We can’t leave Canada’s housing crisis up to the provinces

That’s why, over the next two weeks, Max Fawcett will tackle the housing crisis and the ways we could address it in a series of them.

Mix in the reality that housing policy falls mostly under provincial and municipal jurisdiction and it’s easy to see why the federal government — and, to be clear, many successive federal governments — hasn’t put housing at the top of its political to-do list.

Housing prices have increased 50 per cent nationwide over just the last five years, and it’s no longer just places like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal driving that surge.

Municipal and provincial governments have key roles to play here, whether it’s on zoning issues or supporting the development of more supply.

The recently announced one per cent tax on vacant or underused housing owned by non-residents is a start, but it’s only expected to raise $200 million in its first year — a rounding error on a rounding error when it comes to the size of Canada’s housing market.

Yes, Canada has its first federal minister of housing ever in Ahmed Hussen, but he’s still without his own department and is responsible for other duties in his role .

There are lots of ways it could do that, from investing more heavily in public housing .

Ironically, it was more than 50 years ago, under the leadership of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, that Canada initially tried to address a brewing national housing crisis.

In time, and with pressure from the right places, he relented — and a brief golden age of federal involvement in Canada’s housing market was born, one whose legacy can still be seen today in some of our aging co-operative housing projects.

Those urban problems have become more intractable in the decades since Hellyer tabled his report and now involve much more than 70 per cent of the population.

Our biggest cities are in the process of committing a form of economic suicide, one in which the young people and new residents who create and sustain their vitality are being priced out of existence.

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