True Patriot Love - Why Canada’s Housing Crisis Got Worse ft. Carolyn Whitzman

00:00:00.000 welcome everybody to the show thank you for being here i get the pleasure of sitting down with dr

00:00:08.880 carolyn witzman to talk about all things home uh homes in canada her book home truths thank you

00:00:14.640 very much for being here carolyn lovely to meet you brian um so if you don't mind just quickly

00:00:21.200 introducing yourself um give a little bit of a background of your academic experience and why

00:00:27.120 you're the subject matter expert in this area just so folks know where you're coming from

00:00:31.600 well thank you i'm not the only subject matter expert in the area but i've been working on

00:00:37.040 housing off and on for about 40 years i'm currently a senior housing researcher

00:00:43.200 at university of toronto's school of cities um previous to that i was a professor of urban

00:00:49.680 planning at the university of melbourne in australia and before that i worked for the

00:00:54.320 city of toronto for about 10 years so i've lived in all kinds of places and uh i have experienced

00:01:02.560 all kinds of housing and my particular interests are in uh scaling up affordable housing and how

00:01:10.240 you do it and um yeah what other things can i say about myself i live at ottawa right now

00:01:16.800 uh and um i'm talking to you from a coffee shop yeah yeah i can tell um it's okay here so

00:01:26.000 i guess what i want to start at is one of the first thing that jumped out at me from

00:01:29.920 again your book home truths was that the the federal government had a more or less successful

00:01:38.240 housing first approach that saw success and then was abandoned and delegated more or less to the

00:01:44.880 provinces where it started basically spiraling from there can you sort of expand on that a

00:01:49.920 little bit and flesh out the the concept to which i'm sort of identifying

00:01:56.000 sure i mean i'm a historian by training so i'm always interested in how we ended up where we are

00:02:01.760 today and it's true that canada has never been really gung-ho about non-market housing but in

00:02:10.800 the 1960s and the 1970s and into the early 1980s about 14% of homes completed every year were

00:02:21.680 non-market public housing co-op housing non-profit housing including supportive housing and

00:02:29.840 in 1993 the federal government formally decided that it wasn't going to get involved in affordable

00:02:36.720 housing policy that that was going to be a responsibility of provinces in Ontario

00:02:41.840 the biggest province they in turn downloaded responsibility to municipalities and in many

00:02:47.600 other provinces not much happened so the proportion of non-market affordable housing went from about

00:02:55.040 14 percent a year in some years it was 20 or even one year 25 percent of completions down to less

00:03:03.680 than one percent of completions and even in the last 10 years when then Prime Minister Trudeau

00:03:10.400 said yeah we need to get back into housing policy because clearly found a problem it's

00:03:17.960 only been about two to three percent of housing that's a bit completed it's not market affordable

00:03:23.960 housing so permanently affordable housing so it's been improving from a low baseline but it's still

00:03:32.960 not where we were 40, 50 years ago.

00:03:35.880 And it shows, it shows.

00:03:37.260 I mean, homelessness is increasing,

00:03:40.140 housing need, particularly for rentiers,

00:03:42.980 but really for everyone is increasing.

00:03:45.140 And a whole generation of young people under 40

00:03:48.740 are locked out of ever having a secure, affordable home,

00:03:52.600 certainly in big cities.

00:03:54.820 Yeah, myself, I can speak for myself

00:03:58.140 as in sort of elder millennial born in 1983.

00:04:00.960 So I'm at the early sort of beginning of that.

00:04:02.700 So I'm 42 now and I still fall within that sort of 40 or under problem of not being, you know what I mean?

00:04:10.340 The down payment is the same cost as what a home was 25 years ago.

00:04:13.820 So for people who are not familiar with the term non-market housing, can you just describe what that means?

00:04:20.040 Because I grew up just, again, from my experience, I grew up seeing sort of what we would be called sort of government funded housing,

00:04:26.060 which often resulted in being like ghettoized or, you know, I mean, it was, it was like dangerous

00:04:31.080 neighborhoods that I grew up quite close to. So I'm familiar with sort of my exposure to that

00:04:35.400 level of it. But can you expand on sort of what that means in a broader scheme?

00:04:40.220 Yeah, I mean, it has a bad rap, but at the same time, so as I said earlier, non-market housing

00:04:46.540 is a big tent. It includes public housing and two thirds, the non-market housing is public housing

00:04:55.640 of various sorts owned by a level of government usually municipal and there's another 15% of that

00:05:03.980 stock that's co-op housing so that's run by its members you don't have to buy anything to get in

00:05:11.300 you don't get anything when you get out but you do get a secure home I lived in co-op housing for

00:05:16.760 about eight years and that's certainly not ghettoized in any way and then there's various

00:05:24.540 kinds of nonprofit housing that's owned by charities or by community

00:05:28.940 organizations and that's about 20% of the non-market stock and that's

00:05:36.840 everything from you know owned by a church or owned by the Shepherds of Good

00:05:41.940 Hope or by the John Howard Society and it does include housing with supports for

00:05:51.240 people with intellectual disabilities or mental health issues etc so it's

00:05:58.080 actually a very broad swath of housing one of the neighborhoods that I talk

00:06:03.900 about in the book in fact when I live in Toronto and I'm in Toronto one week a

00:06:10.000 month I am in st. Orange's neighborhood which was developed in the 1970s that's

00:06:16.020 That's one-third public housing, one-third co-op housing, and one-third private sector condos.

00:06:22.460 And it actually works really well as a community and has for the last 50 years.

00:06:27.540 I don't think there's very much ghettoization about it.

00:06:30.900 So the secret sauce there was a mixture of incomes and, you know, some good architecture perhaps.

00:06:39.640 Um, uh, so despite the stereotypes against it, um, there's actually a range of people

00:06:47.620 who live in co-op housing, sometimes, uh, in non-market housing, uh, sometimes seniors,

00:06:54.740 uh, sometimes students, et cetera.

00:06:56.920 So, um, get some, uh, it can be a really, uh, a boon to a community.

00:07:05.100 i i agree and that's that's why i wanted you to describe all the different sort of options of it

00:07:11.340 because i grew up thinking that that was government housing you know what i mean where there was a lot

00:07:15.560 of crime you know what i mean again i lived very close to it so it's like that's what kind of i

00:07:20.120 associated with it and that's my own ignorance not having been exposed to much else or really

00:07:23.720 looking into it um until recent years and then reading your book and and and getting these

00:07:28.740 concepts in much more detail but probably one of the most crazy stats that i saw in your book and

00:07:36.400 then i dug into more resources through ai and cmhc and all these sources that you can find stuff on

00:07:41.880 canadian housing data that the average price of a home in 2005 was 237 000 and then in 2026 early

00:07:52.380 2026 the data is that recent it's uh 661 000 now the price of a home so yeah it's closer to 800

00:08:01.740 000 now actually yeah depending on depending on the city these are averages but the term that i

00:08:07.260 the term that i loved in your book was unearned windfall that was represented by many of the

00:08:13.340 boomers and people who were able to buy houses you know i mean even in the early 2000s to now

00:08:17.660 but um there's like how exactly how did we get here i mean where how did where i know this is

00:08:25.500 a very sort of this is a very loaded question but how did we get here and i want to get to talk

00:08:31.260 about some of the solutions as well for some of the people that are listening to think they're

00:08:35.020 never going to be able to afford a home but there are some solutions on the way but most importantly

00:08:38.940 like what in your opinion brought us here and sort of how do we begin to steer out of this

00:08:43.100 Well, it is a series of decisions that were made really over the last 50 years. So one of those decisions was in 1972, when the capital gains tax was introduced to give a property, sorry, an exemption to folks when they sold their property.

00:09:09.000 and i was actually just talking about that with someone in 1972 the average life expectancy for

00:09:16.120 men was 70 years and the average life expectancy for women was 75 years so the notion was you'd

00:09:22.440 sell your house you'd live in some retirement community and then you'd conveniently die 0.90

00:09:28.360 you'd smoke a lot or whatever and you die um you know not long after you um became an empty nester 0.63

00:09:35.400 retired and um uh and and sold your house and you would be able to live on the proceeds of

00:09:43.560 the house and that's part of the reason why your the money that you made wasn't um taxed

00:09:51.960 now it's great theory um right now fortunately people live a lot longer the average life

00:09:59.000 expectancy for women is 80. the average life sorry the average life expectancy for men is

00:10:04.680 80 the average life expectancy for women is 85 so a lot of people are kind of locked into their homes

00:10:16.280 even if they're still living in a three or four bedroom house that isn't even accessible anymore

00:10:21.400 and they don't use half the rooms because there aren't affordable homes to move to there aren't

00:10:29.720 affordable rental homes to move to and all too many seniors and i'm a boomer and i'm not quite

00:10:35.960 a senior yet but i'm pretty close um i i am concerned i was i lived through my mother living

00:10:47.660 to 92 and by the time she paid for assisted living for a few years and then long-term care

00:10:54.500 for the last couple of years of her life she'd blown through any money that she had saved through

00:11:00.160 selling our house and not getting capital gains tax exemption and um you know we had to support

00:11:07.320 her which was fine for us were relatively well to do but can be a problem if you aren't reliant

00:11:14.440 on either the bank of your kids or the bank of mom and dad to buy a new house so we confused

00:11:20.960 housing as an essential place to live with housing as a great retirement investment.

00:11:29.380 And particularly over the last 20 years, there are, you know, there were returns of 20 and 30 percent

00:11:37.360 of buying up apartment buildings and spiffing them up and evicting the tenants who were there

00:11:46.240 and doubling or tripling the rent. Rents have doubled in the last 10 years or so. There's also

00:11:53.660 been a lot of money made by people buying and selling houses and flipping them, or buying a

00:12:01.080 piece of land and flipping it a couple of times before it was developed. Another long-standing

00:12:06.540 issues starting in the 1970s is that zoning became a lot more restrictive. I grew up in a

00:12:16.420 triplex and then a duplex in Montreal with a single mom who had no problem affording

00:12:25.460 rental and eventually, as I say, became a homeowner. And at that time, tenure was much more

00:12:34.360 secure for renters and rents were a lot lower so you could save money you could go on vacations

00:12:41.480 you could do a lot of the things that are part of a really great life but the more that housing

00:12:48.040 became treated as something to make money with and the less that housing became treated as something

00:12:55.080 that was essential need um the more trouble we got into so i mean we've been focusing a lot on

00:13:01.960 the last few years COVID and post COVID because that's when rents and house prices have gone up

00:13:07.560 most ridiculously but even by the late ooze who are talking about 2008 in the 1980s housing was

00:13:16.280 at the international metrics of affordability which is the median house price was three times

00:13:22.120 the many median household income by 2000 that relationship had broken and now in Toronto

00:13:30.840 the average house price is 10 times what the median household income is in Vancouver it's 12

00:13:39.360 times what the median household income is which means that only very wealthy people

00:13:44.100 can afford to certainly buy a first house and generally move

00:13:49.200 yeah one of the other stats that was pretty troubling for me was that one in three new

00:13:58.340 or first-time homebuyers are using the bank of mom and dad as i think it was put basically to

00:14:04.880 payment and it in i'll just there's an endless number of stats here i could rhyme off forever

00:14:10.280 but at the risk of trying not to bore everyone um the average amount for a toronto home that

00:14:17.220 was gifted was 130 000 to help the first-time homebuyers so that is more than double um the

00:14:25.760 average medium home income in canada so we're talking we're essentially we've essentially

00:14:29.840 moved to almost for lack of a better term a caste system where you're basically born into

00:14:35.280 a family that's able to afford property ownership or not um that's absolutely true i mean we're

00:14:41.360 we're in a situation of inherited wealth which is not is at odds with um canada's values of

00:14:51.760 opportunity for everyone and it's particularly harsh on people who have been historically

00:15:00.800 excluded from the homeownership market. Indigenous people are much less likely to have owned a home

00:15:08.800 say 40 years ago. Black-led families are a lot less likely to have owned a home 40 years ago

00:15:15.840 and the trick now is did your family own a home 40 years ago and can have they managed to get 0.98

00:15:23.520 enough cash that they can let you have a home and i mean there are all kinds of implications

00:15:30.240 of the housing crisis but one of the really important implications or the most uh disturbing

00:15:36.160 implications is that move towards uh inherited wealth as opposed to you know a meritocracy

00:15:42.960 if students can't afford to live near where their vocational training or

00:15:51.600 chosen university courses let's say medicine they can't study medicine they

00:15:56.960 can't study building if if you if you don't have the help of the bank of mom

00:16:05.700 and dad you may be locked out from homeownership forever but increasingly

00:16:10.560 you're also locked out of secure tenure forever because again the the system of protection for

00:16:19.960 renters was so much stronger in the 1970s than it is today. Three percent of renter households

00:16:28.380 were evicted last year and that is unacceptably high. Yeah that's the another another wild stat

00:16:37.580 in a in a similar vein that you mentioned in your book is when airbnb came to canada there were 25

00:16:46.620 hosts identified as having hundreds of listings of homes that they owned for rental many of them

00:16:53.900 were making over 1 million dollars per year from the as as profit from the the properties that

00:17:00.460 they owned and by 2018 uh 20 to 40 something thousand rental units have been removed from

00:17:06.460 the market so just further you know what i mean reducing supply as these are just become airbnb

00:17:11.980 properties it's like it's it's like these problems keep compounding one after another

00:17:16.700 um like where do you see this going like is this going to get worse before it gets better

00:17:23.740 i do fear it's going to get worse there was a 50 increase in homelessness in ontario

00:17:30.300 between 2018 and 2024 and then it's only increased in 2025 um we don't have the results of the 2026

00:17:40.940 census yet but the parliamentary budget officer has said that housing need which are quick and

00:17:47.740 unaffordable housing who can't afford an adequate alternative in their in their area is going to

00:17:54.300 increased from 1.7 million households which is already they buy it's about 12

00:18:00.720 percent of households in Canada to 2.7 or 2.8 million so we're you know I don't

00:18:09.120 use the word crisis lately the title of my book is home truths fixing Canada's

00:18:15.720 housing crisis I'm not using the term crisis lately we are in a crisis and it

00:18:20.940 does require really substantive measures to address it or else we're going to you know

00:18:33.180 have a generation we already have a generation that just aren't able to have the standard of

00:18:40.940 livings that their parents had yeah that's a that's definitely an issue that's i think top

00:18:45.980 of mind for a lot of folks who are anywhere around my age or younger um one one the the models that

00:18:51.660 were seem to be working in europe and in asia and other parts of the world like vienna for instance

00:18:57.260 um trickle up housing economics using tenant participation in the design uh to to get feedback

00:19:04.140 and and not only have them involved in the in the process but offer it's in my interpretation was it

00:19:10.860 it puts dignity into the environment you know what i mean of the person living there given

00:19:15.260 that they have some say in how it's going to go which has a bunch of pragmatic benefits as well

00:19:19.580 can you explain just sort of briefly how the vienna models work or maybe places like singapore that

00:19:24.940 have figured this out a lot better than we have yeah so i mean singapore is a really interesting

00:19:31.420 example because when it won independence in 64 from britain uh it had the housing stock was in

00:19:39.820 terrible shape and the decision was made that the first priority was going to be adequate housing

00:19:45.820 for everyone so it has a model where singapore owns the land it has a big housing development

00:19:53.020 corporation which doesn't mean that the government of singapore does all the building it means it

00:19:57.820 contracts with builders um and uh 80 percent of the housing is public housing and i'm putting

00:20:06.460 public housing in air quotes because the land underneath it is owned by uh the government but

00:20:14.620 it's also ownership housing so um they built condos ranging in size from one to four bedrooms

00:20:21.660 most of them being family-sized condominiums singapore that's very small land area so the

00:20:26.780 only way that you can get everyone in there is uh through high-rise housing uh and um

00:20:32.620 they're sold for prices today between 100,000 and 400,000 so in some ways it's the kind of system

00:20:44.200 that Canada might bridle at because it's quite government-controlled at the same time it's

00:20:52.860 incredibly cheap and you can get loans from the government if you can't afford you know

00:20:57.760 hundred thousand dollars as I say there's sort of a level of government

00:21:02.800 control which is hard to imagine in Canada and yet there is the example of

00:21:09.100 Whistler which is has the same kind of use can buy it for a certain price but

00:21:15.860 you also have to sell it basically at the same price plus inflation and about

00:21:21.520 50% of the housing in that resort municipality is owned by the government of Whistler. It's both

00:21:28.880 ownership and rental housing for the people who work there. And the reason why it is what it is

00:21:35.100 is because it was impossible to attract people to work in the ski resort without offering some kind

00:21:41.660 of decent housing. And housing is far more than decent. It's actually really lovely housing.

00:21:47.560 So that model can work in Canada. The model in Vienna is simply for 100 years, they have been building non-market housing, mostly public housing, but also companies that are private companies, but their profit is limited to 5% per year, built a large part of the housing.

00:22:11.680 And not only are rents super low in that housing, which is about 60% of the housing in Vienna, private rental and even private ownership is also super low because there's choices available.

00:22:28.500 So it is possible in the real world to see systems where housing is affordable, where cities are super livable, because if you aren't spending 50 or 70 percent of your income on housing, you can spend it on dinners out and culture and going on vacation and even investing in retirement funds that don't involve evicting people.

00:22:58.500 So it sounds like there are small pockets of Canada, like you said, Whistler that are able to make this work. Why is it not being adopted on a larger scale? Is it just the fact that there's too much of the electorate based is counting on this as their nest egg to derail this train that's kind of already set on its tracks? In your opinion, why do you think this model that obviously works elsewhere is not being applied here?

00:23:24.440 Well, I think there's two reasons. One is, as you've already said, there are, you know, a lot of older homeowners who've paid off their mortgage who very much benefit from that system. I mean, I'm one of them. And it's, you know, there's not that many people who say, please get my taxes.

00:23:44.100 But also, I think that there's belief that a certain kind of housing is the only way to live, you know, like homeownership or single family houses, despite, you know, many examples of very livable communities like Montreal, where I grew up, where multiclexes are the norm.

00:24:08.480 so there's a lot of opposition whenever people suggest a triplex or a six flex or whatever a

00:24:14.560 small apartment building because they go oh that's going to bring down property values

00:24:18.500 ignoring the nimby the nimby people that you mentioned a lot of the nimby folks yeah um which

00:24:24.600 you know ignores the fact that if you want a place for your kids to move out in or a cheap place for 0.81

00:24:30.620 you to uh live in once um you know longer need a large house that's how those things happen um and

00:24:38.100 there is no evidence in fact there's kind of counter evidence that the kind

00:24:43.200 of investment that new multiplex development brings and the kind of foot

00:24:47.600 traffic etc is good for a community your school won't close you have a better

00:24:52.440 argument for more public transit you have stores more able to reach customers

00:25:02.940 etc so I am a fan of greater densities definitely and simpler zoning and quicker approvals the

00:25:12.900 majority of housing in Canada will always be market housing so there's only two things that

00:25:19.860 you can do really or two categories of things one of them is throw everything at making market

00:25:27.100 housing cheaper through allowing more intensive use of land through lower

00:25:33.940 development fees through various other mechanisms and the market market housing

00:25:44.740 has never been able to serve the needs of lower income people so you do need a

00:25:49.000 critical mass I would suggest 20% of housing that is not part of the market

00:25:54.160 sector to serve the needs of low and moderate income Canadians at the moment we've got a system

00:26:00.080 where literally the majority of Canadians low and moderate but also median income Canadians

00:26:06.000 aren't having their housing need met so clearly we need a new or improved system

00:26:13.680 you touched on something really interesting there to do with the bureaucracy of the machine

00:26:18.160 that is being fueled by all these um surveys and zoning fees and and this site survey and this and

00:26:26.240 it can it ranges from the from the statistics i was able to find in your book and outside was

00:26:31.040 10 to 30 percent of the cost of a house can be eaten up by bureaucratic fees which when you're

00:26:37.640 looking at a 900 000 house you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars of of essentially

00:26:43.020 like great government waste bureaucracy added to it's not necessarily waste brian i'm just

00:26:48.460 going to jump in and say someone has to pay for libraries and schools and parks and a lot of

00:26:56.860 public goods but the problem is that the um responsibility for that absolutely essential

00:27:04.460 infrastructure roads and water and sewer and public transit has all been downloaded to

00:27:11.180 municipalities we get 10 cents on the tax dollar so what do municipalities do

00:27:17.000 their choice their choice is either raise property taxes and property taxes

00:27:22.340 are really unpopular partly because they arrive in a lump sum they don't

00:27:26.840 anonymously come on your bill like a sales tax work off your paycheck like a

00:27:31.940 income tax really visible or they put the charges on new development saying

00:27:42.260 growth should pay for growth there's two problems with that one is that growth is

00:27:47.360 paying not only for new infrastructure but also maintaining existing

00:27:52.040 infrastructure which benefits the people who are already there and you're

00:27:57.440 punishing a future generation so to speak the new renter the new buyer um at the expense of the

00:28:05.440 often more comfortable established um homeowner or even established renter so it's an unfair tax

00:28:15.360 it's regressive tax um it's also um you know having really large impacts on the affordability

00:28:23.680 of housing absolutely yeah um i'm probably not using the right verbiage you know what i mean

00:28:29.520 when i hear 30 of a home is is wrapped up in in governmental fees like my mind goes to waste

00:28:34.640 right away because i just assume that they're not reinvesting it in libraries and they're not

00:28:38.960 reinvesting it in public parks and you know what i mean upgrading existing it just it seems like

00:28:43.520 there's a black hole or a void of where the money often goes and it doesn't seem to be benefiting

00:28:48.320 the people uh like it should i think if all that money was going where it should go we'd probably

00:28:53.440 all have flying cars and our own doctors at this point but obviously obviously we're not quite there

00:28:59.120 yet um well i mean the the place where i would agree that there's a lot of waste is that i mean

00:29:08.000 i had a meeting today about two new definitions of what affordable housing is to add to the other

00:29:16.400 six definitions of what affordable housing is it's used by the same level of government which

00:29:21.840 is federal government and that's not even counting provincial definitions or municipal definitions

00:29:27.920 and we really need a clear way to um establish shared definitions shared targets between the

00:29:36.880 three levels of government they all have a role federal government should be financing

00:29:42.480 infrastructure because it has most tax dollars. Provinces should be making sure that everyone has

00:29:49.600 a decent income and protecting tenants from being evicted without cause and providing adequate

00:30:00.320 health and social services for the people who need them. Municipalities should be doing approvals

00:30:06.720 a lot faster and should have a much much much more simplified approach towards the right housing in

00:30:15.680 the right places so all levels of government are failing and one of the ways that they're failing

00:30:23.280 is that they can't even define the problem the same way which is really outrageous to me that's

00:30:31.600 not that's not shocking and i i would definitely agree that all levels of government are failing

00:30:37.040 so we're on the same page with that one i don't know if you saw the uh the comment by the mp

00:30:42.960 housing minister i think it was about two weeks ago gregor robertson who said that um

00:30:48.480 the housing unaffordability can be blamed on the iran war i i know i i i did hear something about

00:30:56.880 that and again i think that there are some uh pr things that need to happen i mean certainly

00:31:05.120 it doesn't make things better but the pro as i suggest there's a whole bunch of reasons

00:31:12.000 some going back many many years three decades five decades that go that have worked towards

00:31:17.360 housing and affordability and you know the straight-of-home use being uh blocked up is

00:31:25.040 not having an immediate impact on housing affordability it's having an impact at the

00:31:30.400 gas block definitely yeah i i would agree um something that's about three weeks or a month

00:31:36.000 old now i don't think has an effect on the house price of 2025 or anything for that so i i just

00:31:42.000 thought it was comically dumb that someone at that level is you know what i mean just scapegoating

00:31:45.920 here to try to deflect um but one of the things that i thought in your book that was really

00:31:50.560 interesting that i i'm kind of all i'm definitely agreeing with you here is the canada post model

00:31:56.800 with um these and not necessarily you know i mean it doesn't have to be canada post insert whatever

00:32:01.200 other organization but the fact that you you identified this 500 plus hub um postal service

00:32:07.920 that you know what i mean could serve as sort of a focal point with building the community

00:32:12.320 up and around it can you explain that a little bit yeah absolutely i mean housing

00:32:17.360 building has been built on top of libraries, on top of fire halls, which is fairly outrageous

00:32:24.060 to be on top of health centers, on top of schools. I could go on. So any place in certainly a busy

00:32:31.340 city, but even in a rural area where you see a one-story government building, you're looking

00:32:37.760 at lazy land. You're looking at something that could, well, let's take the example of a relatively

00:32:43.900 small town like Egansville which is on the road to Algonquin Park from Ottawa. It has about 5,000

00:32:51.500 people and the people who need adequate affordable housing could so easily be served by one building

00:33:01.700 on top of a well-located but underused post office. So this is an idea that I've been trying

00:33:08.600 shop around uh since 2022 so four years now and um everyone thinks it's a great idea but no one's

00:33:17.640 doing anything about it i will say that the federal government's gotten a lot smarter about

00:33:24.560 use of its land and many municipalities have gotten a lot better about use of their land

00:33:30.000 um provinces particularly Ontario are still not thinking that way which is a shame uh but um that's

00:33:40.320 one simple thing one simple way to help um uh housing affordability particularly since as I

00:33:48.060 say in my book um there are post offices in every small every northern every indigenous community

00:33:56.620 in canada owned by canada post that could easily meet the housing needs of a small community if

00:34:03.900 redeveloped in the right way and a lot of the you know i'm not talking about 19th century

00:34:09.020 the heritage buildings here i'm talking about things that were built with large parking lots

00:34:13.420 around them uh in the 50s 60s 70s that could that need to be redeveloped to make a long story short

00:34:20.460 you know um but uh i still find that um governments talk a lot about the housing crisis but aren't

00:34:31.820 sort of picking up on some simple things that make a big difference yeah i i agree with all of that

00:34:38.460 um i i thought it was a really cool model and i i even in the time that and i i know in your book

00:34:42.860 you mentioned you lived in parkdale which i thought was really neat because that's an

00:34:46.140 the first neighborhood that i moved to after i graduated university so i was sort of uh i had

00:34:51.580 first-hand exposure to some of the things that you were talking about of the of the way that that

00:34:55.900 how that um neighborhood of toronto had kind of grown over the years and and been subject to a

00:35:02.060 lot of the same issues or benefits of what you mentioned in the book and i was it just helped

00:35:07.100 me relate to your story a lot better and i thought that was really neat um another thing that i

00:35:11.260 thought was really interesting idea was your construction job idea offering accommodation

00:35:17.820 to the folks that are building the homes and giving them um i believe it was discounted housing

00:35:22.940 or extremely affordable housing for the people that are coming up in the trades can be trained

00:35:27.820 to build homes and then sort of offered homes in the process i thought that was another good

00:35:32.460 idea i think i'm butchering it a little bit so maybe you can help no no i think you're i think

00:35:35.900 you're right on Ryan I mean in the 1970s and 1980s in the heyday of non-market

00:35:44.760 housing there were a lot of union built co-ops and a lot of affordable housing

00:35:53.180 that was built specifically to meet the needs of workers sometimes in remote

00:35:59.660 areas like mining areas but often in places like Toronto where you need a lot

00:36:05.300 of airport workers so you build housing for the airport workers close to the

00:36:10.280 airport kind of thing so none of these solutions are like magic bullets or

00:36:17.120 silver bullets or whatever but all of them can and should be supported because

00:36:22.880 everyone agrees that we need more affordable yeah it's it's very the

00:36:32.120 construction training idea is very similar to what goes on in the military when you're sent

00:36:36.120 off to a base to go through training or you get a posting and then there's different levels of

00:36:42.480 housing offered depending on the size of your family or what part of your career you're at

00:36:46.220 like if you're still a student or if you're specializing or you're posted to that base and

00:36:50.620 you've got now many years that you're going to be there and they and they essentially give you

00:36:53.880 affordable housing the problem with i i would say they wouldn't give you affordable housing i say

00:36:59.140 give you housing because the problem in the military that i can speak to from experience

00:37:03.060 is that some of these many of these houses that are being offered to soldiers are very run down

00:37:09.140 and dilapidated like i would use the term squalor for some of the things that i've been exposed to

00:37:13.620 personally um and i don't think anyone's joining the military thinking that they're moving into

00:37:18.100 the ritz i don't think that's the case but i i think that there should be a baseline level of

00:37:24.180 dignity that's attached to being in the military and being a soldier sailor airman woman um and

00:37:30.980 you know what i mean i don't think that what we're doing now specifically at dnd

00:37:35.780 um is the right thing and i think there needs to be a major overhaul on the way that they provide

00:37:41.060 housing to to the military because it's definitely broken and not working um thank you so much again

00:37:48.260 for being here today i i think i'm probably gonna have to reach out to you again to get i have

00:37:52.740 another page of notes here that I think I'm gonna get thrown out of the coffee

00:37:57.660 shop soon but let me say that I furiously agree Brian as I mentioned

00:38:03.180 there's a lot of folks in my family who are in the services particularly in the

00:38:08.680 Navy and the state of the housing is absolutely appalling one of my hopes is

00:38:17.100 is that with the increased investment in D&D,

00:38:22.280 there might be the opportunity for a new generation of housing

00:38:26.440 that's not only for the people who are serving,

00:38:29.460 and it should be primarily for the people who are serving in the military,

00:38:33.700 but also for the surrounding community.

00:38:37.920 So I think my son's fond dream would be to serve out of Esquimalt,

00:38:43.220 which is in Victoria, B.C.

00:38:47.100 And I would love to see an organization such as Habitat for Humanity, for instance, partner with DND to create affordable housing at the base, which could also serve a rapidly growing marketplace that desperately needs affordable family housing.

00:39:08.980 So, you know, there's our possibilities are only constrained by the kind of structures that we have now that clearly aren't working.

00:39:23.020 So, you know, if I have any kind of closing note on this chapter, it is let's think big and let's think about what we can do in the next few years in order not to ruin it for another generation.

00:39:36.220 Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

00:39:37.800 again the book is home truths i i loved your book folks pick up the book it's she's there's so many

00:39:42.840 good ideas lots of ubc press 2024 and um yep it's been a pleasure talking with you yeah thank you so

00:39:50.520 much and i'll be in touch again soon patriotic means looking out for each other and fixing things

00:40:03.240 together true patriotism is being in a country you love surrounded by people you love and great

00:40:09.480 weather being a patriot is being a part of your community and caring for it it doesn't matter who

00:40:13.640 you are or where you're from patriotism is the one thing we all share it's okay to be critical

00:40:19.720 of government and still be a patriot it's gratitude to your country of course i'm a patriot i'm

00:40:25.320 I'm Canadian, it's my home.

00:40:27.200 Well, actually, true patriot love is the mission.

True Patriot Love - April 20, 2026

Why Canada’s Housing Crisis Got Worse ft. Carolyn Whitzman

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