Since Prime Minister Mark Carney donned the robe and crown of the Liberal Party on March 9, he hasn’t demonstrated much of a sense of humour.
His speeches are long and disjointed. He says he has a plan to solve every problem facing Canada and Canadians, without ever explaining exactly what the plans might be.
He’s shown himself to be quite arrogant with members of the media at press conferences, when he’s not banning media from his press conferences, as he did with Western Standard’s James Snell.
But it turns out maybe he does have a twisted sense of humour.
On the day before April Fool’s Day, when jokes and tricks abound, Carney rolled out his ‘new’ plan to solve the housing crisis in Canada. It’s not new (but has a new name) and it must be a joke.
The plan, called Build Canada Homes, is a copy of Justin Trudeau’s Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF), which was allotted $4.4 billion in Canadian taxpayers’ money being made available to municipalities if they followed the Liberal’s rules.
One of the rules in order to get some HAF cash was to remove zoning restrictions, which the City of Calgary did last year, despite thousands of Calgarians protesting, and in return, the city received $228.5 million, plus a recent ‘bonus’ of $28 million.
Carney’s plan, which makes HAF look cheap, digs deeper into Canadians’ pockets, extracting $25 billion in debt financing and $10 billion in equity financing to “innovative Canadian prefabricated home builders,” said a Liberal statement announcing the plan.
Not such a funny joke now, eh.
His plan is to build 500,000 new homes per year, over the next decade, so it’s back to joking, because that is so impossible, it’s laughable.
Builders would struggle to construct 300,000 homes a year, due primarily to a lack of labour and what could soon be disrupted supply chains due to tariffs
But is it really homes that your hard-earned taxes will be building?
Here's the undercurrent in Carney’s plan, in his own words.
“We’re going to get the government back into the business of homebuilding, while partnering with workers and industry and cutting taxes for home buyers, so more Canadians can buy their first homes," he said.
Suddenly, I hear some famous words attributed to former US President Ronald Reagan in 1986, when he was warning Americans about governments getting involved in the private sector.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” said Reagan, his summation of his suspicions about the effectiveness and morality of the role of government in people’s lives.
Carney’s idea might be to build more homes, which would be fewer than his target, but it definitely is going to build a bureaucracy that would have plans to build homes and we know how original plans get lost in bureaucracies.
Well, we’d be back to the funny part, if the idea wasn’t so absurd.
“This Liberal plan for 500,000 homes every year begs scrutiny,” says Paul Betts, president of real estate consultant firm, GAP Marketing. ”Not only because of the sheer number but there is a lot to unpack. The cost to the government will be $35 billion in subsidies.”
Carney has as good as said he’s going to build a new housing bureaucracy if he and his Liberals form Canada’s next government.
If they do, the joke is on all Canadians.