods.

For what it will mean for my community and for families, for individuals looking for more housing options and more housing security in the future, I am in favour of this and in support of this legislation.

T. Wat: This is such a great honour for me to rise today and join many of my passionate and committed colleagues who already spoke so eloquently on this bill. We really wish the NDP MLAs from different municipalities can also stand up and tell us why they should support this bill.

It’s such an important debate that I think many of us should participate in, as what we do from our caucus.

Housing is really the talk of the town now and is the top of mind for many British Columbians, including, of course, my constituency, in my riding of Richmond North Centre, and also many of the residents in the city of Richmond.

In the city of Richmond, the number of people over age 65 will substantially increase by 2041. They will represent 26 percent of the population in 2041, compared with 14 percent in 2011. The over-75 age group will represent 15 percent of the population in 2041, compared to 6 percent in 2011. Some will be active and healthy, and others will be frail and will have health problems associated with advancing age.

This will have much implication for government to pro­vide affordable housing and supportive housing and other services or special programs to these age groups in the community. That’s why government must ensure that we are making the correct decisions for those living in our province now and for those who will live in B.C. in the future.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

Everyone in this chamber knows that we need to build more housing. But unfortunately, after seven years and two elections, the NDP has repeatedly failed to do so. This province needs a better housing plan than what the NDP is offering.

After two terms and seven years in government, what has this NDP government done? Sadly, just 15 percent of the 114,000 government-built homes promised by the NDP have opened today. What a shocking lack of results.

[3:30 p.m.]

Whether you are a renter, an owner, a senior or a young person, the price of housing is higher than it has ever been. Right now far too many British Columbians are struggling under the weight of steadily increasing costs.

According to a CBC news report in March 2022 — last year, but now it’s even worse — many Richmond residents have been pushed out of their city because of the shortage of reasonably priced rentals. The CBC news report said that the bulk of new construction in Richmond is creating privately owned condos and not purpose-built rentals.

Data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says Richmond recorded 703 rental housing starts and 5,495 strata condo starts from 2018 to 2021. Recent im­migrants from Hong Kong, many of whom live in the city of Richmond, said they were all taken by surprise how expensive and unaffordable it was to settle down in the Lower Mainland, including, of course, the city of Richmond.

Many of these immigrants have moved to the neighbouring province of Alberta, even though they much prefer living in our beautiful province. They simply cannot afford the high cost of living, including unaffordable housing prices or rentals, skyrocketing grocery bills, transportation costs, etc. Our province and the city of Richmond are losing these professional immigrants who have so much skill, talent and working experience to contribute to our province.

As a result of the NDP government’s inability to build more housing, B.C. now has the worst housing affordability in North America. On the Premier’s watch, rents now cost over $3,000 monthly in Vancouver for a one-bedroom apartment. A Surrey townhouse that used to cost $300,000 in 2012 now costs over $900,000. This government claims that Bill 44 will help build 113,000 homes over the next ten years. By contrast, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says we need to build 610,000 additional housing units by 2030 to restore affordable housing. This plan falls well short of that.

B.C. has the highest rents in Canada and the worst housing affordability in North America. If you are thinking about owning a townhouse, how much does it cost now? It’s up 33 percent, to $1 million. How about a single-family home? Well, it’s approaching $2 million. The NDP housing targets are set at only 75 percent of the real need and well below federal CMHC guidelines to restore affordability.

Robert Berry, of the pro-density group Homes for Living, said in the Vancouver Sun that the NDP is taking a politically convenient route with moderate targets that don’t solve the core issue.

Brendon Ogmundson, chief economist of the B.C. Real Estate Association, notes that even if targets are met, they fall short of what’s needed for affordability. Even after these changes, there are so many things holding up housing that the NDP refuse to address.

Metro Vancouver is planning to triple development cost charges on new housing, adding up to $25,000 to the cost of a new home. The backlogs, the delays and the regulations at the residential tenancy branch make it next to impossible for mom-and-pop landlords to rent out their basement suites or laneway homes. The implementation of the 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-high-performance windows.

[3:35 p.m.]

The development approvals process review also cites a backlog caused by constant referrals to the Ministry of Transportation for developments within 800 metres of a provincial road and a lack of authority for the ministry to grant latecomer agreements, resulting in the reluctance of developers to bear the high cost of being the first to develop, including in areas identified as important for meeting community objectives.

As we have seen with the village of Lytton, costly archaeology requirements and massive backlogs within the archaeology branch are holding up housing for years, not days.

The Premier, the Housing Minister and the entire NDP caucus should open up their hearts to listen to the voices of renters. Let me quote some remarks from our renters.

“Lisa O’Sullivan, her son Cyril Gunn, cousin Sandra McMath and mother, Betty McGuire, live in Richmond in a building that’s shared by another family of renters and are looking for a place that gives them their own space. O’Sullivan says they want to stay in Richmond but can’t find a place they can afford within the city, after searching for two years.”

Teresa Chhina, a housing outreach worker who is homeless: “My job is outreach with the most vulnerable people in the province, but I myself am homeless.”

Bert Atoza, who waited for hours in line to see just one apartment: “It becomes like Hunger Games. We are fighting to get the place.”

Ankita Goel, a renter: “Housing is unaffordable, groceries are going up, rent is going up…. It’s making me consider moving out.”

Paula Hudson-Lunn is losing her apartment in Nelson. “Here I am, at 71, looking for housing in a 0.6 percent rental vacancy market.”

As a result of the affordability challenge, birth rates have plunged to 15-year low. Michelle Cyca, a new mother forced to move: “The prospect of having a baby in a new community, far from friends and family, was hard to swallow.”

The Metro Vancouver Homeless Count shows homelessness is at record highs under the NDP, up 34 percent from 2017.

In a letter to the editor of the Richmond News, Donna Colpitts says: “I applaud councillor Kash Heed for putting forward a motion calling for an immediate action plan to address the homelessness crisis in Richmond.” Donna said: “It is clear from the 2023 official homeless count final report that the current strategy is not effective. The increase for all of Metro Vancouver was 32 percent; in Richmond, it was 91 percent.”

Donna added that the report also highlights the fact that “the majority of people experiencing homelessness are in their home community. They are not somehow being imported or drifting into our community. They grew up here, and this is their home.”

Before taking a detailed look at this bill, Bill 44, Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023, let’s listen to the mayors of several municipalities with regard to their thoughts about this NDP bill. I know that my colleague from Delta South has already talked about some of them. I think it doesn’t harm us to listen once again to how they feel, because they are the ones who understand the housing issue in their local municipalities.

[3:40 p.m.]

Burnaby mayor Mike Hurley is the first mayor to strongly criticize this bill as too much, too soon. It seemed like the province had not put any thought into any of this, Mayor Hurley told Burnaby Now. “It’s a massive change, and I don’t think anyone really realizes how big a change this is, whether it’s good or bad,” he said, also noting that there were “hardly any” details with this new announcement — hardly any details.

Mayor Hurley worries about the possibility of speculation and if land values on single-family lots could double or triple. He questioned how properties will be taxed when lots have the potential for four or six units and assessed on highest and best use.

Mayor Hurley is also concerned about infrastructure. He said that many of Burnaby’s neighbourhoods were built in the 1950s and 1960s with smaller pipes for sewers and water. Let me quote him. He said: “Who’s going to pay to replace all those pipes with bigger pipes and then the infrastructure that goes with handling those bigger pipes?”

The province has planned a $51 million fund to support municipalities with the changes, but Mayor Hurley said that money won’t be enough when split between all the municipalities, which the new legislation affects. Let me quote him again: “That’s really a drop in the bucket when it comes to infrastructure.”

Mayor Hurley also said there should be much more consultation with the municipalities. I’m hoping that the NDP MLAs could have consulted with the local municipalities, and these kinds of comments would not have come about. Let me quote Mayor Hurley once again: “I’m not sure that the provincial government…has the same level of expertise when it comes to planning as cities do, and so that’s a concern.”

This new legislation will also eliminate parking requirements for projects within 400 metres of frequent transit, an issue Burnaby council has been arguing over for months. Just three weeks ago, the Burnaby council approved reduced parking requirements within 800 metres of a SkyTrain station, but they were reductions, not an elimination.

Let me quote Mayor Hurley once again. “We work on things, and then the province comes out and does something, you know, without talking to us. And it’s very frustrating.” Burnaby’s bylaws will have to comply with the provincial rules by the end of June next year. Mayor Hurley said: “There will be no community input into any of this stuff.”

The province is also asking municipalities to update their official community plans every five years. Mayor Hurley said that would likely mean more work for city staff in years ahead.

Mayor Hurley is not the only mayor who expresses, I guess, frustration with this Bill 44. Another mayor who shares the concerns raised by Mayor Hurley is Mayor Eric Woodward of Langley Township. Mayor Woodward told Postmedia that “the NDP government’s implementation timeline is completely ‘unrealistic.’” Mayor Woodward suspects it has more to do with the looming provincial election than any concern with long-term planning.

[3:45 p.m.]

Mayor Woodward expressed doubts that communities will be able to densify single-family neighbourhoods “without creating significant challenges on sewer, water, school sites, park sites, public safety capacity, road capacity and parking requirements. This one-size-fits-all approach is really going to create a lot of problems here.”

Well, there’s another mayor. Acting Sooke Mayor Al Beddows says that one of the immediate effects of the legislation would be to send his municipality back to square one on a community housing plan that has just consumed several years’ effort and $200,000.

This acting mayor also questioned the government’s wisdom in getting rid of public hearings once the new community plans are final. He told CKNW: “They say public hearings are a nuisance and usually negative, and I guess they are. But it is the only way for our citizens to voice their concern.”

He also raised an important prospect. The ban on public hearing is intended to curb the forces of NIMBY — not in my backyard. Well, as Vaughn Palmer of Vancouver Sun said, in the brave new world of provincial government dictator zoning, residents may not learn about the transformation of their single-family neighbourhood until the construction crews descend, when it will be too late for them to do anything about it. How sad.

Vaughn Palmer, in his column, pointed out that Mayor Hurley, Mayor Woodward and acting Mayor Beddows are not the only local government leaders raising legitimate concerns about the NDP’s rush-job zoning legislation. He said that each of the mayors represent a community represented in the Legislature by NDP MLAs who should be alert to the valid criticism of local government leaders.

I fully agree with Vaughn Palmer that our NDP MLAs on the other side of the House should talk to their local government leaders, who know the local housing issue better than the Premier and the Housing Minister and understand their concerns.

Now let’s take a look at this Bill 44. There’s a lack of details. There’s also a major gap in this bill that we have no ability to explore. Nearly all the details about this legislation that are going to be implemented are supposed to be contained in a policy manual, which will not be published until after this legislation is passed.

This missing policy manual is set to include important practical details like setbacks, height restriction, parking and lot coverage. This lack of details makes this bill nothing more than a marketing document, reflecting this government’s pattern of empty announcements with no details, no tracking and poor results to date.

This government has shown time and time again that they are not the right people to build housing and make life more affordable in British Columbia. The Premier confessed as much at a gathering of NPD insiders at the Broadbent Institute this September. “We are not going to solve the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the health care challenges. We are not going to solve all those issues in British Columbia between now and the next election.”

Moreover, there is a large portion of this legislation that won’t come into effect until after the next election. Interim housing needs reports don’t need to be completed until after the next election, in December 2024. Official community plans don’t need to be redesigned until the end of December 2025.

[3:50 p.m.]

What this legislation also fails to do is fix the massive amount of taxes that are blocking new housing construction, including Metro Vancouver’s plan to more than triple fees on new housing. It’s simple. Additional housing costs are the exact opposite of what British Columbians need right now to make housing more affordable. We need to make building housing less expensive.

Unlike the Premier and the NDP, we want to build high density where it is needed most, not urban sprawl. People want to afford a home that is close to transit and has an easy commute to work or school. Those are the homes that we want to build. That means smart urban density in our downtowns as opposed to the outskirts of town. We don’t want to end up like California where urban sprawl is rampant and traffic jams mean it takes hours to get home.

This legislation will increase density to 142 units per hectare on average, which is a significant increase for suburban areas, compared to 18 units per hectare in Coquitlam. But there’s no mention of how the government is going to improve the infrastructure to go along with density. That shows that the government lacks foresight, lacks a comprehensive plan at all.

There are no details or plans to address what is re­quired to support all these homes. The NDP has not even figured out how to pay for the massive cost of this infrastructure. And because of those costs, housing is going to be very expensive, unless we get taxes, fees and red tape out of the way.

There is a role for the province to be stepping up to the plate here. But the best they can do is recycle old announcements that are massively over budget. British Columbians are tired of the same old rhetoric, seeing the same projects be announced but with no new affordable housing to show for it.

In contrast to the NDP, we will be offering a real plan that prioritizes green urban density over a managed sprawl. The record speaks for itself when it comes to housing. With the NDP’s continuous lack of results, there’s no reason to believe they will be any more successful this time than they have been in the past.

The only people who can truly fix this mess are our B.C. United caucus, with a bold vision to build homes and avoid cost escalation. We should be flooding the zone with all kinds of new housing — condos, townhomes, apartments, market rentals, affordable rentals — along with building the infrastructure, like transit, child care and schools that growing communities need and deserve. To do that, we need a comprehensive plan that meets the diverse needs of B.C. communities, and that’s what you can expect from a B.C. United government.

S. Furstenau: It’s been interesting to listen to the debate on this bill. I hope everybody takes the time to listen to the member for Saanich North and the Islands’ speech yesterday, which I think was not just wonderfully delivered but a thoughtful and deeply important part of the conversation on housing in B.C.

[3:55 p.m.]

I’m going to follow his lead. I would like to say that it would be quite a different thing if we were starting this debate and this conversation about housing with the assertion that it’s a human right, that there should be no expectation that people in a place like British Columbia, in a country like Canada, should not have the human right to be housed. Yet what we are mostly hearing in the debate is a kind of: “We can solve this problem by just doing more of the same as what we’ve been doing for so long.”

What I’d like to argue is that the unaffordability and lack of attainability of housing for far too many people in British Columbia is not the problem. It’s a symptom of a much bigger problem. What my colleague from Saanich North and the Islands laid out yesterday was a view of community and family and housing — a view of the world, really — that situates that unit of family within community and the idea that we as humans are actually meant to be caring and taking care of each other.

What we’ve seen for the last about four and a half decades is a story, mostly from Western governments, starting in the United Kingdom with a prime minister who said, “There’s no such thing as society”, and then in the United States with a president who rejected the idea that we should support people who need support. Then here in Canada, with the adoption of the kinds of principles that led to a lack of investment in non-market housing for the last four decades.

This bigger context to understand how the problem we have now with unaffordability and unattainability of housing for so many people is actually the outcome of a system that says: “We’re going to lean into letting this thing called the market drive the outcomes.”

So what have we got? Where has that market taken us? Well, today in the world we have what I would have been calling a billionaire problem. Currently the world’s ten richest men — and they are all men, Madam Speaker — own more wealth than 3.1 billion people combined. They own more wealth, ten men, than 40 percent of humanity.

We have allowed for this unmitigated accumulation of wealth by the few to create the conditions for more and more and more people in which they can’t meet their basic needs of shelter, food.

Then we have governments that for decades have not invested in the public services that actually are a buffer against this growing inequality. So we see a decline in the state of our public education system. We see a decline in our health care systems. We see a decline in our public institutions, our social safety net. We see people who are on disability, who are expected to live on a far-below-the-poverty-line amount of money every month.

We have gotten here not by some accident, not by like: “Oh well, you know, this is just the natural state of things.” We’ve gotten here by a series of policy decisions made by governments for decades.

[4:00 p.m.]

There’s a very interesting article that just came out in the Walrus. It’s by Ricardo Tranjan. It’s an excerpt from his book called The Tenant Class, which was published this year. In it, he points out that this conversation around the housing crisis in Canada has actually been going on for more than 100 years. We have commentary from B.C. that says: “We must have more homes, and we must have them at prices people can afford to pay.” That’s from 1911.

In Quebec, Le Devoir, in a press conference organized by tenant communities, demanded provincial investment in affordable housing. That was in 1980. We have the Toronto Star warning that if rent control were suddenly to cease, many families would suddenly be confronted by the danger of eviction or the necessity to find other accommodation, because they could not afford to stay where they were — 1950. An investigative news story in Maclean’s contends that the housing crisis, which shows no immediate signs of easing, is fuelling tenant organizing across the country. That’s 1969.

This conversation around the lack of affordable housing is not new. As we heard from the previous speaker, the kind of rhetoric and the kind of conversation that we hear tends to stay pretty cemented within a particular set of boundaries, mostly around what’s called the supply side of the argument. If we just build more housing, it will solve the problem, and yet that is not proving to be true.

I’m just going to quote from Ricardo Tranjan’s piece here. He says: “For example, proponents of the ‘supply side’ argument frequently point to low vacancy rates as an indication that supply is low, which drives rents higher.” This is the standard kind of economic argument. If we have more supply, then we’ll have less demand and prices will go down.

Earlier in the article, he points out “housing is not bananas.” It doesn’t get overripe. You don’t have to sell it off quickly. Housing is a different kind of…. Well, it’s turned into a commodity instead of a human right, so the value of that housing has continually gone up, and the expectation, as my colleague pointed out yesterday, that that increase in value is something owed to people who invest in housing is also pretty standard in the conversation.

I’ll go back to Ricardo Tranjan:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, the national vacancy rate went up from 2 percent to 3.2 percent — a 60 percent increase in the national vacancy rate. What happened to rents? They, too, went up 3.6 percent. In Toronto, vacancy rates more than doubled between October 2019, when they were at 1.5 percent, and October 2020, when they were at 3.4 percent. What happened to the average rent in the city? It rose by 4.7 percent.

“A Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. report explained that in hot markets like Toronto and Montreal” — Vancouver — “landlords chose to wait longer to fill vacancies or offered one-time rent discounts instead of lowering rents.”

Because we have, as my colleague spoke about, allowed for the commodification of housing, there is an incentive that exists for finding ways to extract the most amount of profit — the most amount of return on investment — in that housing.

Let me carry on from the article: “In 2021, a prominent housing expert, Steve Pomeroy, demonstrated that ‘be­tween 2006 and 2016, Canada added 1.636 million households and built 1.919 million new homes.’”

Let me say that again:

“‘…between 2006 and 2016, in the space of ten years, Canada added 1.636 million households and built 1.919 million new homes…. Almost 30,000 extra homes were constructed each year compared to the increase in the number of households,’ yet housing prices and rents went up at a breakneck speed during those years. Neither Pomeroy nor I,” Ricardo, “contend that Canada has enough housing or that additional supply would not be beneficial. The point is that supply alone will not solve the problem.”

[4:05 p.m.]

The bill in front of us proposes, essentially, a supply solution to the problem that we’re facing with the lack of affordable and attainable housing for people. And it dismisses the evidence that we have that this solution has continued not to work, that it’s not just quantity of housing that is the issue. It is quality of housing.

Because we have allowed for market to be the driving force in this, we can, I would say, expect to see what we’ve seen all along, which is that more housing does not equate to lower cost of housing.

One of the books that I’m reading right now is Astra Taylor’s Massey Lectures’ The Age of Insecurity. I think we’re hearing a lot in this House right now about people’s sense of insecurity. We’re hearing questions around worries about crime rates, worries about affordability, worries about people not feeling that sense of security.

Astra Taylor writes in her first chapter:

“Insecurity plays a unique role in the liberal capitalist order that dominates today — a role underscored by the fact that the modern word “insecurity” entered into common usage in the 17th century, just as our market-driven society was coming into being. Only by revisiting the history and the central role insecurity has played in capitalism since its genesis can we understand our present situation and see how more recent developments, particularly the decline of the welfare state over the past 50 years, have intensified and left no one, wealthy or working class, unscathed.”

Another very, I think, important and critical point is that the inequality that we see, the inequality that is actually a significant part of the lack of affordability that people are experiencing, harms everybody. It’s not that inequality only harms people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. It creates a growing sense of insecurity for everybody, with the exception, perhaps, of the 72 centimillionaires and six billionaires who reside in Vancouver right now, making it the 41st most wealth-laden city that we have in the world.

We have Vancouver as a real example of the massive amount of wealth that can pour into a region, yet as that ceiling of wealth gets higher and higher and higher, we don’t see the floor rise with it. The floor gets lower and lower and lower, and we get greater inequality and greater insecurity.

In the debate we’ve been listening to about Bill 44 — with the exception, largely, of my colleague yesterday — we’re not talking about the root of the problem that is getting us to this place where too many people in British Columbia can’t afford housing, are feeling very insecure economically, are feeling insecure in their communities.

The reality is that as a result of policy decisions that have been made for decades in this country and in this province, we have the conditions where more and more people are falling deeper and deeper into poverty. One of the driving forces of that is the lack of housing that they can afford.

[4:10 p.m.]

Do I think that Bill 44 is going to solve that? I don’t think it will. I think it will achieve some of the outcomes that have been identified. But I think until we really contextualize this problem into the wider socioeconomic context in conversation that we need to be having, we are going to see, as we’ve seen since 1911 and 1950 and 1969 and 1980, the conversation around the housing crisis in Canada and B.C. carry on much as it always has, because we are not willing to look at the root causes of what has gotten us here and what is driving this perpetual problem that we face.

With that, I will thank you for the opportunity to participate in the debate.

G. Kyllo: Well, it gives me a great amount of pride to stand in the House today to speak on behalf of my hard-working men and women, the constituents of Shuswap.

In response to Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023, it is interesting that in three terms for the current government, their signature, Hail Mary, election platform promise to British Columbians was to improve housing affordability.

Here we are, seven years in. I think we’ve seen at least six or seven, maybe even more, housing bills as they continue to funnel their way through. What we’ve seen is the single largest increase in housing prices, the most unaffordable housing prices in North America.

Even media are reporting out that this piece of legislation was a rush job. It’s incomplete; there has been a lack of consultation. We have a government that is failing. They have failed consistently to meet one of their signature election platforms in 2017: to address housing affordability. As they continue to tinker around the edges and muddle their way through, it’s clear that they have no clear plan. There’s no clear direction.

It’s not a plan that was put on the table in 2017, where they’re slowly executing on that plan. This has been a hodgepodge of different pieces of legislation, different attempts to try and monkey around with the numbers and try and make it look like they’re achieving progress.

I’ll remind viewers at home that it was the NDP that committed to building 114,000 homes over ten years. The result? A failing grade — barely over 16,000 homes in seven years of a ten-year plan, 16,000 of their 114,000 construction target goal.

What has this government done to try and monkey around the edges to try and make people somehow believe that they’re making progress? Well, they’ve put in a speculation tax and tried to come up with some numbers. We haven’t seen the data or how they came up with those numbers, but they decided that the spec tax actually freed up some rental properties: “So we’ll count those numbers towards our goal.”

We have seen, in this legislative session, additional changes, largely around Airbnb. I’m quite certain that this government again will try and come up with some number, some estimation, on the number of potential units that might be made available for housing, and they’ll count that towards their target.

The reason we’re here today is to talk about this bill, which I think is one of, potentially, five different pieces of legislation that address housing in some form.

Government’s talking now about building 130,000 homes over the next ten years. Well, they built 16,000 over seven, which is not even 20 percent of their initial target. Seven years in, you’d think they’d be at least 60 or 70 percent of the way to achieving their target. No, it’s a failing grade. Nobody is believing this government. They keep coming out with announcements, new legislation: “Look over here, folks. Oh, we’re doing this over here.” But they are failing British Columbians in a big, big way.

Housing is, definitely, top of mind for every British Columbian. We need to ensure that we’re making the correct decisions for those that are living here in British Columbia now and for those who are coming to our province.

[4:15 p.m.]

Everyone in this chamber knows that we need to build more housing. There is a severe housing shortage. We only have to look to the number of homeless in our communities, the number of young kids that don’t have the opportunity to find alternative housing and are still living in parents’ basements or living with other friends.

There is a great need for more housing, and it wasn’t until three years into the term of this current government that they identified that supply was even part of the conversation. Their former leader, Premier John Horgan, said that supply wasn’t an issue, that they were going to somehow legislate their way out of the housing problem. We know that that was a gross miscalculation, a gross error. So here we are.

The province needs a real plan. It needs a leader that’s going to have a vision, show leadership and provide hope for young British Columbians. What did we see this government do with respect to housing supply? We saw this government charge ahead with buying up hotels and motels, warehousing individuals with severe mental health and addiction challenges, destroying neighbourhoods and taking product out of the tourism sector.

You could say that that actually helped to increase and push individuals into Airbnb. It was this government that took away from hotel and motel stock that otherwise would be made available for the tourism sector in our communities. When I had responsibility for B.C.’s jobs plan, tourism was one of the eight main focuses of the previous government in meeting the job plan numbers. What has this government done? There’s no sense of a jobs plan; there’s no sense of hope.

What we have seen — it’s certainly part of this legislation — is an override of municipal authority. The NDP seems to always know best: “Don’t do as we say; do as we do. Let’s blame it on the federal government. Let’s blame it on municipalities.” Suddenly, this blanket zoning that the government is providing and putting forward for communities over 5,000 people is going to have disastrous effects.

Mayors from across B.C. are calling this out as a sham­bles of legislation — inadequate consultation; inadequate thought into how municipalities are going to fund the necessary upgrades to important services, whether it be water, sewer or hydro; increasing densification of our neighbourhoods without forethought and without the opportunity of municipalities to make their own choices and make their own determination on what is best for their own communities. That’s all thrown out the window.

It’s no wonder that we are seeing mayors stand up and express grave concerns over the direction that this government has taken. I was on municipal council in Sicamous, only for a short amount of time, but it wasn’t the municipality’s responsibility to build affordable housing. Yes, they certainly were very supportive of different housing groups and associations that provided housing in communities, but it was largely a federal and provincial responsibility.

This government changed that, tried to lure municipalities into the program of building housing, $100,000-a-door incentives where communities were encouraged to vend in land, waive DCC charges, and waive future taxes for municipal services. Municipalities spent countless hours in time working on trying to meet the need and respond to the failure of this government, which has tried to downshift responsibility onto municipalities.

This is just the start. Well, it’s certainly not the only thing that they’ve done. Just look at the employer health tax. It was the single largest downloading of costs onto the backs of municipalities in the history of this province: a 2 percent employer health tax.

[4:20 p.m.]

In most municipalities, 85 to 87 percent of their ex­penditure is as wages and benefits. This government placed a 2 percent wage cost directly on the backs of those municipalities and did not backstop with any additional funding. What did the municipalities have to do? They had to raise taxes in order to make up for that shortfall.

Government talks about how they eliminated MSP. No, it was a big tax shift. A big chunk of that tax shift went onto the backs of municipalities, who in turn just put it back onto the residential and commercial taxpayers in their communities. There’s no end to the effort of this government, that surely believes that they know best.

It was interesting. This does tie directly to this bill with respect to what I see as a government that is starting to — I would say “inflict” is probably the correct word — put pressure on municipalities without looking at efforts that they can take internally. This has to do with a municipality that’s in my community, Salmon Arm.

There’s a beautiful waterfront park, Salmon Arm waterfront park, a big marina that was put in as part of the Expo legacy project. They’ve been waiting for a lease renewal. They need the lease renewal to be completed so that they’ll have a valid lease so they can move forward with some projects they want to do in Salmon Arm. They’ve been waiting three years — three years — for a lease renewal.

I spoke to a senior bureaucrat within the Ministry of Forests who confirmed to me that the administrative time to process a lease renewal is eight hours — eight hours administration time. And here we sit. Salmon Arm is waiting three years, and their last update: “Well, it’s going to probably be another year.”

When this government seems to think that municipalities are not doing everything in their power to move things along, I’ll tell you what. This government is failing in a big, big way on many, many files. How is it possible that a lease renewal that takes eight hours of admin time…? Somehow, in this government’s mind, it’s justifiable for that community to have to wait for three years, plus a year and counting. There’s no certainty.

This is what we see from this government: big an­nouncements and scolding everybody else. But things that are within their own ability to actually move forward on, to address — absolute failure.

The city of Salmon Arm had three different individuals approach me last spring. This is directly related to housing starts. These three different houses in different areas of the community of Salmon Arm were within relatively close proximity to streams and creeks, and as such, they had to complete a riparian area assessment at considerable expense.

They completed the riparian area assessment. They submitted all their information to the city of Salmon Arm. Salmon Arm is ready to issue a building permit, but this government has decided that the creation and completion of a riparian area report, signed off by a qualified environmental professional, is not good enough.

Jeez, they couldn’t trust a qualified environmental professional that has actually stamped and has the liability assurance to ensure that that report is complete and accurate. Oh no. This government has to have a whole separate set of bureaucracy to review these reports.

And guess what it said on the website when these individuals, when Salmon Arm submitted the riparian area assessment to the provincial government for review? They got a response back: “Eight-month delay. We’ve got a huge backlog. It’s going to be eight months before we can review these reports.”

This is at the exact same time that the Minister of Housing puts out his naughty list, pointing his finger at other municipalities for not moving forward quick enough with housing approvals. How is this possible?

It doesn’t end there. Whether you’re a renter, an owner, a senior or a young person, the price of housing is far higher than it has ever been. And right now far too many British Columbians are struggling under the weight of steadily increasing costs.

As a result of the NDP’s inability to build more housing, B.C. now has the worst affordability, the worst. Man, even if you’re in the top-five worst, that’d be something. But oh no. These guys have got to be the absolute worst in all of North America. Think about that for a second — of any place in North America, the absolute worst record on housing affordability.

[4:25 p.m.]

This all happened under the Premier’s watch. Rents now cost over $3,000 a month in Vancouver for a one-bedroom apartment. A Surrey townhouse used to cost $300,000 in 2012 — over $900,000.

Think about that young family, maybe just had the birth of their first child. They’re excited, and they want to look to finding a home. Well, a $950,000 home requires a $190,000 down payment. I appreciate that Canada Mortgage and Housing has some programs to reduce the amount of down payment. But on most lenders, a $950,000 home requires a $190,000 down payment.

Trying to, for a young family, save $190,000 is almost an impossible feat if they don’t have the opportunity to have some support from family members. But even with the $190,000 down payment, at current interest rates, you’d require a $205,000 family income just to qualify — $205,000 just to qualify for a $900,000 home.

Now, government will claim that Bill 44 is going to help build 130,000 homes over the next ten years. Well, I don’t buy it, and I know British Columbians don’t buy it. Their initial goal of 114,000 homes over ten years, an absolute failure. They’ve come nowhere close to achieving that goal, with only building 16,000 homes.

So how is anyone going to believe that this government, just because they make another announcement…? “Oh, trust us. We’re going to build 130,000 homes over the next ten years.” And you know what? CMHC, or Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., are suggesting that we need to have 600,000 homes built in B.C. over the next ten years or next seven years. This is a fraction of that.

When we look at some of the efforts this government has taken to even achieve the 16,000 homes they’re reporting to have constructed…. I know in one community in my riding, there was a housing project that was already in development. It was market-built housing. But guess what. Government came along and said: “Hey, here’s a carrot. How about we give you $100,000 a door. You provide a little bit of a reduced price on these homes. We’ll make them affordable housing now, and then government gets to add that to their total.”

They weren’t responsible for building those homes. Those buildings were already under construction. So even the 16,000 that this government is reporting on actually having built does not really tell the entire story.

B.C. also has, as I mentioned, the highest rents in Can­ada, the worst housing affordability in North America. Townhouse, up 33 percent to a million bucks. A single-family home in many communities, approaching $2 million. The NDP’s housing targets are set at only 75 percent of what other individuals are indicating is a real need in British Columbia, which is well below the federal CMHC guidelines in order to restore affordability.

Robert Berry of 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, chief economist for the B.C. Real Estate Association, notes that even if targets are met, they fall short of what’s needed for affordability.

Now, that’s even if government was to achieve their allotted goal of 114,000 units, but they’re only at 16,000. Even after these changes, there are so many things that are holding up housing that the NDP has refused to address. Metro Vancouver is planning to triple development cost charges on new housing, adding up to an additional $25,000 in cost.

[4:30 p.m.]

The backlogs, delays and regulations at the residential tenancy branch make it next to impossible for mom-and-pop landlords to rent out their basement suites or laneway homes.

I’ve got an example of a couple living in North Cowichan. They had an opportunity to go away for the winter. They signed a six-month lease with another couple that moved into their home with their furniture.

Well, the first two weeks, rent cheques…. They moved in the middle of October. That cheque cleared. November’s bounced. December’s — they were going to get all caught up. December’s bounced. Now they’re into the Christmas season, trying to get a hold of the residential tenancy branch to actually start the process. Good luck. Nothing really happens for about two weeks over the Christmas period.

Now they’re into January. They finally make the applications, and of course, these individuals who live in their house haven’t paid for November, haven’t paid rent in December, haven’t paid in January. Now we’re getting into February — still don’t have a hearing with the residential tenancy branch. They get into early March. They’re literally within days of getting the hearing so they can actually deal with these individuals and get them out of their home, and guess what this government does. The Premier John Horgan eviction ban. You can’t move anybody out of a house due to COVID.

Here you have people that are thumbing their nose at a contractual agreement that they have signed with the owners of the home, refusing to pay the rent that they agreed to pay.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

So this couple comes back to Canada because of the concerns around COVID, but they can’t move into their own house. They can’t move into their own home, because there’s an eviction ban. So they had to, out of pocket, go and rent another place for them to stay and reside in. It took them until July of 2020 before the residential tenancy branch finally got around to giving them the authority to move these people out of their home. They’re owed $18,000 in back rent. The house was a shambles.

That’s how this government respects landlords or property owners. How is it that the right of the tenant supersedes the right of the property owner when they’re knowingly breaking a contractual agreement? It almost sounds communistic to think that somebody can refuse to pay the owner of the property for the rent that’s due, and that can drag on for nearly eight months.

It’s no wonder people are concerned. I’ve talked to many of my constituents in the north Shuswap that have refused to continue to rent out their properties.

Deputy Speaker: If the member might be able to help the Chair understand the connection to Bill 44, the Housing Statutes Act, I’d appreciate it.

G. Kyllo: Absolutely, hon. Chair. I appreciate your advice.

Bill 44 is speaking specifically about trying to increase the housing supply, and I would suggest, because I have direct examples in the Shuswap where there are many property owners….

If they felt they had the support of the residential tenancy branch and the laws of this province were such to ensure that folks that don’t pay their bills or damage their property, that there’s a convenient and a precise method in addressing those issues, those folks would actually rent their homes, and that would increase the housing stock that’s available for rent in British Columbia.

Many of these individuals have had real challenges with getting action, and a prime example is the one I just gave. Eight months. What happened over those eight months? That couple that was living in their house, not paying their bills, not paying rent, they destroyed the home, and the landlords or the owners of the home moved back into their home with significant costs of trying to repair the damage that was done by these tenants that were thumbing their nose at the property owners for eight months.

We wonder why people are moving to Airbnb and maybe not actually putting their homes up for rent. What are the policies of this government that is, in large part, leading the way?

[4:35 p.m.]

Now, the development approval process, or the review process, also cites backlog caused by constant referrals to the Ministry of Transportation for developments within 800 metres of a provincial road. I know there’s really good, hard-working folks at the Ministry of Transportation.

It is not just development applications within 800 metres of a provincial highway that require a review from the Ministry of Transportation. Anything outside of the municipality, all of your rural communities, anything within your regional districts: Columbia Shuswap regional district, regional district of North Okanagan, Thompson-Nicola regional district. Any of those rural areas, the sub­division approval process is undertaken by the Ministry of Transportation.

Again, a government ministry that this government has direct control over with funding the budgets. And we know there’s no concerns on the government side right now of growing the public service to the tune of over 130,000 public servant jobs over the last six years: to the tune of about $17.4 billion a year of additional wages and benefits. But the Ministry of Transportation, which has a role to play in housing development approvals, have they seen the necessary resources so that they can provide those reviews in a timely manner? Apparently not.

I have no quarrel with the folks in the Ministry of Transportation, probably one of the most forward-looking ministries in government. Those folks want to get stuff done. But they haven’t got the support necessary, otherwise we wouldn’t see these further backlogs and delays. There’s apparently a lack of authority for the ministry to create latecomer agreements, resulting in reluctance for developers to bear the high cost of being the first to develop, including in areas identified as important for meeting community objectives.

As we’ve seen with the village of Lytton, costly archaeology requirements and massive backlogs when the arc branch are holding up housing for years — years, not days. It’s been two years — two years — since the poor community of Lytton was razed to the ground. Two years. Not a single family home has been rebuilt. Two years. That’s incredibly concerning.

My community of the North Shuswap, the communities of Scotch Creek, Celista and Anglemont; the First Nations community…. My friend Chief Jamie Tomma and his council and his community — they lost 34 homes in the Bush Creek East fire when the back burn that was lit by B.C. Wildfire ravaged their community. There are 34 homes that are now no longer part of the housing supply, and they’re trying to find an opportunity for somebody to help rebuild those homes so they can move back to their community.

The community of Scotch Creek — 178 structures, all lost due to the wildfire. There are another 178 homes that are out of the housing supply.

Those community members are looking to government for some certainty. What’s going to be required around archaeological assessment? What’s going to be required around repair area and assessments? Many of these properties are fronting Shuswap Lake. What is going to be required around geotechnical assessments and reviews?

What role will the Ministry of Health have? They don’t have a municipal sewer system, like many municipalities. They have septic systems, and many of these homes were built 50 and 60 years ago. Well, in order to get approval for a building permit, the Ministry of Health will have to issue a permit. But I’ll tell you what. The regulations have changed in the last 50 years. Perk tests…. The opportunity and the challenges that those homeowners have — there’s more questions than answers right now.

As we’ve seen with Lytton…. I remember the former Premier John Horgan saying: “We’ve got your back.” We’re going to help you out. Well, two years later, where are those community members?

[4:40 p.m.]

There are community members that are dying outside of their community, through old age and everything else. They haven’t been able to return home. I’ll tell you what, when it comes to the North Shuswap, I’m going to be doing everything in my power to push hard to make sure that North Shuswap isn’t left in the same plight of Lytton, having to wait two years before government finally gets around to providing the necessary approvals so they can go and build housing.

With respect to the bill before us, this is far too little, far too late. It’s monkeying around the edges. No consultation. Thrown together. This bill is an admission of the NDP government’s failure, absolute failure, on the housing plan.

With that, I will take my seat.

P. Milobar: I’m glad to rise to Bill 44 and take my place in the debate. I will be our designated speaker. I don’t know that I’ll be taking the full time.

I certainly wanted to add a bit of perspective that I have to this bill, as I can understand exactly what a lot of mayors have been expressing about this particular bill. I was the mayor of Kamloops for almost a decade, nine years — depending on how you look at the months, the longest-serving mayor in Kamloops history — so I have a little bit of history on these files.

In fact, our official community plan that’s the most recent one was started back in 2014 while I was still the mayor. It was finished off as I was leaving office and the new mayor took over. And it’s, in fact, that document from 2018 that the city of Kamloops is working on. These official community plans take a long, long time to come together and update. That was not our first official community plan; it’s called KAMPLAN. They date way back.

When you read Bill 44, there is a lot of concern as to how this will actually work. I can appreciate what the member from Victoria had said earlier about engaging in those planning sessions. But to try to equate people that have that great community spirit of engaging on all those planning-type meetings…. Every community has them. They’re necessary and vital for a community to have.

To think that an official community plan gets the granular local input of smaller microsets of a neighbourhood…. It just simply doesn’t happen. You reach out to the building community. You reach out to other organizations. It’s a very lengthy process, but it’s a lot of high-level discussion around a broader area of a commercial core or a town centre or a city centre. All communities use slightly different language. Then, as you get into specifics….

That’s the broad stroke of: what do you want to see there? You want to strive for ground-floor retail with residential above, and it’s meant to be a transit-dependent community area. Then, as you move out from there, you have these broad ideals of what you would like to see in terms of growth patterns and densification.

What gets overlaid into all of that, and this is what you’re hearing from the mayors, is how you’re going to service those with water and sewer, in particular, and then roads. It gets very, very complicated very fast, which is why it takes quite a bit of time.

To think that people that are very busy in their daily lives…. In this current economy that the NDP have overseen — with the spike of inflation, like we’ve seen, outpacing the national average ten of the last 15 months in British Columbia — there are more and more people needing to work a part-time second job just to stay in the house they’re in or the rent they’re in, whatever type of housing they’re in. To think that they’re going to engage over a three- or four-year period on a community planning exercise is just not realistic. It doesn’t happen. There are those that do, and that’s great. It’s needed.

But people start to pay more attention when they get the notice…. In Kamloops’s case, it’s about a 100-metre radius from where rezoning is going to happen. And they take interest what’s going on in their community, in their very close, localized community.

[4:45 p.m.]

All too often we frame it up as NIMBY if something gets opposed. What this bill is attempting to do is take away basically all public input and say: “It doesn’t really matter what you might think.” I can tell you from experience. I was also a councillor for six years before I was the mayor. Over that 15-year period, we had a lot of public hearings in Kamloops — a lot. The vast majority actually got approved.

We like to focus on what’s wrong with the public hearing process on the applications that don’t get approved, instead of looking and seeing the councils that actually do stand up and say: “No. We’ve heard your concerns, neighbourhood, but we’re still approving that.” Or: “We’ve heard your concerns, neighbourhood, and the developer, through that process, agrees to take one floor off.”

I can remember one public hearing where the developer agreed that they would put up a fence because the design of where their development was going to be would have led to cars continually driving with their headlights shining straight into this living room that previously wasn’t going to get those types of headlights.

It was a simple remedy, but that only happened because it was an engagement with council and the planning department, the developer and the neighbours to come to an understanding of what would work for sensitive infill. What’s ever happened to that word? Why is that such a bad thing all of a sudden: sensitive infill?

Now if we want to go to those high-density corridors that get identified in an official community plan, I can understand the concerns around NIMBYism. I really can. I can understand the concerns around social housing and NIMBYism. I called six public hearings on six different properties, city-owned land, on the same night. We could have just done a citywide public hearing for all six properties, diluted the process, so that no one would have probably shown up.

I insisted that we give each neighbourhood, those six properties, which were all going to be for social housing, that they be allowed to have their say…. We passed four of the six, all on the same night. We heard from the neighbourhoods on each different one. If we had done one-offs, it might have been a problem. We might not have had four of the six. We might have had zero of the six. The point being, and the logic behind it was that these were surplus city lands that we were going to make available for supportive housing through B.C. Housing and partner agencies so that building could happen.

Then we also identified what type of housing. Was it meant for Indigenous organizations? That now has housing on it. Was it meant for seniors? Was it meant for families? It was so that people in neighbourhoods would look at a zoning map and not just have a high-level idea what was planned for that property, so they couldn’t keep coming back and saying: “But I bought in a single-family neighbourhood. What’s that doing on the zoning map?”

They could see exactly what it was, and they could be informed. If they chose not to be informed, that’s on them at that point, as they work through their purchasing and looking at zoning maps and things of that nature.

But if you look at Bill 44, and then you start looking at official community plans, it’s very easy to slough this off and say: “Well, what’s the big deal about a fourplex?” Well, a fourplex per hectare works out to 142 units per hectare based on the math that this government is using on what you can put on a 280-square-metre lot.

The city of Kamloops, in our most densified urban cores, where we currently have a 25-story tower being built, as part of an almost two-square-block development, which will have even more towers coming in…. That zoning is for 125 units per hectare. The neighbourhoods where the bulk of these fourplexes would go in, in the community plan, is 75 units per hectare. Bill 44 would double that and with no public hearing.

Three, four doors down from my house, we just had an eightplex approved. Neighbours showed up. I didn’t go to the public hearing. Unlike the NDP members, I don’t believe I should be interfering in public hearings. I’ll let the elected officials at the local level deal with local elected issues and let neighbours speak on their own behalf and not try to cloud the issue and pretend I am or I am not an elected official at that particular point of the evening.

[4:50 p.m.]

I know the member from Port Moody doesn’t share my thoughts on that. I know the Environment Minister hasn’t shared the same beliefs on that. But that’s how I choose to conduct myself.

The neighbourhood admittedly didn’t want it for the most part. There were some in the neighbourhood that didn’t mind. It ultimately got approved. It’s an eightplex on around a 20,000-square-foot lot. Even that is less density than what is proposed in Bill 44. That’s the problem. I don’t think the average person in their communities right now across British Columbia, in cities that qualify for this, and there are about 85 of them, understand the true ramifications that this could have in terms of the right of fourplexes to just be built, or sixplexes.

They talk about being on transit. They haven’t totally defined it. I’m not clear if it has to be 15-minute service or not. If that’s the case, there are very few routes in Kamloops — and Kamloops is one of the leaders in transportation in the province, for smaller communities — that have 15-minute service. But if that’s the case, where exactly are all these units going to be built, then, to get to 130,000 across the province? It only works if they have to be near transit. Four hundred metres is what B.C. Transit uses as a walk to a stop that people will reasonably take, at the extreme.

But Bill 44 is silent on all of this. That’s part of the problem with all this housing legislation this government has brought in. If you look at the timelines, precious little of this will actually take effect right away. Most of it, we’re still waiting to see the regulation of what it actually will mean or not mean. Policy booklets still aren’t ready.

The Premier has talked about this concept for probably at least a year, if not longer. We’re only seeing the legislation now, but it won’t really be impacted until 2025. What a convenient timeline, post the next provincial election. But the government will have a nice shiny document to say that they’re creating 130,000 new housing units. Just like when they’re pressed to actually show how many true housing units have been created with the speculation tax, they can’t actually show us a number. They give you a vague number, and sometimes it changes.

As my colleague from Shuswap pointed out, when we came into this chamber in 2017, with the new government, they had their big housing plan, 114,000 government-built housing units in ten years. Here we are, seven years later, 16,000 units that aren’t even fully completed. Now, walking away from that plan by the government over the last two years, they don’t talk about the 30-point housing plan that they used to talk about non-stop when they first took government. Apparently, those 30 points have disappeared, because they couldn’t action them.

So it’s time for a new marketing document, or two, or three. We’ll delay them all until right up to the next election. We’ll paint landlords as evil and bad, and I wonder why landlords don’t want to keep going in the market. We’ll paint developers as speculators and profiteers. I wonder why they might start looking for their investment dollars to go to other jurisdictions.

We’ll paint cities as being the problem on delays and fees and charges, but we won’t address our own shortcomings and permitting and provincial fees that go against it, and backlogs on a wide range of permits. Instead, we’ll bring forward Bill 44 and say to the cities: “Well, you haven’t really done enough, so we’re just going to tell everyone that cities are out of the equation.”

[4:55 p.m.]

The servicing costs cannot be underestimated. If you look at a zone in a city, when you start thinking of how complicated a water and sewer system is…. In Kamloops’s case — that’s the city I’ll keep referring to, because it’s obviously the one I have the most knowledge around — we have more vertical lift in our water treatment plant than San Francisco.

It’s the most complicated water pumping plant for a city in North America. It’s all run out of one plant through a series of lift stations to reservoirs that get up on the hills and come back down, because as anyone knows, Kamloops is a very hilly city. It’s a beautiful valley, but it’s a narrow valley compared to, say, a Kelowna valley or a Vernon valley. That’s the complexity of the water servicing, just to make sure….

The number one thing Kamloops tries to ensure is that you actually have pressure for fire service at the hydrants. That’s the concern of the engineering. We’ve had water restrictions forever in Kamloops in the summer to try to manage that, to try to manage the irrigation and to try to make sure there’s always pressure there in these various neighborhoods.

We have a whole area, Barnhartvale, where we’re still trying to wrap our heads around whether we have capacity for any further development on those small acreages, subdivision. We’re not 100 percent sure what we have for water capacity in that area, a long-standing, historical neighbourhood. It gets really complicated.

Of course, if we’re pumping all that water uphill, every time you run your tap, every time you run your shower and every time you flush your toilet, the water’s coming the other way until it hits the valley floor, and then you’ve got to pressurize your lines again and push the sewage lines out to the sewage plant. So it gets very, very complicated.

When the city embarks on their OCP plan and actually has growth areas identified but it’s still actually providing transit into those areas, will that qualify? Will those lots all qualify and automatically be fourplexes? When you read this, they would.

If it’s a single-family residential neighbourhood right now that’s only meant to have a few more units added on, where is the mechanism in this bill that allows the city to say: “We’re done. We were only planning on having 100 more housing units into this neighbourhood. We’ve approved several fourplexes. We can’t handle any more”? Sorry, fourplex No. 26. You don’t get to build, because the cost to upsize everything for four more units would be astronomical?

That’s a very real engineering problem cities face, which is why all of their OCPs have designated growth areas, have densification areas and have densification ratios that are actually not as high as these fourplexes would be.

We can brush off the worry about parking all we want, if you’re government, I guess, but it’s a very real consideration, with or without transit into those areas. The number one thing municipal councils will tell you is that if there’s a basement suite application, people are concerned about parking — noise and parking. Parking is usually more than noise.

What happens to cul-de-sacs? Cul-de-sacs are notoriously bad for garbage pickup and snow removal, snow clearing and parking. They’re great for kids to ride their bikes around and play street hockey and basketball in, and they create a great community feel when neighbours all get along. How does this work when you have narrow street frontages to begin with, and now you have the ability to put a fourplex on there because it’s zoned RS1?

[5:00 p.m.]

Four different housing units, four different people. Let’s just say there’s only one car per. That’s still four cars, not counting visitors, family gatherings, anything of that nature.

When communities, when neighbours get together and raise these as concerns at a public hearing, it’s not NIMBY. It’s reality. And where it makes sense, the vast majority of the time, councils thank the public for their presentations, and usually the application gets approved, or there’s a slight adjustment to it.

Now, I can’t explain why a daycare got turned down for nine parking spaces. That can happen. I understand it got overturned, and it actually got approved. That’s the process we have. Bill 44 is going to remove those processes. Bill 44 is going to say to everybody: “It doesn’t really matter that you’re living in the biggest investment that 99 percent of the population of B.C. will ever make in their life. You have no right to have any opinion on anything that happens in your neighbourhood, moving forward.”

That’s what Bill 44 says: you have no right to try to get some small changes to how something is orientated on a lot so it doesn’t affect your life to the same degree.

We have had public hearings where we approve townhouse row housing — 44 units, I think — where five houses used to be. But we had to work with the developer at the public hearing stage to address the end wall windows so the rest of the neighbourhood, which it was going to abut up against, the rest of that block, didn’t feel like they suddenly had all these end windows staring down in their backyards.

It was a small, minor change. The developer agreed. The housing got built. Everyone was happy. That’s gone with this. Bill 44 removes that.

I know it’s Bill 46. We’ll get to that one. But you can’t just rely on development cost charges and community amenity charges to pick up all the slack and to try to get the mayors that are mad at Bill 44 back in line with Bill 46. It doesn’t solve the problem.

If Bill 44 is supposed to be flooding the market with all of these more affordable fourplexes, layering on the level of municipal charges that can go on it — it’s totally counterproductive.

We have a provincial government that, for the last seven years, has vacated partnering with municipalities in any meaningful way for infrastructure like water and sewer. Then they rushed out their billion-dollar year-end extravaganza. No shock that municipalities would suddenly be happy to be getting that money after being starved for six years.

But the programs around regular projects, around water and sewer across this province, were nonexistent over the last six years from this government. There simply wasn’t that partnership, nowhere near the levels they used to be.

When you look at Bill 44 and you see that it’s going to create 142-unit-per-hectare housing density in single-family residential areas…. It seems a little out of whack when you’re looking at cities that have 125 for what they consider to be their heavily densified areas.

The other thing that the government hasn’t shown to support Bill 44 and that they need for this, is: where is the backlog? Where is the rush of all these builders that are desperate to build on these lots?

[5:05 p.m.]

Have they all been getting turned down? Have they all been going to city councils and asking for houses to be torn down, to be made a fourplex, and being told: “No, you can’t do that”? I certainly haven’t been hearing that.

If it’s meant to go onto raw land and brand-new lots, well, that’s urban sprawl. There are not many brand-new lots being created in the centre of cities. They’re all on the outskirts — also much more expensive to service, much harder to get transit to.

When very real concerns around spiking the value of land as highest and best use, because this will now be law for anyone…. And you try to get an answer out of the government around how B.C. Assessment is going to deal with this. They just slough it off: “Trust us.”

Well, the public has been waiting for seven years for the government to deliver its so-called affordable housing in B.C. What we have are the highest rents in Canada, the highest housing costs in Canada and slower permitting processes from the provincial government than ever before, as it relates to housing. But we’re supposed to trust them that Bill 44 is going to solve all this.

It simply is another example of this government trying to point fingers at other levels of government and say that they have been the problem.

The case of the Vancouvers of the world, where they drag out a public process to approve a highrise with their view corridors and their community amenity agreement negotiations and everything else that goes into it with a Vancouver development, will not really be impacted by Bill 44 as it relates to fourplexes and sixplexes on single-family lots. That’s a completely different animal to tackle, and it’s kind of the outlier.

And oh, Vancouver actually has their own charter. So you don’t have to change everything. You could change the Vancouver Charter if you really think that’s the actual problem.

If you go through and look at development cost charges in most cities, if you go through and look at permitting application times in most cities, they’re not that far out of step of what should be reasonably expected. Cities only have so much engineering capacity to look at things in their building permit stage and approve them. There are only so many professional engineers and architects and land surveyors out there to try to get your project moving forward.

This government won’t take any responsibility for their delays. It’s interesting. I remember the Premier speaking — up in Prince George, I believe it was, last January — about how they were taking action on permitting delays as it relates to housing.

[The bells were rung.]

P. Milobar: I have a feeling this is the upstairs chamber.

Deputy Speaker: Division had been called in the Birch Room, but we can continue here.

P. Milobar: Okay. Thank you.

I can remember. I was at that conference. It seemed like a strange thing for the Premier to be talking about permitting delays to that crowd tied to housing, because it was a natural resource development conference.

They were all, actually, kind of hoping he was going to deal with the 21,000 backlog of natural resource permits that this government had. But instead he was highlighting how the new permitting process would speed up permits around housing, through government agencies.

[5:10 p.m.]

Well, it’s actually gotten worse. How do I know for sure it has gotten worse? Because the Premier doesn’t talk about that anymore. In the midst of a housing crisis, if this government actually had their act together and had their permitting together, I’m reasonably confident their 575 communications staff, or whatever it is, would be able to push out a bit of a press release to tout their success in speeding up permits. Instead, they won’t even tell us how many permits are backlogged, how long the backlog is, what the average processing time is. What is actually the reason there’s a delay?

We’re not even talking about the archaeological branch and their 255 days on average. That’s the average. That means for every application that gets through in, say, 100 days, there’s another one waiting a year. That’s all on this government. Bill 44 does nothing to address that. Bill 44 continues the seven-year tradition of this government pointing fingers at everyone but themselves.

It’s shocking, really, when you read through Bill 44, because again, the 130,000 number just seems like it was pulled out of the air, kind of like the 114,000 number was seven years ago. But the 130,000 units still fall way short of the 610,000 that CMHC says that we need in seven years.

Well, in the last seven years, this government has de­livered less than 16,000 actually livable housing units that people are physically in. We’ve got seven more years to go, and we need 610,000. I would say the odds aren’t very good that we’re going to make it, but I’m sure we can find someone else to blame than the government.

You look at the cost of housing, and the narrative that Bill 44 stitches is that this is going to solve the affordability crisis. That’s the government’s narrative. We’re going to pump more volume of houses into the market, and it will solve the affordability crisis.

The Premier has also been on the record as saying that you can’t tax your way to affordability, yet time and again, we’ve asked the government to block the $24,000 a unit that Metro Vancouver is trying to add on to their housing. The federal government has demanded they not do it. Did this provincial government demand that? No, no, no. We’ll bring in other legislation that not only enables that but enables higher local charges to happen.

After seven years of blaming local governments, local governments have been looking for things like, I don’t know, proper connections to highway interchanges. Now this government is going to let you do that on your own dime. I guess they kind of set that when they took over the Pattullo Bridge project and told Surrey that if they want proper on-ramps to the Pattullo Bridge, Surrey can pay for it themselves, on a provincial project. That was some fascinating Surrey representation by their seven MLAs on the government side.

Again, when you have single-family homes approaching $2 million in the Lower Mainland, when you have townhouses approaching $1 million in the Lower Mainland, when you have single-family homes approaching $1 million in the rest of the province, frankly, when you have townhomes approaching $750,000 in most of the province, this does precious little.

My son and his wife are in their mid-twenties. They’ve been looking to try to figure out how to buy a house for the last year. They’re not afraid of putting sweat equity into a house. They know they’re probably going to have to buy a traditional, small, starter, fixer-upper home. Good luck.

[5:15 p.m.]

This is a young couple. He’s fully employed, finishing off his schooling. She runs her own company. She was B.C. top 30 under 30 this year, has about 20 or 25 staff that work in her company, all self-made. They’re looking at the Kamloops housing market and saying: “I don’t know that we see ourselves in this housing market.” They weren’t thinking that way seven years ago when they were first starting to date. They sure think that way now.

If younger people with that kind of drive are feeling that way in a non-metro area of the province, it’s no wonder others in Vancouver and Victoria areas are feeling that way. I can totally understand why. I’m living it in my own household — not that they live with me, but you get the point.

The member from Chilliwack pointed it out before. Next generations aren’t going to ever see themselves as owning a home. Well, that’s a pretty defeatist way for a government to view housing. Bill 44 explains why they think that way. It’s not actually addressing the problem. It’s window dressing that won’t really be in full effect till 2025.

It is going to have municipalities…. Let’s look at Bill 44 and what it’s going to do to the municipal permitting side of the planning world over the next six months to a year to meet what’s legislated in this. It is going to grind planning departments to a halt, all to come up with the new plans and updates that this government is demanding happen in Bill 44. That’s what these timelines are like, and that’s what you’ve heard from other mayors around unrealistic timelines in this bill.

What’s going to happen to permitting processing over the next year in municipalities? It’s the same staff. Unlike the provincial government, which has 600 new employees designated for other budgetary priorities in its budget, and it still won’t tell us where any of them got hired to, municipalities don’t have 600 people just hired, sitting around waiting to find out what their assignment may or may not be.

There’s already a lack of urban planners out there. This government has now just told all 85 municipalities, “You must update a wide range of planning documents,” many of which took years and years and years to continually have the updates on, “to fit our specific legislation.” That probably won’t deliver any actual meaningful bump in housing, even if you had the first one approved in 2025 when this looks to be taking full effect. Consider a year-and-a-half construction timeline, so 2027 might be the first housing unit that you might actually see out of this.

It’s time for the government to be realistic with the public about their lack of action and what it’s actually doing to the housing market and, in fact, how this is going to actually make things worse. It will actually slow down the exact thing they’re saying is taking too long. Planning departments aren’t going to be able to do both. Councils won’t be able to do both.

Lots of councils…. I know it’s a crazy thought when we stand in this chamber in these, whatever it is, few thousand square feet and think that we know best for all things, and all things in our community. But locally elected officials, other than in Vancouver, for the most part, aren’t tied to any political party and have a wide range of political beliefs around those tables. Those people actually believe that they were elected by the locals to hear from the locals to try to do things that the locals would like to see done.

Bill 44 is being very prescriptive to them, tearing that away. “Oh, by the way, while we’re going to blame those mayors and councils for taking forever to approve things, we’re going to unilaterally go in, blow up their planning departments for the next year and a half, and demand a totally different set of work be done than pushing through permits and applications that are already sitting on their desks.”

[5:20 p.m.]

It’s really that basic; it’s really that simple. At a time when developers are desperate to try to time and get things out and going, because of interest rates and holding costs and charges, they’re going to be sitting there going: “Why can’t I get my permit?”

And the planning department is going to turn around and say: “Well, because I have to implement Bill 44.”

“But I want a permit for a fourplex.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I can’t give you that until I finish processing Bill 44.”

That’s what’s going to happen. I know it to be so because I have lived it for 15 years in a city operation. City staff deal face to face at the counter, have personal relationships, and work regularly with people that want these permits. The professionals, engineers and architects that work with the planning departments and the builders all work together in those communities, regularly. Bill 44, based on what they are requiring municipalities to do for updates, is going to create a massive strain on those relationships and a massive slowdown as it relates to permit processing.

I don’t see how that can possibly add to any speed in the backdrop of high interest rates and carrying charges, how it’s going to add any speed to any new housing being approved — especially in the communities where it’s already really, really slow — and how it’s not going to increase the cost. Homebuilders aren’t like this magnanimous entity that just says: “Oh, well, if we lose $10,000 a door, it’s not a big deal. We’ll just keep building. I’m sure the banks will keep lending us money.”

If a homebuilder can’t make a profit on a door when they sell it, they can’t build the next one. It’s really that simple. This government paints them as profiteers and speculators, but it’s really that simple. If their carrying costs keep going up as Bill 44 is being implemented in all these municipalities while they wait for their project to finally get through, because this will take precedence within those planning departments, how is that making housing more affordable? How’s that getting any extra housing onto the market?

I love seeing housing built in our community. My son-in-law is a carpenter. If no houses are being built, he’s not working. That kind of makes it hard for my granddaughter. So it’s pretty important.

It’s important to the broader economy that we keep things moving. Now more than ever, we can’t afford a slowdown. This government’s job creation, of private sector job creation…. Its record over the last five years is that for every one job they’ve created there, they’ve created five jobs in government. What do we have? We have legislation blaming other levels of government for a slowdown, when we have a government with a backlog of permits that they can’t get through, despite hiring five people for every one the private sector hires.

Now, they’ll say: “Where will you cut? Where will you cut? Where will you cut?” Well, how about if we just get the workflow going? How about if we get the efficiencies going? How about if the provincial government doesn’t have a MOTI backlog? How about if they don’t have a 255-day average processing time, after waiting months to even get approval to do the work through the archaeological process?

[5:25 p.m.]

We talk to developers all the time. They don’t take issue with the process; they take issue with the timeline. They agree they shouldn’t do that; they don’t mind doing the work. What they need is to know that their findings and their permits will be processed in a timely fashion by the provincial government so that they can get on with building the exact housing this government keeps purporting to want to see built.

Bill 44, again, is a marketing document. When you scratch the surface of it at all, it simply is not designed to deliver anywhere close to what this government is promising to deliver. If it did, there’d be more detail. Now, I know this government likes to present legislation sometimes, when the detail actually has been worked out and we get the order-in-council on things five minutes, ten minutes, 15 minutes after the bill has been passed, after repeatedly asking things like: what will it cost for an FOI fee?

Maybe that’s the case with this. Maybe the policy booklet has already been written and the Housing Minister will present it right after royal assent. We could only be so lucky. At least that would, maybe, speed things along as it relates to housing. It has been done before: FOI law. Maybe they’ll do it again.

Unfortunately, the track record is…. The FOI piece was the outlier for this government. That was the first time they ever acted with any speed. The amount of bills that we’re still waiting to see the regulation come forward on — and that was such a rush and such a priority by this government to deal with over the last seven years — is shocking.

Bill 44 adds to that list. It adds to that list of housing failures: housing legislation that’s brought in, half-thought-outand ham-fisted, that won’t stand up to scrutiny. So it’s all left to regulation.

When we get to committee stage, the answer will be repeated: “Well, we haven’t…. We’ll get to that in regulation.”

“Well, it’s a good question. I appreciate the question from the member, but we haven’t worked that out yet. We’ll work that out in regulation.”

“Well, I would like to thank the member for that, but we haven’t really got to that yet. We’ll deal with that in regulation.”

I fully expect, for clause after clause on 44, that that will be the answer. Of course, we’ll wait. The minister will take seven or eight minutes chatting with staff to turn around and tell us that he can’t tell us anything. Then we can invoke closure on Bill 44 and a few other bills.

[The bells were rung.]

Deputy Speaker: Division in the Birch Room, so not here. We can continue. Thank you.

P. Milobar: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yes, we can go through committee stage on Bill 44. We can be told repeatedly, after long waits, they can’t answer the question. It’s not figured out yet. We’ve got to wait for the policy booklet. We’ve got to have further discussion. We’ve got to have some regulation figured out. That, somehow, is speeding up the housing process, according to this government.

Then, as that drags on, and as debate on the next couple of housing bills drags on — we have, after today, nine days of debate left in this place — pretty much everything is going to have to get condensed down here because you can’t have a minister in two different chambers dealing with two different bills. Oh no, wait — this government actually did that. They did that on forestry when they invoked closure.

We were in second reading in this chamber, debating a substantive forestry change, and then we had committee debate going on down the hall on a forestry bill. So I guess it can be done, because this government has done it before. Then they’ll just invoke closure, and people won’t really have certainty or clarity around what’s going on with the housing bills. Bill 44 may or may not get caught up in that.

[5:30 p.m.]

It’s shocking because the Housing Minister is actually the House Leader. He’s actually in charge of figuring out the timing and bringing…. In fact, I think he’s in charge of the legislative review committee for government. You would have thought that if any minister would have been able to get this in early if it’s such a critical priority for legislation…. It would have been sooner.

As we’ve seen and as we’ve heard…. When we talk about things like this and the lack of affordable housing that has been delivered by this government over the years, it really ruffles some feathers over there.

I wasn’t really paying attention. I was up in the Fir Room yesterday when a staffer let me know about the debate going on in here. Apparently, I might actually be a resident of the most affordable NDP housing provided to date in the province of B.C. It sounds like I’m living rent-free in the mind of the member for Langford–Juan de Fuca.

The truth and the reality of what’s going on, despite his objections to what I had to say yesterday on some other issues, as he was debating Bill 44, bringing those forward…. The truth and the reality of the situation, as uncomfortable as it makes the government….

It makes them uncomfortable because they know it to be true. They know it, despite the speaking notes they get handed by the 575 communications staff. They know it, despite the rhetoric they might hear in question period.

It’s interesting. When they talk about student housing in question period…. It used to be 500 or something housing units, 700 housing units, that they used to say we built in 16 years. Now, recently, it’s 138. So it’s going downwards.

They don’t want to acknowledge that it’s actually 9,300. We can actually point them to each and every housing unit. It equals 9,300. They’ve been told, over the years, that’s the number. You would really hope, especially, ministers of the Crown would do a little digging to make sure of the accurate numbers they’re using in question period.

I mean, I was standing at an announcement on so-called brand-new student housing that his government uses in Kamloops. They permitted the university to buy it off-campus and call it new student housing, even though it is buildings that were built in 1987 and that have been housing students in there since 1987. Somehow the government calls that new student housing. I’m not sure how that all works out.

That’s the problem with the math in Bill 44. It purports to be able to add 130,000 housing units through a series of fourplexes.

Why I bring the densification per hectare into play and why it’s important to realize that is…. I think most people, in this day and age…. If you went to your neighbour and said, “Actually, we’re going to turn our lot into a duplex….” Most people would get that.

That’s actually what is envisioned in Kamloops’s KAMPLAN, if you look at the densification numbers that they’re talking about of about 75 units per hectare. That would take a single-family home, and it would turn it into a duplex or something with a carriage suite or things of that nature. What this bill will do is double that density.

Again, a one-off. Not a big deal. But if you’re in one of those microneighbourhoods, in terms of water and sewer capacities, and you’re the city looking at this…. There are a couple of hundred housing units that feed into that particular connection point and need the water from the other side of the connection point. You suddenly add a unit here, a fourplex here, a fourplex here, a fourplex here, a fourplex here. You go from 200 to 220 or 230. Those could become very expensive 20 or 30 housing units. If it’s already near capacity, you can’t afford to do it.

[5:35 p.m.]

If you can’t afford to have the draw of water — you will drop the pressure to your fire hydrants — you have to do significant upgrades. That’s what the mayors are saying. Who’s going to pay for it?

It’s too simplistic for the government to say: “Well, just charge some extra charges for it.” That could work if it’s in a targeted area. But when you make these city-wide…. A city might have four or five different areas that they’re suddenly all looking at trying to upgrade for 20 and 30 units in each of these areas. That’s a lot different than when they go through their official community plan with their engineering departments and they say: “Look, we can put so much housing in this area.”

The towers I talked about in Kamloops, which are going to add 550 housing units in about one square block of area, required a little bit of service upgrading to connect in, but they are in an area that was planned for that and can handle, without major change to everything else, heading out to our sewage plant and our water plant. This is two blocks away from the hospital tower, which was started while we were in government. So proper planning for cities is what they do.

Our Aberdeen subdivision in Kamloops…. When it was built in the late ’70s, the city worked with the developer. The developer had to put in a pipe. I can’t remember. I’ll get it wrong. It was probably a 12-inch pipe. The city said: “We’ll pay the difference and put in an 18-inch pipe.” The city paid the difference in pipe costs. It didn’t cost the de­veloper anymore to put the bigger pipe in the hole. They just didn’t want to have to pay for the bigger pipe.

That has created the ability for growth for the last, almost, 50 years in that area. It’s still slated to be one of our higher-growth areas, without substantive changes, literally, down the line. That’s what good planning can do. Between that subdivision and the sewage treatment plant and the river…. We’ve created a whole bunch of other development around the university that’s all tied in and densified with rapid transit, 15-minute service, and everything else.

Cities are doing their part. Are there some bad ex­amples out there? Absolutely. Are there some bad public hearings that go sideways? Absolutely. Are there a lot of really good public hearings that happen? Yes. Are they a little messy? It’s neighbours. Sometimes people think it’s whoever yells loudest gets their way. They get confronted with the fact….

Staff have very technical reports, and councils rely on them for their advice. I always say that we pay staff for their advice. They went to university for the specific thing they’re advising us on. But it’s advice. A mayor and council don’t have to take that advice. So just because an engineering report and a planning report say that this is best for the idea….

Why does Bill 44 take away the ability for a neighbourhood to say: “No, that’s not our vision for our neighbourhood”? I recognize it’s a fine balance. I really do because I’ve lived it. But Bill 44 is going well outside the bounds of a fine balance.

Bill 44 is creating an environment…. Instead of really targeting and honing in on those areas that cities have already identified as their high-growth areas…. Instead of really accelerating processes in those areas, it’s saying: “Let’s concentrate on infill with fourplexes and create a bunch of angst in communities all over the place and uncertainty for mayors and council, uncertainty for engineering departments.”

They are going to have to start rapidly deciding whether or not they have to start accelerating water and sewer projects, which maybe were 15 years on the horizon, as part of a regular asset management plan.

Cities have been working, for the last 20 years, on trying to come up with asset management plans to tie in with their official community plans and to actually proactively address their water and sewer and road needs at end of life, to maximize their life so they’re not replacing them ahead of time or unnecessarily.

[5:40 p.m.]

That all gets blown out of the water with Bill 44. Same with the life cycles on their recreation facilities and parks and playgrounds. All of that gets wiped out with Bill 44, all that work.

Now Bill 44 is telling the planning department you’ve got to update all of that, and at the same time, you think you can still process building permits like you normally do? When you don’t, we’re going to blame you, because that’s what this government does.

Bill 44 has a lot of flaws. I look forward to committee stage, and maybe I’ll keep a running tally. We don’t want to make it a drinking game, because I don’t think anyone could drink that much at the times the minister turns around and says: “I can’t answer that. That’s left for regulation.”

That’s what’s going to happen with Bill 44. We’re going to have thoughtful, real questions that have real impact to people in their daily lives and their daily communities, and this government won’t be able to answer them, yet they insist that this is the urgency they’re bringing to the housing file.

It’s something that’s going to gum up the works and planning departments in 85 municipalities around this province. It’s going to slow down regular building permits. It’s going to create turmoil in small neighbourhoods. They can’t provide any timelines except for sometime in December of 2025.

If that’s what this government considers urgent towards housing, it explains why in seven years, we still don’t even have 16,000 finished housing units out of a ten-year plan that was supposed to deliver 114,000.

I thank you for the time, and I look forward to committee stage.

Deputy Speaker: Seeing no further speakers, the question is second reading, Bill 44, Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023.

Division has been called.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

[5:45 p.m. - 5:50 p.m.]

Mr. Speaker: Members, the question is second reading of Bill 44, Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023.

[5:55 p.m.]

Second reading of Bill 44 approved on the following division:

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move the bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 44, Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023, read a second time and ordered to proceed to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Mr. Speaker: Hon. Members, I have been advised that the Lieutenant-Governor is in the precinct. Please remain in your seats.

Her Honour the Lieutenant-Governor requested to attend the House, was admitted to the chamber and took her seat on the throne.

[6:00 p.m.]

Royal Assent to Bills

Clerk of the Legislative Assembly:

Motor Vehicle Amendment Act (No. 2), 2023

Environmental Management Amendment Act, 2023

Emergency and Disaster Management Act

Pension Benefits Standards Amendment Act, 2023

Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act

Crime Victim Assistance Amendment Act, 2023

International Credentials Recognition Act

School Amendment Act, 2023

In His Majesty’s name, Her Honour the Lieutenant-Governor doth assent to these acts.

Hon. J. Austin (Lieutenant-Governor): Thank you.

ÍY SȻÁĆEL NE SĆÁLEĆE.

Good afternoon, everyone. As always, it’s an absolute delight to be here to see all of you.

I wanted just to reflect today that it is Indigenous Veterans Day. It’s an important day for us all to reflect on the contributions of the many Indigenous veterans that have loyally served our country in many conflicts over many, many years and have never really received, in the past, the recognition and the thanks that they are due.

I feel very proud that our country is now making huge efforts, I think, to recognize their contributions and to cele­brate, again, their many contributions to Canadian society, to peace and to upholding our democracy.

I thank you again for all of your outstanding work, and I look forward to opportunities over the next number of months to welcome many of you to Government House, to share some time together, to have some great conversations and to celebrate the work that all of you do.

Thank you so much, and I’ll see you again soon.

Her Honour the Lieutenant-Governor retired from the chamber.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Hon. R. Kahlon: In this chamber, I call second reading of Bill 46, Housing Statutes (Development Financing) Amendment Act.

In the Douglas Fir Committee Room, I call Committee of the Whole, Bill 41, Forests Statutes Amendment Act.

In the third House, Committee Room C, I call Committee of the Whole, Bill 39, Zero-Emission Vehicles Amendment Act.

[6:05 p.m.]

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 46 — HOUSING STATUTES
(DEVELOPMENT FINANCING)
AMENDMENT ACT, 2023

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move that the bill now be read a second time.

Our government has proposed changes that will provide cost certainty and transparency to the development in­dustry and help local governments to fund the infrastructure and community amenities that are needed as we increase the supply of homes.

These changes support the actions we are taking to create more homes within the reach for people and address the housing crisis to require proactive zoning in B.C.

We know that good planning and growth benefits our communities and our economy. Both local governments and the development industry recognize that growth creates demand for new local infrastructure and amenities. Development finance tools can be used to ensure that these costs are more equitably shared between existing taxpayers and new development.

We also know that the success of a new zoning framework depends on local governments providing necessary infrastructure and services to support new housing supply. We also heard from the developers about the need to ensure that the costs of developments are known upfront and the need for transparency and predictability in the process.

With this in mind, let’s get into some of the specific items within these changes.

Development cost charges, known as development cost levies in Vancouver, can be used to help pay for specific core infrastructure needed for basic health safety, such as water, sewer, drainage and roads. These changes will expand the list of infrastructure to include police facilities, fire protection facilities and solid waste facilities. They will also allow municipalities to collect DCCs to pay their portion of provincial highway projects, like interchanges, that support growth in the communities.

These costs will continue to be shared between existing taxpayers and future development. We heard from devel­opers and local governments that the DCC framework is a robust and transparent tool.

While basic health and safety infrastructure is important, we also need to create livable communities. Local governments in high-growth parts of the province often negotiate with developers for the kind of amenities to help create livable communities as part of rezonings. As we move away from site-by-site rezonings that add time, uncertainty and cost, we need to make sure that local governments can still do this important work.

To help address this issue, the legislation proposes a new tool called amenity cost charges that will let local governments impose charges on new developments to assist in paying for community amenities without the need to rely on rezonings. This tool is part of the long-term upfront planning process to support greater housing supply.

The approach also creates certainty and transparency for the development community with flexibility to ensure that local community amenities’ needs can be met.

To impose an amenity cost charge, local governments will need to identify where more housing supply is needed and plan for development to meet that need, identify what amenities are needed to support that growth, determine the charge amount following rules set out in the legislation and pass a bylaw.

We heard from the development industry about the im­portance of making sure that costs do not deter development. This is why this legislation includes rules to ensure public accountability; prevent any double-charging and double-dipping, like using more than one tool to fund the same amenity project; protect in-progress projects; and keep charges reasonable.

Local governments will need to do an economic analysis to ensure development remains viable. The legislation also gives the province the authority to intervene to limit costs if needed. The rules also ensure the community has input into amenities that will be supporting new homes being built.

We know affordable housing is crucial to address the housing crisis and that it’s important to ensure that affordable housing is supported and viable. This is why the legislation lets local governments waive or reduce charges for affordable rental housing. It also allows the province to exempt affordable housing to ensure the right types of housing are being built in communities.

If passed, local governments can begin planning to use these new tools right away.

[6:10 p.m.]

As announced at the UBCM Convention this September, we will be providing $51 million in direct funding to support local governments in implementing new requirements using new tools.

The changes to development finance are part of a larger package of significant changes being made to our land use planning system to address the housing crisis while creating livable communities.

With that, I welcome any questions and look forward to hearing from colleagues across the way.

K. Kirkpatrick: I’m pleased to rise in the House today to speak to the bill before us, the Housing Statutes (Development Financing) Amendment Act, Bill 46. I’m beginning to think that the Minister of Housing must really like working with me. I believe this is probably — I think I’ve lost count now — fifth or sixth housing legislation in the past two weeks.

I’ll pause while the bells go.

A good comedian is always thrown off by timing, and that was right in the middle of my best joke. I’ll start again.

My first comment on this piece of legislation really is that I don’t understand why we’ve had three bills addressing amendments to the same statute in the last few days. Why didn’t this all form one act which was making a larger amendment? As we move forward and as we go into committee stage, there are portions of Bill 44, Bill 46 and then today we had Bill 47 come in, which is going to be now the third amendment to the Housing Statute Act. It’s going to be very complicated because all of these things are connected. There is some confusion with this.

I will note the minister himself, yesterday, was confused when he was introducing the new bill into the House. I note also that media, when they were reporting out on these bills yesterday, were referring to the wrong bill numbers. I think there’s a lot of complexity within these bills. The way that it’s been rolled out is going to make it even more complicated to understand how all of these pieces fit together.

So 44 dealt with the zoning and the upzoning. We talked about that yesterday. And 46, the bill before us today, deals with development cost charges. It enacts the amenity cost charges, and it does give us a bit of a roadmap in terms of how this government intends to pay for the upzoning and some of the amenities within the community that are going to need to be increased and supported. This is proposing tools for communities to be able to extract those costs and be able to apply them to amenities in their own community.

The minister also, I think…. I was speaking to a couple of CAOs today in a couple of different areas, and the ministry is really keeping council CAOs and local planners and, probably, lawyers very busy across British Columbia now as they’re trying to figure out what’s going on.

If I was cynical — which, of course, you know I am not — I might think that this is being broken into three bills to make it look like we have more legislation coming for housing than we really do, as opposed to this having been in one bill, which would have been, I think, the most reasonable way to have been promoting it.

Perhaps it’s because it’s taken this NDP government seven years with less than acceptable results, as we know, on housing. There’s suddenly this flurry of legislation or an appearance of a flurry of legislation.

[6:15 p.m.]

Much of what we have seen on housing, including the short-term rentals…. There’s been a real lack of consultation with community. This is all coming through very, very quickly and, in some ways, a bit half-baked, because a lot of the information that is really necessary for people in communities to understand the impact of this legislation is being pushed into regulation.

It’s being pushed down the road to after the legislation comes into force, and then they’re going to tell us what it’s actually all about and how it’s actually going to work. That’s very difficult for municipalities and developers and individuals wanting to build housing. It’s very difficult for them to manage with that uncertainty.

Again, without consultation…. When this kind of legislation is brought in, and we’ve got less than a year before the next provincial election…. Clearly, there is not going to be an opportunity for the public, for municipalities to see if the proposed or promised outcomes of this legislation are actually going to be real and if there are going to be measurable results.

So why now, and why not a year ago, two years ago, three years ago? I’m not sure what we were waiting for in terms of coming in and talking about the things we need to do in British Columbia to address the housing crisis.

We have a number of questions about this legislation, and we’ll look forward again to committee and the ability to ask those questions. I will say that there’s good and bad in this piece of legislation. The good that I recognize, and I think we all recognize, is that it’s very difficult for developers when they’re having to negotiate in different communities and they’re not finding out until down the road with zoning what their costs are actually going to be.

Coming up with consistency, transparency, some certainty, so that when development projects are being looked at, it is much easier for developers to understand what those costs are going to be up front and to do a more accurate feasibility analysis. Do they want to move forward? That’s good. We need more consistency.

But it has also taken away some of the tools that some communities use through CACs, for example, where some communities actually put some of those funds directly into an affordable housing fund that developers can draw on.

There have been some things lost along the way, and we’re already hearing some concerns from municipalities on that. We’re hoping that that’s something we can ask questions about. Perhaps it has already been anticipated by government in regulation but, of course, we don’t know that as we’re looking through this document.

We know housing affordability is still front of mind for all British Columbians, and it’s our job here in the House to ensure that we do everything we can to lower the costs of creating housing, because the more it costs to build something…. It doesn’t matter if it’s a house or if it’s a car or whatever it is. The more it costs to build that thing, the more the end user is going to be paying. You’re either buying the car off the lot in what you’re paying or you’re renting something or you’re purchasing something.

What B.C. United has really been looking at and focusing on is: how do we make it easier to get shovels in the ground? How do we make it less expensive to get shovels in the ground? There are some real concerns that, looking at what we’ve got before us today in this legislation, are going to contribute to escalating costs and are not going in the right direction.

We have to ensure that nobody here in British Columbia has to choose between affording groceries or gas or paying their rent or mortgage. We know that with rents and mortgages, we’re the most expensive jurisdiction in Canada. Something’s not going the right way. These policies, and whatever we’ve been doing up to this point, are not working. Things are getting more and more expensive. This government has some tools that it can use in order to help manage this province and make things more affordable. This, to me, just looks like it’s one more way to extract fees out of housing.

Seven years, two elections. Repeatedly failed to provide more housing and make life more affordable for British Columbians, and this is only going to continue to worsen.

[6:20 p.m.]

What this bill really does…. It’s introducing the most massive housing tax increase in the history of this prov­ince. That is what it is doing. Is that how we’re going to make housing more affordable? It is not.

As official opposition, it’s our responsibility to critique legislation and to hold this government to account, especially on issues as important as housing. It has got to be one of the most important issues that we are dealing with, addressing, in British Columbia now.

Not having appropriate housing contributes to all of the other major issues that we are dealing with in this province here: mental health, addictions, homelessness. Much of that starts with the ability for people to have a safe and affordable place to live. So far in British Columbia, this government has failed to be able to provide that to people.

The bill codifies a new taxation power on housing projects at the local level: amenity cost charges, which is something new. So we don’t have our CACs, and there isn’t that opportunity, at the rezoning process, for the negotiation with developers to determine benefits to the community that are unique to the community.

Again, we certainly support the fact that we need to ensure that developers understand up front what their costs are going to be. So that’s positive, but how this is being done is clunky.

It expands the scope of taxes on new homes. This is going to be passed on to first-time homebuyers and renters in the form of increased prices.

As it stands, as we all know, Vancouver is already the most expensive city in Canada for taxes and fees on new homes, costing $644,000 per home. This legislation will make it even worse. Can you imagine all of these additional costs that we have some ability to control, and we’re not? We’re just making it worse and worse for people to be able to even hope to afford a home.

We look at this increase as…. This is now the 30th new or increased tax introduced by this NDP government, which has been part of a blizzard of taxes. It has clearly not helped at all in making housing more affordable. You’d think after the 26th, 27th, 28th or 29th new tax or in­creased tax, and the outcome is not good…. “Gee, well, let’s try a 30th tax now. Let’s see if that does it.” But it’s not working. It’s not how we do things.

British Columbia has, after the blizzard and flurry of additional costs here, rents almost doubled to $3,000 a month in Vancouver. If you’re looking for a townhouse, it’s up 33 percent. A single-family home is now out of reach for the majority of young families, approaching $2 million. We can talk about that when we’re in committee stage, in terms of the impact of the upzoning and the vulnerability on these single-family lots for speculation. We’re already seeing a lot of conversation about that.

Our caucus, Madam Chair, as you know, has already called on the Premier to block Metro Vancouver’s tripling of the development cost charges on new development. We looked at this and thought: “Well, it’s an extra $24,000 on a family home, and $14,000 more on an apartment.”

We looked at what was happening in Metro Vancouver, and the federal government looked at what was happening in Metro Vancouver as well. It said: “Hey, we’re just going to pause on the dollars that we’re looking at bringing into this community, because the purpose….” What the federal government is trying to accomplish and what we’re trying to accomplish is to reduce the cost of providing housing.

When Metro Vancouver tripled these levies, we asked the Premier to do something with that. But we understand now why that didn’t happen.

[6:25 p.m.]

This government is now tripling down, I guess, on the approach to increased development charges in order to be able to fund infrastructure projects in communities that are necessary for increased density. But really, it should be the responsibility of the province and the responsibility the federal government and not be borne simply by those people who are trying to rent and to buy housing in British Columbia.

We say it a lot. We’ll say it again. We get some laughter from the other side, because it’s clearly too simple a con­cept. If we want to make housing more affordable, we need to make it less expensive. It’s pretty simple.

Do you think that’s a good idea? I think it’s a good idea. We need to make it less expensive to build it, and we need to look at all the tools we’ve got in order to be able to do that. All this NDP plan does is introduce additional costs that are going to prevent new homes from being built.

I will tell you that since the Housing Supply Act was introduced…. It was another of those “We don’t have a lot of details, but we’re going to upzone at some point, and then we’re going to give you all the information. Then we’re going to go to different communities, and then we’re going to set some housing targets — not for all communities but for some communities. Again, we’re not going to tell you how that’s going to work.”

What we’ve seen happen is that a number of projects that were going to move forward or developers who had identified projects and identified land have paused. Why wouldn’t you pause if you’re going to build a duplex, and now you think you might be able to do a fourplex, and you’re not sure where the goalposts are going to be in a year from now? There’s been a lot of hesitation on moving forward.

You can paralyze the market by creating confusion and not providing clear guidelines. For the last year and a half, municipalities and developers have been a little confused about what was going to happen. Now we’re getting a glimpse, with this legislation, in terms of what’s going to happen.

Again, as always, as seems quite consistent with this particular NDP government, the devil is in the details, and the details are always going to come later. They’re always going to be dealt with through regulation as opposed to upfront transparency, where a municipality or a developer can look at this legislation, and say, “Oh yeah, I get it. I know what we’re supposed to do. I can give some direction to staff. We can get going on this stuff.” But that simply isn’t the case.

With all of this flurry of things coming at the same time, the timelines are so tight. All of this stuff is coming in in the next year. Municipalities — some of the larger ones may have a large staff that can address these things and deal with these things. But a lot of the smaller communities are already struggling with the workload that they’ve got.

To suddenly be bringing in all of these changes and doing it so quickly, and they’re very substantive, everybody’s got to kind of down tools to retool. What’s that going to do? It’s going to mean that we’re slowing things down even more. Instead of increasing taxes on housing, the province should be stepping up to the plate with infrastructure funding and jump-starting the development of new homes.

Ironically, you might say that this bill actually is bringing tolls back to pay for highways. If you look at how this is set up, it’s going to start tolling the roads in areas where you need to use those roads. They’re doing it not on the cars but on the homes.

If your place is being built next to a provincial highway and you need a new interchange, that’s going to come from the houses around it. That sounds like a toll for those people using it in a community. This is only going to add to the massive amount of taxes that are already blocking new houses being built in our province.

Now, in here there is a backdoor provision to include policing costs in development cost charges. Well, that’s interesting.

Wastewater as well. I know those of us on the North Shore…. We have a bit of a nightmare over there with a new wastewater plant that has tripled, already, in the cost to the people of the North Shore. Now we’re going to maybe be able to offload this on to the development of housing on the North Shore.

[6:30 p.m.]

But yeah, policing costs can now be included in these development cost charges. Just wondering if it’s the secret plan to pay for the cost of the Surrey police transition — to levy a tax on every new house, making it less affordable.

As I know the Premier and the minister are well aware, last year…. Isn’t it earlier this year? I think in the spring. One of B.C.’s largest developers, Coromandel Properties, filed for creditor protection earlier this year. We’re also hearing from other local developers. There’s this huge increased stress on debt-servicing right now with the incredible and quick rise in interest rates over the last few years.

We’re also looking at developers who are unable to sell projects right now. Someone may have, when they did a presale for a condominium, qualified for mortgage because they were qualifying at 3, 4 percent. Now when they go to close, they can’t qualify. Now their mortgage is going to be 7, 8, 9 percent. That’s hurting individuals purchasing, but it’s also putting an extremely real financial strain on a lot of the homes coming onto the market right now.

If we look kind of now and further down the road and don’t appreciate that in development financing, you are taking huge risks for long periods of time…. Every dollar is going to count right now because of all of these other external factors that are making it so much more expensive to get housing built. So instead of adding, expanding the scope of those things….

[The bells were rung.]

I’ll pause again. There are no jokes this time.

Just a bit more on what the bill does. It codifies the new taxation power to housing projects at the local level, through these new ACCs, amenity cost charges. Then, additionally, it expands what can actually be included or funded, paid for through DCCs. There might be more consistency up front in what a DCC is, but those DCCs can be larger.

The authority to apply an amenity cost charge to be upfront in the building process rather than zoning, now, Bill 44 removed the ability to negotiate the community amenity contributions when it removed the public hearing phase. We understand why that’s important, but the municipalities have now lost a piece of that process, where they would actually be able to negotiate with developers for things that are very specific for their community. Some of them are very creative in terms of how they’ve used some of that to be able to provide additional funding, federal funding even, for some affordable housing projects.

Amenities are now defined as: “a facility or feature that provides social, cultural, heritage, recreational or environmental benefits to a community, including, without limitation, (a) a community, youth or seniors’ centre, (b) a recreational or athletic facility, (c) a library, (d) a daycare facility, (e) a public square.”

These are all good amenities that we need to have in a community, but the cost of this kind of…. The expansion of what can be funded, including policing and wastewater and these, can be substantial in terms of a burden on the cost to people buying housing.

Sorry, Madam Speaker, there are just so many things here to talk about. It really is concerning what the approach to housing has been from this government. I just want to go back to the confusion.

[6:35 p.m.]

I’ll say, as I’m also shadow minister for child care, that the same thing I’m seeing here with housing are these…. A policy here. A policy there. An announcement here. An announcement there. This is a policy. This is in regulation. This is in the legislation. It’s very confusing for those people in communities that are the ones who want to build their housing if it’s not consistent.

I mean, we’re talking about the need to make sure that DCCs are…. There’s a formula, and we know what they are up front. But that has not been the approach that this government has taken to much of the legislation that it has developed — all of the legislation that it has brought into this House — because it’s not well-thought-out in terms of bigger picture.

When you bring in five pieces of legislation on housing in a week and a half, it should be more cohesive than this. As I asked the minister in my speaking on Bill 44 and in previous conversations, what is government doing with respect to all of the other pieces of government that have to work together in order to make these housing targets actually work?

If you don’t have the Ministry of Education in the room, if you don’t have the Ministry of Health in the room and if this is not part of a larger picture and a larger plan — transportation — how can you be looking at the work that the government is looking at doing here? If you don’t have alignment with your transportation planning…. If you don’t have alignment with your education planning. Your school planning. Your K-to-12. All of this stuff is just being dumped on communities at the same time.

The response, which I’m not surprised, is communities are saying — and not just to me; the MLAs are receiving phone calls and emails from their local community leaders — “How are we going to have the capacity in order to quadruple a population in certain areas if we’re not also quadrupling the number of schools that we’ve got, and not doing it through portables. Do we need a UPCC in this community? Who’s paying for that? Is the developer going to pay for the UPCC in the school?” Apparently, the developer is going to pay for part of the highway, which is a new way of doing things.

Really, British Columbians…. They deserve a break, not an increase, on the already extremely high costs that we’re facing today because of the Premier and this NDP government adding more costs to construction of homes. I can’t even explain just how ridiculous that is — to think that if we’re trying to resolve an affordability housing crisis, we’re going to do it by actually making it more expensive to build housing. It’s ridiculous.

People have started to come to expect this from the NDP government, so I don’t think this will be too shocking. Big talk that only leads to big tax increases. Skyrocketing costs of living. There’s really no relief here. The record speaks for itself.

We’ve lost confidence, if we look at the promises and commitment to how many units the NDP government had committed to building, 114,000. We’re more than halfway through, and I think we’ve got, at last count, 15,000 of those built. Coming back and making a new promise on what is going to be built and actually increasing that is…. We’ve lost some confidence there.

I wanted to quote something — the media. I was laughing today, because some of the media, again, had the bill numbers confused because of the confusion yesterday. Vaughn Palmer — I’m going to quote him in the Vancouver Sun — when he was discussing the lack of a formula anywhere in this legislation to actually show and explain how these calculations are going to come to be.

[6:40 p.m.]

“Once again, the New Democrats, in their haste, would appear to have saved the critical piece of information for release at a later date.”

At that, I will take my seat. I appreciate the time.

D. Davies: I’m happy to give my remarks on Bill 46, the Housing Statutes (Development Financing) Amendment Act, 2023.

Just to follow up, obviously, on some of the points that my colleague made. It feels like we’re in a housing marathon on the legislation this last couple of weeks, as I believe we’re up to five now.

I think my colleague used the word “cohesiveness.” But that connectivity, I think, is really important, making sure that things are moving together in the right direction, as opposed to having a piece of legislation over here that does this. What I see probably happening in the near future is that there’s going to be a lot of miscellaneous statute bills coming, as everyone is reflecting on these five or more pieces of legislation that we’re in right now.

It’s like: “Oh my god, we didn’t know that that was going to do that because this is doing this.” I think it’s going to pose significant problems for government as we move forward into this.

I think, unfortunately, British Columbians have come to expect very little from this government. We’ve seen this in the housing legislation that has been brought up to now, just like we’re seeing it in this piece of legislation here today, in Bill 46.

The member for Chilliwack, some months ago, himself had mentioned that British Columbians had pretty much given up on trying to own a home. Again, this very specific piece of legislation is adding wood to that fire. It is increasing the costs that are going to be going onto new homes.

Those new homes — we want to get people into them. We’ve said in this House before, on numerous things…. Affordable housing — it’s actually to make it less expensive. It’s how you make it affordable, make it less expensive.

I don’t understand what the government is missing on that very simple concept, because here is another example of the government adding exorbitant costs onto the construction of new builds. Those costs are going to be passed on to the purchaser of that home, or, should it be in the case of a landlord, those costs are going to be passed on to a renter.

We’ve already seen and heard over and over and over for the last seven years, let’s just say for easy math, about how expensive British Columbia has got. We are the most expensive jurisdiction on the continent by every metric, including housing. Actually, I think there might be one city that is a little more, but as a jurisdiction.

The future doesn’t look very good for new homeowners or prospective new homeowners, those young people, the young families that are striving. I remember, going back a few years ago when I was a young person — maybe a few more than a few years ago — it really and truly was something that you could set your eyes on, just like my parents before me and my grandparents.

[6:45 p.m.]

They could actually, as they graduated school and were going out into the workforce, look at: “I am saving money to buy a house.” That is not the case at all nowadays. Seventy-four percent of non-homeowners have given up that dream, and that’s a real shame. This legislation is one more nail in that coffin of that dream of that young family that wants to buy a house.

We’ve seen that rents have nearly doubled, to $3,000, in Vancouver. A townhouse is up 33 percent to a million bucks. On what reality is that affordable for a young family?

A single-family home, two million bucks. Back just a few years ago, again, when I was younger, a $2 million home…. You would maybe see…. Movie stars live in a $2 million home. That was my thinking when I was in my 20s, maybe even my 30s. Now that’s just a small little house.

If the NDP want to make housing more affordable, they need to remove the red tape. They need to be looking at removing fees, not adding fees, to get people into a house. They’re doubling down. Sadly, the result is….

We don’t have to look any further than on the streets of many of our cities to see how our homeless population has gone up in almost every community around the province. Even in Fort St. John, a 67 percent increase in homelessness in the city of Fort St. John since 2018.

Now, sure, there are some other circumstances that have probably impacted numbers across the province, but I will guarantee that the cost of housing is probably…. Well, not probably. It is a huge factor for people to try and get into a house, and some, unfortunately, just could not get housed.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

This bill, Bill 46, introduces the most massive housing tax increase in British Columbia’s history. It is our role as opposition to criticize legislation as it comes in, to raise the points around how things will impact British Columbians as a whole as well as in each of our communities. Plain and simple, this legislation, Bill 46, is absolutely out of touch with British Columbians and what British Columbians need for affordable housing.

As it stands, Vancouver, we already know, is the most expensive city in Canada for housing. Taxes and fees already on a new home are roughly around $644,000, and this legislation is going to make that already ridiculous number worse. For a number of…. Well, for a long time, we’ve been saying in this House now…. We’ve talked often about — what is it? — the 29 new taxes and fees that this government has introduced since their tenure in 2017.

[6:50 p.m.]

Well, ladies and gentlemen, here’s No. 30. It’s not a competition to become the most unaffordable jurisdiction in the world, because if it was a competition, you’ve already won.

Again, I just don’t understand the thought process around making affordable housing cost less by adding on thousands of dollars to the building of a new home. If this was interactive, I would ask members on the other side to repeat that back to me and tell me how much sense that makes. Because it doesn’t make sense.

For the life of me, I don’t understand how the government could move forward with this legislation, unless they’re in this sick competition to make us the most unaffordable, actually to set us even way beyond the most unaffordable jurisdiction on the continent. Maybe they’re trying to get the world. I’m not even sure where we actually fit on the planet.

My concern, though, is that young person in British Columbia who was trying to get ahead, trying to kick-start their life. That dream has been snuffed out by this government, of ever owning a home in British Columbia.

This bill, and I’ll just talk for a few minutes on what the bill does, is looking at the amenity cost charges, expanding those charges and passing them on to the builder. Looking at “social, cultural, heritage, recreational or environmental benefits to a community, including, without limitation, (a) a community, youth or seniors’ centre, (b) a recreational or athletic facility, (c) a library, (d) a day care facility, and (e) a public square.”

Again, in very typical NDP fashion, there is so much in this legislation left up to regulation that one has to wonder: how are builders even going have confidence to build homes in British Columbia anymore?

We’ve already seen the largest mass exodus of people leaving British Columbia for our neighbours in Alberta ever in the history of British Columbia. And we wonder why, with legislation like this, people are leaving. Again, it’s not just people. It’s contractors. It’s people that want to build homes. It’s people even in the resource sector. It’s too risky to do business in this province. We hear that over and over and over again.

I know that my NDP colleagues on the other side are getting those phone calls from people. I’ve been on many emails where we all get cc’d about: “What the heck are you guys doing?”

The ACCs, the amenity cost charges, are going to be a direct hit onto new homebuyers. This legislation also looks at the development cost charges and allows for changes on the development cost charges that are already in place in many places. And we’ve seen….

[6:55 p.m.]

The example here is…. It’s like a toll. We know they’re against tolls, but this is, technically, a toll, except on housing, that the government is placing on it. So it again raises many concerns in regards to a builder, a contractor who now is already facing significant charges.

This isn’t just a Vancouver issue. I used the example of…. There’s already six hundred and some thousand dollars of additional costs on a construction build. This is in Fort St. John as well. We hear from the same people. It’s hard to build in this province. When we see pieces like Bill 46 bringing forward amenity cost charges, changing how the development cost charges are also implied…. One possible thing is: what does this look like with the DCCs on policing in British Columbia? Is this another way to maybe pay for the Surrey policing transition? I don’t know.

Our caucus, obviously, has raised many issues around asking government to stop the taxation, to stop these fees, to stop raising costs on people. In fact, we’ve even called the Premier recently to block Metro Vancouver’s tripling of their DCCs on new development, which adds $24,000 to a family home. Just that adds $24,000 on the development of a family home. Approximately $14,000 or more — the impact on a rental apartment.

I go back to how it’s little wonder that British Columbians don’t have faith in the government. They don’t have faith in delivering because we haven’t seen deliverables. We have not seen deliverables by this government. Just take, take, take.

Instead of increasing taxes, maybe we create incentives, encourage people to build in this province. Incentivize building. We know we need the housing, but we’re blocking it. We’re scaring contractors. We’re scaring people away. So let’s encourage people to build homes. Let’s en­courage people to build these apartment blocks that we need.

Again, housing looks different in Vancouver. It looks different in Victoria, as it does in Kelowna or in Fort St. John or in Terrace. But we need to stop with the silly charging people, taxing people, fees on top of fees, taxes on top of taxes on homes that people need to build. Then in the other breath, we need more affordable housing. It doesn’t make sense.

Also, any new home that’s built next to a provincial highway or interchange now could face new taxes and fees. We need to be doing things smarter. We need to be making homes cheaper. British Columbians deserve a break. This is a dismal failure on the part of government to make affordable housing, to make affordable homes.

Unfortunately, it’s what people have come to expect, which is the sad reality — lots of announcements, lots of talk, no results other than more tax revenue on behalf of the government. You only have to look at the NDP’s record over the past seven years.

[7:00 p.m.]

With that, I’ll reserve my right to continue debate, and adjourn debate.

D. Davies moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Committee of the Whole (Section A), having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.

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

Hon. L. Beare moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 7 p.m.