Hansard Blues

Legislative Assembly

Draft Report of Debates

The Honourable Raj Chouhan, Speaker

4th Session, 42nd Parliament

Tuesday, November

7, 2023

Afternoon Sitting

Draft Transcript — Terms of Use

The House met at 1:32 p.m.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Routine Business

Introductions by Members

S. Chandra Herbert: I don't think they've quite arrived yet, but I'm very excited to welcome to the House,

to welcome to the Legislature, Ghizaal Haress. Ghizaal Haress is an accomplished legal

expert from Afghanistan, now residing in Canada after being forced into exile when

the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021. She's now a visiting scholar at the

University of Toronto, where she engages in research and teaching.

Her previous experience, and I think this will interest everybody, includes serving

as the first ombudsperson for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. As the first woman

to ever lead a law enforcement agency in Afghanistan, her role included investigating

cases of corruption involving high-ranking government officials. She also served as

the parliament-confirmed commissioner for the Afghanistan independent commission on

overseeing the implementation of Afghanistan's constitution.

I look forward to meeting her shortly, and I just thank her for her work for the people

of Afghanistan.

Please would everyone make her welcome.

Orders of the Day

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

Development) Amendment Act.

In the Douglas Fir Committee Room, I call Committee of the Whole on Bill 38, International

Credentials Recognition Act.

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

Amendment Act.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 44 — HOUSING STATUTES

(RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT)

AMENDMENT ACT, 2023

(continued)

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

it goes.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

We face a multitude of barriers stifling the birth of new homes, from development

cost charges in Metro Vancouver that threaten to hoist an additional $25,000 per unit

onto the price tag of a new home to the frustrating entanglements of regulations that

deter small landlords from offering their properties for rent. We cannot ignore the

stringent step code for the new buildings that, while aimed at sustainability, inadvertently

pile up to about $50,000 to the cost of each new home or unit.

[1:35 p.m.]

Nor can we overlook the development approvals process review that highlights severe

backlogs, a startling lack of authority for crucial agreements and a burdensome referral

process to the Ministries of — I don't know — Transportation, Environment, Agriculture,

Forests, and water boards. Each one of those approvals can take a year, two years,

three years.

Let's consider the individuals, the human faces behind these initiatives. Well, there's

Teresa Chhina, a housing outreach worker who, in a cruel twist of irony, finds herself

without a home. There's Batuhan Özer, caught in a dystopian struggle akin to the Hunger Games , just to glimpse a single apartment. Then there's Paula Hudson-Lunn, 71 years old,

scouring for housing in Nelson, a city with a rental vacancy rate hovering at a dismal

0.6 percent.

The most harrowing statistic of all — this is pretty interesting: our birth rates.

It's one of the major driving forces behind our immigration policies. Those are plunging

to a 15-year low. The dream of parenthood is now shadowed by the nightmarish costs

of living in our province, evidenced by the story of Michelle Cyca, a new mother compelled

to move far from her support system.

We're doing this to them. This is what the NDP policies are doing. It's about the

cost of living. It's about the cost of housing. It's about how we are asking people

to live. It's about the lottery to get the $10-a-day child care spot or even a spot

at all. This is what we are doing to our younger generation. They're choosing not

to have kids.

Recently I was on a phone call. My husband overheard just the last part of my conversation,

and he asked: "What were those numbers that you were talking about?" I said: "Oh,

that's the cost of child care right now." He looked at me, his eyes actually welled

up with tears, and he said to me: "Really? Really? Our kids are never going to be

able to have kids. How could they afford even a two-bedroom condo and the price of

child care?" But this new bill is going to solve all of that.

Well, I decided to do some math on it. A lot that is under 280 square metres is going

to yield three units, and over will yield four. So let's do the math on one that will

yield four units: 280 square metres is 3,000 square feet. We'll be able to, with setbacks,

etc., probably occupy 65 percent of the lot, which is 1,950 square feet. Then you

take 87 percent of that, which is the optimal efficiency of a building with internal

penetration. Now we're down to 1,696 square feet.

Then we multiply that by three stories. Let's hope that we can go three stories next

to all those single-family homes. That's 5,089.5 square feet. Then, as the minister

has stated, each of those will have a parking stall. So we'll take off the parking

for that, divide it by the four units, and we have left 872 square feet per unit.

That's what we're doing.

I actually am not that much of an advocate of single-family housing, but let me tell

you why single-family housing exists. It is one of the most flexible zonings, it is

the fastest to build, and it is the least cost per square foot to build. So we are

taking out of the mix one of the products that is absolutely the least expensive per

square foot to build, and we are now putting one of the most expensive in its place.

Coupled with the fact that these homes are not properly serviced with the schools,

parks, transit, amenities, etc., yeah, I don't blame the next generation. Why would

you want to have children at all?

Homelessness, too, paints a grim picture of this government's tenure: a 34 percent

increase since 2017. These are not just numbers. This is a searing indictment of policy

failures. These are not just street entrenched. These are seniors that are losing

their homes and turning to the streets.

I recently had a phone call from one of the shelters who said: "You have to find the

senior citizens housing. They can't stay at the shelter. It's not safe for them."

But they had nowhere else to go.

Turning to the specifics of Bill 44, what we see is a glaring void, an informational

vacuum with no policy manual in sight until this legislation is etched into law. This

isn't just putting the cart before a horse. There is no horse.

[1:40 p.m.]

What of the practical details: setbacks, height restrictions, parking and lot coverage?

They remain as elusive as the affordable homes we are promised. This bill, absent

of detail, is a hollow shell, emblematic of a government all too comfortable with

grandstanding but devoid of substance — a government that, when the Premier speaks

candidly, confesses to a lineup of unsolved crises.

The Premier confessed as much at a gathering of NDP insiders at the Broadbent Institute

this September: "We're not going to solve the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the

health care challenges. We're not going to solve all these issues in Columbia between

now and the next election." After seven years, what will be eight years of this government,

two terms of a majority, they'd better be able to say that they've solved some of

those crises.

And what of implementation? Large portions of this legislation won't see the light

of day until the next term, while our citizens yearn for relief now. The NDP would

have them stalled in the waiting room of bureaucracy. What's going to happen between

now and when the regulations come in? City councils won't know what to approve. Planning

staff won't know what is actually allowed.

We have to remember that housing isn't simply a matter of numbers or construction.

It's about communities. We need parks, schools, transit, services to occupy this growth.

Otherwise, we're not building homes; we're stacking boxes. This government speaks

of suburban densification yet it remains silent on the critical infrastructure these

communities depend on.

We are here for density. We love density. B.C. United thinks density is great, as

long as it is smart density — density in the right areas, planned density, density

where it belongs. High-density construction should be prioritized in the areas where

it's most crucial, steering clear of the inefficient spread of urban sprawl.

Home ownership should be attainable, with residences conveniently situated near transit

systems, allowing for a seamless journey to work or educational institutions. These

are precisely the types of housing developments we need to promote.

Our blueprint is coming, and it's going to be way better. It's going to actually fix

housing. I'm so excited about it; I can hardly speak. We're committed to avoiding

the pitfalls of states like California — unlike this NDP government with this bill

— where uncontrolled sprawl has led to chronic congestion, turning commutes into multi-hour

ordeals.

This proposed legislation's, Bill 44, changes aim to escalate average density in suburban

localities. In Kelowna, suburban sprawl and increased density are discouraged in the

OCP. Quadrupling the density of the suburban neighbourhoods could cripple our infrastructure.

Let's talk about schools for just a second. The schools in my riding are all above

capacity. Our high school has so many portables and is so loaded, we need, desperately,

another high school. What happens if every, single, single-family lot becomes four?

What happens to all of those elementary schools and middle schools and high schools?

This plan conspicuously lacks the necessary blueprint to underpin such extensive housing

with adequate infrastructure.

The NDP appears to be at a loss regarding the financing of these imperative amenities.

Without a comprehensive plan to diminish taxes, cut down on unnecessary bureaucracy

and reduce fees, the dream of affordable housing remains elusive. Because as our leader

of B.C. United says, if you want to make housing more affordable, make it less expensive.

The company that I founded builds housing in four provinces. B.C. is, far and away,

the most expensive place to build housing.

[1:45 p.m.]

Not because a 2-by-4 costs any more or less in Winnipeg, in Regina or in Edmonton

but because of all the bureaucracy, red tape, requirements, restrictions, guidelines,

DCCs, cost charges, amenity fees, etc.

Provincial intervention is necessary. The current administration, though, is very

misguided. The NDP seem to be stuck in a loop of regurgitating previous announcements

that have spiraled beyond their initial budget projections. They don't know how to

build — not on budget, not on time. So why should we believe that they can actually

fix housing?

Well, you're right. The Premier is right. They can't fix housing. And the people of

British Columbia are growing weary of their narrative, continually witnessing the

reiteration of old promises without any substantial increase in affordable housing

stock to show for these declarations. Broken promises.

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

do we keep the dream of affordable housing alive? How do we keep the dream of attainable

housing alive?

Well, this NDP looks backwards. But the B.C. United caucus? Well, we're poised to

look forward. We will be presenting a comprehensive plan, a blueprint for a future

where homes are abundant, where they're a fit for every family, every senior, every

individual, regardless of income — a plan that sees beyond the horizon to a province

where everyone can afford to dream, to build and to live.

We're not going to stand idly by as the hope of affordable housing fades into the

twilight. Why? Because British Columbians deserve better. They deserve certainty,

and above all, they deserve a home. That's our promise, a pledge not built on the

shifting sands of rhetoric but on the solid ground of action and results. This is

the commitment of the B.C. caucus to you, British Columbia.

I look forward to committee stage on this bill.

A. Olsen: I rise to speak to Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment

Act, 2023. I'm the designated speaker for the B.C. Green caucus.

It's important that I frame my comments today in the experience I've had over the

past 15 years as an elected representative of my community. First, I'm still the kid

who grew up in W̱JOȽEȽP, Tsartlip Reserve, the young man that the people of Central

Saanich elected as their district councillor and now the MLA for Saanich North and

the Islands.

This speech ranges across those many years, the thousands of hours of coffee meetings,

community meetings, duly convened meetings, Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal

Communities conventions, Union of B.C. Municipalities conventions. This speech is

the result of the cumulative work of those 15 years as an elected official in this

socioeconomic system, this political system, this bureaucratic system.

This speech incorporates the conversations about form and character of neighbourhoods,

the imbalance the settlement and land use patterns of past decades has created, patterns

that largely excluded housing forms for people who couldn't afford a mortgage, people

who can't afford to participate in the market housing system — all our friends, family

and neighbours, who contribute to the fabric of our society, the front-line health

care workers, construction workers, trades, seniors and our children.

I know my colleagues at the local government council tables across the province have

been the easy target of senior governments, who need to look at themselves for propping

up systems that have produced the exact results that we face today.

It is troubling that we are so intoxicated with this belief that the socioeconomic

systems that I'm going to talk about in this speech must be perfect, must be just

one or two tweaks away from working as we envision them. If only we do a little bit

more of what we are doing, without having to face the pain of immersing ourselves

in the machinery, we'll get different results.

[1:50 p.m.]

I think the

summary, for those that don't want to hang around here for the next two

hours, is that we're getting exactly the results of the system that we've created

and nurtured.

My experience at these tables has me growing increasingly restless, feeling a desperation

to speak to the housing affordability crisis that is a direct result of that economic

system — a real estate market, a full, free market and the glorification of a toxic

individualism that has been elevated above the village, the community, that drives

much of the North American beliefs about our economy and how, for the sake of this

specific speech, housing product is developed and distributed.

I've decided to prepare these remarks for this speech because I have quite a bit to

say on this topic, and it is critical that they be organized a little.

For example, I don't think that it's helpful for me to stand in here and use strong

language like I did last week, "Decommodify the housing market," without providing

context as to what the internal philosopher has been ruminating on. I did that in

my Bill 35 speech, and I regret that I ventured into the area without providing some

context and some detail.

What I'm about to say here will likely be challenging for many to hear. Human civilization

is facing existential threats. Climate change, extreme weather, soil-scorching wildfires,

heat domes and atmospheric rivers are costing society infinite billions of dollars

and countless lives — many who died in isolation, suffocated in the heat of their

ill-equipped apartment — thousands whose lives were washed away when the river broke

the 100-year-old dike that we knew, a decade ago, needed to be upgraded, that the

local government prioritized but that didn't deliver enough votes for the provincial

and federal governments to pay attention to.

Whether we are prepared to admit it or not, the experiment of the last 150 years attempts

to answer the underlying question: how much of the abundance of the earth can we take

before it breaks? Another question: how long do you think it will take for humans

to break it?

The collective connection and reverence our species had with the biodiverse ecosystems

we lived in has been broken. The village has been abandoned, and each individual unleashed

to live their best lives. The village has been replaced with the strip mall, suburban

cookie-cutter, stick-frame neighbourhoods that were never sustainable — the gluttonous

fossilization of the land, urban sprawls, pipes and asphalt — filling the market with

cheap, affordable housing for everyone.

In Victoria, we covered all the flat land quickly. If it wasn't for the genetic remnant

that the agricultural land reserve emerged from, all that land would be covered already

too — so urban sprawls across the mountains. It creeps westward, deforesting and pulverizing

mountains to push more pipe and asphalt, to fill more markets with more cheap, affordable

housing for everyone, plus quite a bit of market appreciation and inflation.

The strawberry fields and salmon creeks that we built on in the 1970s and '80s in

Central Saanich, those formerly affordable houses that we're living in today…. Well,

they're now 50 years old and each $1 million.

The anthropogenic ruin of earth's critical, functioning ecosystems — the wilful destruction

of the machinery that creates life-sustaining oxygen and clean water — is driven by

pride, elevating individual pursuits as the highest form of expression. That was really

unlocked when our species became enlightened just a few hundred years ago.

[1:55 p.m.]

Now we see the result: bureaucratized care replacing genuine human connection, corporatized

human suffering hunched over in a doorway or bus stop by a crippling chemical concoction

that is indiscriminately reaping a half-dozen souls in our province every day. Here's

to chasing the North American dream.

In about a century, we've smashed our spaceship, ransacked the treasury and turned

the controls over to the most reckless narcissists. Unsurprisingly, we face a chaotic

climate, deteriorating housing security and food security, and public insecurity.

The public health care system is in perpetual chaos, and the public education system

is chronically underfunded.

We've known for decades that our public infrastructure is decaying, with scarce resources

to properly maintain and upgrade our culverts, roads, bridges, dikes, dams, drinking

water and wastewater systems. There's no credible plan to pay for the infrastructure

to support the hundreds of thousands of new people predicted to move into villages,

towns and cities in British Columbia each year.

The philosophy and the systems that my great-grandparents' generation designed and

built are not serving us as they once did. We need to have a real conversation, not

politicians talking with their mouths full of Okanagan apples, skirting the issue

because they lack the courage to actually address what's happening, because it's uncomfortable

for our collective constituents to hear.

It's not helpful when members of this chamber forget our history, or wilfully try

to rewrite parts of it, when we forget that our ancestors who sat in these seats signed

agreements to share this land in a way that they never intended to share it.

This was long before there were subdivision lines drawn on the land surrounding these

precincts, long before land use zones defined the small chunk of land inhabited by

a settler who was beaten and starved out of their own homeland. The names of those

colonial men are memorialized on the streets: Douglas and Blanshard. Only the despicable

Trutch didn't survive.

It's not helpful when politicians leverage these complex issues for political gain,

arguing against development cost charges, like I believe the Leader of the Official

Opposition did recently, without clearly identifying how local governments are supposed

to pay for all this new supporting infrastructure.

It's not just the official opposition here in B.C. or in Ottawa whose silky slogans,

sound bites and aviator sunshades are so convincing, though. Our own government is

responsible for leveraging the suffering for their benefit as well.

Remember when the government was going to make life affordable again? That was Ambassador

Horgan's promise. When his consecutive $100 handouts failed to make a big enough dent

on the grocery bill, they stopped talking about making life more affordable again.

It's gone from the playbook, gone from the message box.

As you might sense, this speech is going to get a little gritty. I'm going to name

some stuff, because even if the consensus agrees that the issues I raise are not as

dramatic as I argue them to be, I will have done my job as a member of the opposition

in this House, raising the bitter and uncomfortable truths.

We've known for thousands of years that food and shelter are basic human needs, and

the socioeconomic systems that produce and distribute food and shelter are the most

rudimentary connective tissues holding human societies together. No matter where you

come from on earth, when your ancestors secured food production and developed a reliable

housing system that supported their way of life, human ingenuity was given space to

flourish. Our creativity and innovation soared.

With the energy from full bellies and a sturdy roof over our head, we were able to

focus the creativity and innovation of incredible human minds and bodies. Some humans

dedicate their energy to intellectual pursuits: inquiring, processing and describing

their understanding through theoretical models. Others devote their energy to practical

pursuits: growing and refining understanding and expertise through hands-on craftship

that comes with repetition and experience.

[2:00 p.m.]

The technologies that our societies benefit from today are possible because our ancestors

secured food and shelter. They didn't work or live alone. Our ancestors were individuals

within a collective. Each had a role in the survival of the group.

We produced food security together. We shared responsibility for providing shelter

together. We raised and protected our young ones together. And we carried within our

identities the law that ensured the collective or the public safety and security,

with the foundational understanding of how fundamental food and shelter security is

to our individual and collective survival, the recognition that flourishing is not

possible without it. It is therefore critically important that our modern society

develop systems grounded in this core belief that access to food and shelter should

be a basic human right.

The Straits Salish people, where I come from, had an interesting system that we could

learn from. If you were hungry, you would be fed. Families would welcome you in and

feed you with no expectation of payment. Food to satiate hunger was available for

friend and foe alike.

But food also had value. You could exchange within your families as a way of balancing

your immediate group. And for those who produced a lot of food, you could distribute

it regionally for other much-needed products, and the excess could be shared with

others, turning it into a capital of sorts by converting it into honour for themselves,

their name and their family to be leveraged as needed later.

This is how a compassionate society looks after its people, by developing a socioeconomic

system where food is free but not valueless. Today food for hungry people is not immediately

available, even though our planet has never had access to so much food, nor has it

ever created so much food waste.

With respect to housing security in North America, the real estate market is responsible

for creating unimaginable wealth for those lucky enough to own private property. But

it is also responsible for producing affordable housing for everybody who needs it.

An inherent conflict of interest, the desire to generate undesirable wealth, fuels

decisions made in the real estate market. What did we think was going to happen when

housing and food security as human rights were put directly in the way of a capitalist

private property owner or business owner and their unlimited wealth?

When our legislative ancestors needed a silver bullet to recover from the Great Depression,

they created a system to produce individual wealth for property and homeowners. It

supercharged continental economic growth with more investment in real estate and jobs

in construction. Across Turtle Island, there was a tremendous extraction of critical

natural resources and the expansion of concrete, steel and glass urban infrastructure.

For the people born in the fortunate generations, times have been good. If you were

born a boomer or a Gen X'er, you are extremely lucky. It wasn't always perfect. Skyrocketing

interest rates in the 1980s wiped out people financially. However, for those generations,

it was a golden time. Those generations are the beneficiaries of a remarkable increase

in the value of their real estate investments and their personal wealth.

I remember my grandfather lecturing his grandchildren to buy a home. Everyone needed

their own home. Those who followed his advice were elevated and used as examples for

the rest of us.

From those days in the 1930s, we have entrenched in our political and social culture

a trope that was useful in getting everyone to have the same North American dream

of property ownership. Every individual needs their own single-family home in a cul-de-sac

with the green lawn, a white picket fence and a North American car in the driveway.

This was assured because of a cultural device that held up property owners in high

esteem.

As we heard in here yesterday –– speaker after speaker from the United Party innocently

repeating the social construct about renters, the character foil to the obedient individual

homeowner in the storyline. Bluntly, renters are a blight in the neighbourhood, not

to be trusted.

[2:05 p.m.]

There is a much older proverb. Scholars believe it originates from Africa. We've probably

uttered it ourselves from time to time: "It takes a village to raise a child." It

comes from our past, when we valued each other, when we relied on each other, before

we broke the complex interconnectedness of all the things, before we sanctified independence,

before the enlightened thinkers, the economic philosophers of some 300 or 400 years

ago, began defining the individual as the sacred unit.

As I've shared about my W̱SÁNEĆ culture, we lived and worked together in an extended

family. The village shared the responsibility to house, feed and protect each other.

I have no romanticism about this. Despite the accurate anthropological descriptions

of a much more egalitarian society that existed pre-contact here in the Salish Sea,

it was far from perfect. We were and are human, after all. We warred and engaged in

selfish pursuits. However, it was the exception, not the rule, like it is today.

Now every child in the family needs to achieve the North American homeownership dream.

The economic system depends on the majority buying into this story. It's more than

a story now, though. Deeply embedded in the fabric of our socioeconomic systems in

North America, housing construction, real estate value and mortgage lending are economic

indicators that are the engine of North American global dominance. So we are reminded.

Families living together — that's uncivilized. It's what humans did in the darker

ages of human development, before we were enlightened and empowered with a sense of

toxic individualism.

We confront the deeply established stigma against intergenerational living. For example,

the middle-aged man living in his parents' basement is mocked as a sign of incompetent

parenting, a failure to fully realize an individual's potential and even go so far

in our culture as them being an early warning sign of a threat or danger in the community.

Of course, this isn't true, but in order for us to have as many people as possible

participating in the housing market, these cultural narratives shaped our behaviour,

our expectations, our actions.

If we dig deeper into the impact of these little mantras that we tell ourselves, the

tentacles of toxic individualism slide into the cracks and undermine the social and

cultural structures that have appeared solid for decades. As the children's pursuit

to live their best life forces them to move further and further away from the parents,

estranging grandchildren and grandparents, and as the aunties and uncles, the cousin

siblings, the niece and nephew relationships grew more distant for the first time

in millennia, the family unit was shattered.

The result is a century-old experiment that we are failing to critically analyze and

learn from because we're hoisted by our own petard. We've been so convinced that the

sacred unit is the individual, when for all but a century of human existence, the

sacred unit has been the family, and for good reason.

This government celebrates the billions of dollars that they're pouring into a child

care program. This government also defends the billions of dollars spent on elder

care, long-term facilities where our seniors can spend the final days of their lives

living away from their loved ones with other old people.

In order not to disrupt the economic systems that depend on this toxic individualism

I'm talking about, parents are forced to farm the development of our children out

to whoever we can arrange to do it — often not the parents' first or second choice.

It's often a desperate dash to find anyone who can do it so there can be a second

salary to cover the shareholder expectations set up by the exuberant CEO's promise

of infinitely increasing corporate profits.

We are warehousing the care of our elders to facilities run by foreign for-profit

enterprises more interested in pumping their annual returns to their shareholders

than delivering the contracted care they committed to.

[2:10 p.m.]

Our elders are left lonely, medicated and forgotten, many of them, because of a heartless

economic system that forces the offspring to work endlessly to placate envy, keeping

up with the Joneses, yet another of the North American references to a cultural notion

that is used to keep individuals moving in a prescribed direction.

What would our ancestors say about us farming out the raising of our children and

the warehousing of our elders? Before having our children, Emily and I never raised

children. We had no idea what we were doing. But I know two people who did, and Emily

knows two people who did. Those four people know eight people who raised children

before them.

Whenever my children are having a hard time and I don't have the answers, I bring

in the Elders. Not only do they share the wisdom of years' experience, but they also

bring a calming warmth, a strength that is only accumulated through time.

And it's not a one-way street. When my parents are having a tough time, when they're

tired and lonely, when their body hurts and they feel the wear of decades on their

bones and muscles — why, bring in the children. Not only do they have the innocence

of youth, but they also bring a bright energy, an endless supply of joyful fuel that

is only accessible by the unjaded, unblemished spirit of a child.

It's not just the vertical relationships we've broken, but we've detached the horizontal

ones as well. Where I come from, there's a mysticism about big auntie energy and not

just in W̱SÁNEĆ territory. The magic of big auntie energy is embraced by my cousins

and nations clear across Turtle Island and in Indigenous communities across the earth.

Big auntie energy ain't no joke. They don't even have to be your auntie to deliver

big auntie energy. They are people in the generation ahead of you that you can rely

on when your own parents are not reliable. When our children need to escape their

intense and unrelenting parents, they go over to their aunties' house. Joanie and

Heather see the child needs support, put aside whatever they're doing and just loves

the child.

I feel the same responsibility to show love for my nieces and nephews, to support

them in their development, to nurture them into adulthood. The emotion that I'm feeling

today is the same emotion that I felt when I wrote this. I'm overwhelmed by the beauty

of the social strength that exists in these relationships.

I yearn for a society that is founded on this compassionate interconnectedness, where

we are connected to those ahead of us and those behind us, where we are connected

to those beside us — multidimensional familial community connections.

The philosophy of toxic individualism has broken that. It has feasted on what my maternal

grandfather called human nature. Grandda was a deeply religious man, and we all knew

what he meant when he would go off about human nature and all the traits that may

help us achieve our best selves but may not result in the betterment or the advancement

of the group, however defined. And they're named.

This toxic individualism has stolen our belonging. Who are you? Where do you come

from? Not just the passport you carry but who are you? Who are the people that you

come from? What is your story?

With increased globalization and the fragmentation of the village around the child,

including the land question in Canada and North America, a cultural wave of 21st-century

settlerism has emerged. What are the social implications of losing belonging? I think

we're seeing it and feeling it in our society today. We have a different relationship

to the place we are if we do not feel like we belong there.

ZIȻOT, my paternal grandmother, gave me this teaching. This visit with her was a pivot

point in my life. I've talked about it. I was on a dark path. Looking up from her

knitting needles, ZIȻOT gave me a job. She talked about all the people, the W̱ENITEM,

people who are not from here, that have moved into W̱SÁNEĆ. She talked about how that

was the future of our territory.

She encouraged me to share a message to all the people who have come to W̱SÁNEĆ, who've

set down roots going back to the first settlers, who've taken refuge from an atrocity

in their own territory, or people who have just retired here from Alberta or Ontario.

[2:15 p.m.]

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

XÁLS, the transformer creator of the W̱SÁNEĆ, created a worldview that honours multidimensional

connections, relationships between the animate and the inanimate, the smallest creature

to the largest mountain. And with each transformation, QEN,T TŦEN SĆÁLEĆE — you look after your relatives.

In a law intrinsic in each and every relationship, from all angles, a responsibility

for each to look after their relatives, an agreement that your relatives share the

same responsibility to look after you — the principle that is at the centre of the

culture that makes food both freely accessible and the reason why you can accumulate

great wealth and prestige.

If you are in W̱SÁNEĆ, then belong here in W̱SÁNEĆ. Fight for it. Be good stewards

of it, as if it's the place you belong. That's the instruction of my grandmother ZIȻOT.

I've got to thinking about the impact of settlerism, as I will call it here. Clumsily,

I'll define it as a guilt-driven unwillingness to belong to the place you are, resulting

in good ally-ship but void of the purpose and responsibility to actually submerge

yourself into the social fabric of the community that has accepted you.

I'll just leave a few questions here. What is the long-term implication of self-imposed

settlerism rather than receiving the permission to belong? How are the current trends

negatively affecting our ability to effectively build resilient communities?

Most of my grandfather's grandchildren followed his advice, except for his status

Indian grandchildren. More on that in the

section to come. But honestly, though, has

nobody ever stopped to ask what might happen if we leave food and housing security

to markets that never account for the natural limitations of the planet?

At the core of our real estate market is this implicit expectation of infinite growth.

But how is that possible? Most boomer and Gen X'ers have the future well-being fully

invested in their real estate, just as successive governments — the people in these

chambers — encouraged them to do. They did exactly what they were asked to do, and

there is a generational assumption that the value of that investment is going to go

up.

In the last 30 years, we've been accelerating towards a socioeconomic collapse. The

very housing system we deliberately created, supported by the Canada Mortgage and

Housing Corp., the system that was constructed to create immense wealth, paradoxically,

is now creating poverty.

As fewer and fewer British Columbians are able to access stable, reliable, affordable

housing in a community of their choice, or even the community of their birth, they're

forced to make decisions that benefit their individual situation in the short term

but may be detrimental to a healthy, balanced society in the long term.

People suffering from housing insecurity, people that can't afford their food, have

to get a second or third job to pay the bills. They have little time to volunteer

with their local community group. They're less likely to be able to go to school and

improve intellectually. They might choose to not have children.

People who are suffering from insecure food and shelter are more likely to suffer

from deteriorating mental and physical health, constantly stressed out in search of

a place to sleep, a bit of food to satiate hunger. We can see what the deterioration

leads to already taking shape on the streets of our privileged and wealthy communities.

As people fight to secure their food and shelter, they become desperate. Perhaps their

medication to dull the pain of some of their deeply buried trauma or burden of unmet

cultural expectations becomes an addiction, and their numbers increase, overwhelming

the social safety net. It becomes frayed, and more frequently people slip through.

Public security erodes.

[2:20 p.m.]

It used to just be in the Downtown Eastside, in Vancouver. The numbers of vulnerable

people marginalized by a socioeconomic system that cannot deliver the promise of infinite

growth are flooding to towns and villages across British Columbia, seeking some supper

and a safe place to sleep. Our housing system that produced generational wealth for

some is now creating poverty.

It's because the people in this chamber are unwilling to address the reality that

the socioeconomic system that is determining production and distribution of basic

needs like food and shelter is not designed to ensure everybody has food and shelter.

Individual wealth creation has become more important than the health and well-being

of our communities, yet recent polling results are clear. The top priorities of the

public are the cost of living and public safety and security.

Are we supposed to collectively pretend that the two are not inextricably linked so

as to not impede on all the potential locked away in individual pursuits? This government

is not prepared or well enough equipped to transform our socioeconomic system.

At what point does culture regulate this, evolving a social stigma against someone

who squeezes every ounce of value out of their real estate? When will we elevate the

person who sells for below current market rate, choosing to sacrifice a little for

the good of the community?

In all the cataloguing of the issues I'm doing here today, I cannot skip an opportunity

to drag our public health care system into this speech. The deterioration of our health

care system should be of no surprise to anyone. It was never sustainable, and rather

than allowing our leaders to dig into the system and fix it, we enshrined it and worshipped

it. Those who designed it were pure in spirit.

Nevertheless, the politically acceptable action was to spend more money on a tool

designed to serve a different purpose. The system they designed was the best one they

could negotiate at the time, not the best possible design.

If we want to see further proof that our economic system is suffering multifunction

failure, housing and food insecurity are symptoms to start with. Look next at the

health care system that is designed to treat sickness, not promote wellness.

Poorly oriented, the health care system is left to carry the burden as best it can

— pressure building on the social determinants of health overwhelming the physical

infrastructure and human resource capacity that cannot keep up. Doctors and nurses

come to my office exasperated because they are seeing patients with late-stage disease

because of a lack of intervention by effective primary care. Remember Laozi's proverb:

"Treat a problem while it is still small."

Acute care facilities, hospital emergency departments are understaffed and temporarily

closing. The downstream impact of addressing sickness: hospital beds filled with people

with hypertension and other conditions better treated in community because they have

nowhere else to go.

The Health Minister is all too happy to celebrate spending $8.4 billion to get worse

results and to maintain a health care system oriented to sickness when it should be

focused on promoting wellness. Physical health is declining. Mental health is deteriorating.

Depression and anxiety disorders drive marginalized and vulnerable people onto the

streets. Self-medicated addiction, mental illness, brain injuries are all supercharged

by poverty and a lack of secure shelter and food.

All things are connected, yet 13,000 individuals, each with a critical role in the

fabric of our society, have perished from toxic, illicit drugs because of a cold socioeconomic

system that blames them for failing to succeed better.

We are seeing the poverty that our socioeconomic systems are producing. We know there

is a widening gap between those fortunate enough to be well leveraged in their investments,

those who won the real estate lottery and those who weren't able to pull their socks

up high enough.

[2:25 p.m.]

In Canada, we know what happens once housing creates and perpetuates poverty. It's

not theoretical in Canada. I witnessed this firsthand growing up. If you grew up here,

then you did too. You might not have seen it, but it does not mean that it has not

been there in plain sight.

Our government has been experimenting with housing poverty for more than a century.

Canada has been nurturing poverty through inadequate housing on Indian reserves delivered

by the Department of Indian Affairs through the powers they gave themselves in the

Indian Act to provide cover for the other system they created to generate unimaginable

wealth on unsurrendered territories.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Mr. Speaker: Thank you, Member. Are you finished, Member? Reserve your place. We will adjourn the

debate, then we'll get back to it right after we get a report from the committee.

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

A. Olsen moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Report and

Third Reading of Bills

BILL 40 — SCHOOL AMENDMENT ACT, 2023

Bill 40, School Amendment Act, 2023, reported complete without amendment, read a third

time and passed.

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

in

Section C, the Birch Room.

I call continued debate on second reading of Bill 44, Housing Statutes (Residential

Development) Amendment Act, 2023.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 44 — HOUSING STATUTES

(RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT)

AMENDMENT ACT, 2023

(continued)

A. Olsen: That is the despicable reality of our country. It's probably why, in recent years,

we've seen Canada's international reputation tarnish.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

Despite Pierre's assertion, I argue that the diminishment of our role in geopolitical

affairs has less to do with our Prime Minister and more to do with the exposure of

our history and about the way we handle our internal affairs.

That's one of the reasons why I find the debate that's happening politically, federally,

right now so disingenuous. Two systems, side by side, in communities across the country.

It's our blemish. Where the federal government created personal financing mechanisms,

initiatives to spur construction and building standards on the municipal side of the

road, none of those policies were afforded Indians on the Indian reserve side of the

road.

We've seen the awful outcomes of this terrible experiment. Historically, when societies

did see it, it was fashionable to complain that the Indigenous people couldn't look

after themselves or do better with all the government handouts. "Look at how they

take care of their houses," they'd say. "Look at all their missing and murdered women,"

they'd say. "Look at all their children in the child welfare system," they'd say.

Each is the result of a symmetrical assault on Indigenous people to cover for the

lie.

The reality is that Indigenous people have experienced more than a century of a totally

preventable systemic housing fiasco, the demoralizing impacts and effects of a system

that continues to plague us to this day. We struggle every day to make the best with

what we've got.

Every day Canadians have failed to see the deplorable housing conditions on reserves

and have explained them away as a poverty issue alone, as a First Nations issue. Both

are blamed for the housing. But as the powerful work my mother, Sylvia Olsen, did

in her doctoral studies, digging deep into the history of our heart-wrenching political

and bureaucratic housing history in this country…. We've been wrong. Poor people don't

make bad housing. First Nations people don't make bad housing. The inexcusable housing

conditions in First Nations is a housing issue.

[2:30 p.m.]

Ineffective housing systems, bad housing policy creates housing insecurity, inadequacy

and unaffordability, which in turn makes poor and demoralized people. Canadians, British

Columbians, would do well to take the current national housing affordability crisis

seriously. When housing starts making poverty, things get out of hand quickly.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

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

Introductions by Members

Deputy Speaker: I just wanted to welcome Ghizaal Haress, Afghanistan's first ombudsperson, to the

House. She did incredible work in the country of Afghanistan. I was honoured to be

able to meet with her and for her to share her work with us and in this chamber. Please,

would everyone make her welcome.

I really appreciate that, Member. Thank you.

Debate Continued

A. Olsen: We've seen what happens in our society when a gap forms and widens on the socioeconomic

strata between impoverished people and the wealthy. We know it is better to have a

more diversified strata with a clear path of mobility for people. With a greater distance

between the layers, there's less mobility, more capital for those that already have,

more demoralization for those that don't. That is the toxic stew simmering in our

province today.

When my parents moved back to Tsartlip, the housing policy of the day meant that my

parents would have to have 100 percent of the money needed to build or purchase a

house. Who else in our society in the early 1970s needed 100 percent of the money

to create their forever home for their family?

My dad made too much money to get support to build a house on reserve, and there were

no mortgages for Indians on Indian reserves at the time, because all that land was

owned by the minister that was responsible for us. There were no building standards

for what was built. Housing was distinctly not a commodity like it was on the other

side of the road.

The House they brought me home to in 1976 was a double-wide trailer that was the result

of a loan from my maternal great-grandfather. That's it. Indians either had to be

impoverished, independently wealthy or have a well-enough-to-do auntie or uncle to

get a house in their community.

As my mother, Sylvia Olsen, asserts in her dissertation, housing on Indian reserves

in Canada was designed to create poverty. The federal government deliberately delivered

one failed housing policy after another. Now, why would they do that? I've alluded

to it earlier. It was to cover for the lie. Politicians in British Columbia and Canada

regularly trumpet, on behalf of the public, rule of law rhetoric, at the same time

as promoting systems that grow tremendous wealth on vast tracts of land that were

never ceded or surrendered.

Indeed, when ministers of this government, members from all parts of this chamber,

acknowledge the Indigenous territories that we live and work in, the honour that we

feel when we signal our virtue with words and when the Housing Minister tables legislation

like Bill 44, perpetuating the zoning and land use system that dispossessed Indigenous

peoples from their lands illegally, subdividing and zoning the lands and distributing

them to settlers, who were previously starved and violently displaced from their own

homelands, you can imagine that there's a sour taste.

I've raised this issue with the Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation.

I reminded him that the resource of our territory is no longer fibre from trees or

nutrients from fish, minerals from the earth or even much food from the land. The

resource in W̱SÁNEĆ is real estate.

[2:35 p.m.]

The land he lives on, the lands that surround these legislative precincts, is unceded

and unsurrendered. That is the central lie that I keep referring to. The promise governments

make to all the individuals is made with land of questionable ownership by our own

laws.

In 1975, a packet of documents was published, curiously titled Papers Connected With the Indian Land Question . Do you think the question was answered? Did our legislative ancestors do us a favour

and answer the question they were asking in 1875? Even then, even in 1875, it was

a land question. It's a sleazy bit of history, really. You can imagine someone holding

the packet of documents, handing it over, kind of one eye closed and a little bit

of hesitation on their breath: "Well, you know, it's not exactly legal, but it's good

enough. We got what we wanted, right?"

James Douglas was a Hudson's Bay Co. man, HBC chief factor. First, Douglas was a corporate

man; then he was governor. Some folks have bristled at my characterization of this

province as a resource colony — when I draw comparisons to the level of corporate

reach into our legislative and political affairs, when I complain that our current

government is being represented on political panels by corporate lobbyists, when I

complain about how the government has been captured by industry. It has, because that's

how it was set up.

In 1849, Britain gave title of Vancouver Island to Hudson's Bay Co. for a decade.

There was a condition: promote colonization of the territories. It's sleazy, because

James Douglas knew, when he was standing on PKOLS with my ancestors, that all he needed

to do was buy himself enough time. With the W̱SÁNEĆ increasingly anxious about encroaching

settlement, ironically irritated by tree-cutting and by the murder of one of our messengers,

Douglas needed time. The settlers were on their way, and in the next 30 years, they

would flood into this region.

When Douglas made the agreement with my ancestors to share the land — to share the

land — it gave him the space that he needed to fulfil the requirements of the corporate

agreement he had with Britain. Former Premier, now Ambassador, Horgan spoke clearly

of his belief in Indigenous sovereignty. He talked about rights and title confidently,

like he knew what he was talking about.

I reminded the minister that one way sovereign people recognize claim to land is through

the right to tax. Since it was never surrendered, I asked the minister why the W̱SÁNEĆ

would not be able to recover some of their sovereignty through the collection of revenue

from the trade of the most valuable resource in our territory: real estate. Why can't

the W̱SÁNEĆ collect a portion of the real estate transfer tax?

The minister is a lawyer. He knows it is a reasonable request. He fails to recognize

the elegantly simple solution that I offer him and the Finance Minister. If not just

a basic recognition of humanity, it is a powerful act of reconciliation: the ability

to capture a portion of the wealth-generating capacity of the lands of our unceded

and unsurrendered territories. Until then, the minister must feel some responsibility

for knowingly perpetuating the lie that there is no unanswered question over these

immediately surrounding lands — and, indeed, most of British Columbia — not just for

the sake of closure.

It wasn't until 2008 that I and my relatives were able to borrow money for housing

on our Indian reserve — 2008. That's quite a head start that this government gave

their settler relatives. Centuries-old, outdated ideas, rooted in our government,

inform our systems. They are designed, nurtured and fiercely protected by growing

administrative bureaucracies. They convinced those people, elected to these democratic

institutions, that the only answer is to continue to perpetuate another lie: infinite

growth on legally surrendered land.

[2:40 p.m.]

All the political leaders across the country right now seem to agree on one thing,

from Pierre Poilievre, Justin Trudeau, Premier Doug Ford to our Premier. They answer

the question of how to fix the housing affordability crisis in the same way: build

more supply. All we need to do to lower prices of housing is to build more supply

than demand. In reality, we've not even come close to doing that. So we've fallen

behind.

Additionally, we expect hundreds of thousands of people to migrate and immigrate to

British Columbia each year, adding to the demand of our insufficient housing supply.

The way our local governments have been set up to deliver land use planning and zoning,

a negative incentive existed for mayors and councillors who are mostly property owners

and historically elected only by property owners.

It's not in the interest of the people who currently own property and want the value

of it to increase for there to be more supply than demand. In a profit-driven real

estate system overtly driven by greed, why would the owners of a commodity want to

devalue it?

People flock to public hearings at town halls to argue against increased density because

it will change the form and character of the neighbourhood they were promised when

they bought their property there. This past year people in a neighbourhood in Vancouver

wrote to complain about a child care facility because they didn't like the sound of

children.

My friend, Central Saanich Coun. Bob Thompson, has a copy of one of the oldest maps

of the Saanich Peninsula. It has no lines drawn on it. There are forests and wetlands,

watersheds and prairie. It is the land before the first surveyor's chain began slicing

and dicing it into ever-diminishing sizes. The diminishing returns, fracking — each

time a

section is split, more value is unlocked.

The first settlers arrived to their large farms: Thomson, Verdier, Stelly — their

names also memorialized on the neighbourhood streets. You can visit the Saanich Pioneer

Society Museum in Saanichton to glimpse back in time just 175 years ago.

In the decades that followed, community development patterns continued to be governed

by zoning systems, shaped by governance systems that featured public hearings in front

of locally elected officials who were responsible for managing the fence lines between

one individual property owner's rights and interests and their neighbour's rights

and interests.

The system that we have was not designed to create housing security operating from

a central philosophy that housing is a human right. Up until now, our housing system

has been maintained by managing scarcity. A confluence of factors include a decade

of skyrocketing property values, high inflation, increasing interest rates. It has

squeezed housing affordability in previously unimaginable ways to the point that people

who own property argue that opening the taps and creating more supply is necessary,

obviously unconcerned that the conditions will diminish their property value too much.

Bill 44 is a remarkable piece of legislation because it fundamentally rewrites the

underlying principles of our historic land use planning and development systems. The

zoning creates wealth, and it protects the wealth. Just as individual lots have increased

in value dramatically, Bill 44 has the potential of multiplying the wealth of those

fortunate enough to own those little pieces of land by allowing three or four or six

times the density.

While the Housing Minister will be remembered for generating tremendous wealth, he

will also be recognized for creating a wider gap between those who have and those

who don't. It's unlikely that this government is going to hear many complaints from

property owners. The vast majority have just received a massive windfall. And by the

provincial government circumventing the local government hearing process, the requirements

of local governments to bring their zoning bylaws into compliance, there will be little

point to complaining anyway.

[2:45 p.m.]

But the scale and scope of the lack of housing affordability for both home ownership

and rentals likely won't be met by this initiative either. So the minister goes ahead

and transfers huge wealth to property owners.

The fact that the situation has become so desperate that it is not possible for government

to flood the market with more supply than is needed to actually drive these prices

down, matched with hyper-inflated cost and high interest rates…. I'm concerned that

despite what this legislation is designed to make you feel as a British Columbian,

the system will still be effectively managing scarcity. Does this government have

any intention to create as much abundance as it needs to drive the real estate market

prices down?

When the Minister of Housing was on CBC Victoria with Gregor Craigie, he was asked

about emergency shelters — extreme weather warming centres. Gregor asked him several

times whether the provincial government would fund these initiatives. The minister

kept deflecting back to the key message provided him: "The approach of the ministry

is to move away from the shelter model to focus on long-term housing." No matter how

many times Gregor asked, the minister reframed the short-term question and offered

a long-term solution.

However, the minister knows that the number of stable, supported and affordable housing

units he is delivering is far from sufficient, and obviously, they won't be available

tonight and tomorrow night as the temperature plummets or in a few weeks when another

atmospheric river flows over town, as was the compassionate spirit of Gregor's questioning.

Stemming from our long pursuit of the average person to achieve property ownership,

the classist struggle and stigma of the non-property owner — as I previously mentioned,

renters — have found themselves on a lower rung of the societal hierarchy in North

American culture. When I was elected to Central Saanich council, there was a rule

that landlords had to live on the property they were renting. When this issue came

up, I was shocked by some of the comments about the potential for the neighbourhood

to fall into disrepair, apparently, because of the renters.

Now we expect people to pay 50, 60, 70 percent of their income to rent a home. Over

the past 15 years as housing prices steadily climbed, people who could qualify for

a mortgage were encouraged to make it affordable by buying a place with a secondary

suite so the renter could help the owner pay and afford their debt.

Renters hear their landlords openly talk about how their tenants can't be trusted,

insinuate that they're terrible people and that they need to have the power to be

able to evict them much easier, all of which has a terrible impact on the psychological

well-being of renters, who are constantly living in fear that their housing is unstable.

Now, I know that there is some exaggeration in what I'm saying. The vast majority

of these relationships, as I learned in that rental housing task force I was on, are

good and stable. However, we only hear about the edge cases — the cases of bad tenants

and bad landlords. As a result, we need to have the right-sized context for this discourse.

Our constant cultural undermining of the renter is one of the destabilizing forces

among many in our society today.

The amount of rent people pay is not attached to the amount that they can afford to

pay or based on the median salary of the area or based on the fair price that allows

them to maintain a balanced life. The amount of rent they pay is the amount the market

determines. So people…. Well, they take what they can get where they can get it, and

then they scramble. Scramble is not a sustainable lifestyle. People grow exhausted.

Burn out. Stress out. They get mad. Society meets wrath.

This is the cycle for those who are born in the unfortunate generations, the people

who look at housing and participating in the real estate market as a sci-fi fantasy.

The ones the boomers and the Gen X'ers are convinced are unmotivated sloths, people

who don't want to work with the same ethic that they have, people who are choosing

not to pick up their socks like we once did to get ourselves ahead. Never mind the

reality that these generations cannot save for a down payment for a mortgage because

they're locked into paying their landlord's debt.

[2:50 p.m.]

It's clearly inappropriate to suggest the landlord subsidize their tenant, so there

are very, very few options here. If you get into the rent trap cycle, there are very

few outs. There is minimal mobility from being a renter to being a property owner

in the current real estate market.

Let's be honest. With the volume of supply and the chronological distribution of this

new supply that Bill 44 purports to create, paralleled with increasing immigration,

renters will still be renters, locked into endlessly paying someone else's mortgage

and hearing how terrible and incompetent they are.

It's important to ground this discussion in the reality and the acknowledgment that

we've been building an extraordinary number of commodified units of housing stock

in the last 15 years. Obviously not enough to meet demand. Or maybe just not enough

of the correct form of housing as a result of a number of factors, including immigration.

Our villages, cities, towns, metropolitan areas have all grown immensely. Construction

has been booming, but not all those new units of housing have become homes. At the

same time, the new construction was marketed as an investment vehicle, fully turning

homes into economic units. This is evident in our vernacular. Whenever we talk about

a housing unit, we are talking about an economic unit, not necessarily a home.

That is why the minister can talk about the number of units, behind the ribbons he

and his colleagues cut in front of the cameras, snapping up these visual artifacts

that represent marginal, even laughable, progress. Ultimately, those can be detached

from the problem because he's operating in an economic sphere of commodified housing

units and not from the principle that housing is a human right.

He doesn't need to know how many unhoused and housing-insecure people he's targeting

to support. He just needs to have the number of units he's responsible for building

close at hand so he can repeat it, ad nauseam, to demonstrate government is doing

something.

With construction booming and trades looking for a workforce who can afford to live

in a high-cost region, it's unclear how the minister and this government intend on

building all the necessary supply — the pan-political promise, the silver bullet to

solve this housing affordability crisis. Who is going to build the magic supply?

A little detour. When politicians offer supply as the solution to the crisis, they're

often talking about building new supply. They want to build their way out of it. However,

we've been building housing stock for decades. How much of the current housing stock

is underutilized? We can't accurately answer that question, but anecdotally, there

are many single-family homes in my communities with one or two people living in houses

with many more bedrooms and baths than they need.

This is another difficult discussion that I'm venturing into here, because private

property rights are a sacred cow. Identifying this as a potential solution is probably

going to be seen as controversial. But why hasn't government created a program to

incentivize single people and couples who are oversized to downsize?

The vacancy taxes are an example of the government using a penalty to encourage some

investors to either rent their unit or sell it so it can become somebody's home. What

if the provincial government offered a grant to cover the moving and storage of excess

possessions? What if they offered a substantial tax incentive to those who entered

the program to right-size their housing in an effort to free up some of those empty

bedrooms, either for someone to rent or for the family who needs space for their growing

children?

Another idea that I've proposed to the minister, if that one is venturing into too

much discomfort, is to abandon the notion that B.C. Housing needs to only purpose-build

the solutions. Why not have a program that purchases larger homes, larger buildings

on the market, and transforms them into multi-home buildings — rental buildings managed

by a non-profit housing manager, cooperatives, co-living, strata buildings with their

own governance structure?

None of these ideas have found any fertile soil within the ministry, yet they're all

potential solutions that provide housing much more quickly than B.C. Housing has been

delivering.

Now back to construction. Just another idea to address the minister's insistence that

the housing affordability crisis will be solved by supply alone. Why not invest in

developing modular building systems?

[2:55 p.m.]

Our current construction industry is inefficient. It promotes inefficiency. Trades

cannot find employees for the current volume of construction that is needed, never

mind the massive increase envisioned by the minister. Construction site management

requires an orchestration of trades who drive from job to job across town.

The stigma against modular construction is another one of those strictly classist

cultural artifacts. Look down your nose at the people in the trailer park.

Imagine the efficiency, speed and lean manufacturing we could achieve constructing

components of buildings in modular climate-controlled factories adjacent to the construction

site, modules then transported to the site and assembled like Lego. With modern technology,

we could build attractive high-quality product quickly, drastically limiting waste.

It's good enough for the LNG Canada project supported by this government. Why not

support it for our housing systems?

We hear the stories regularly. Approved projects are not getting out of the ground.

The cost of construction, even after approval, is too high. High costs to borrow construction

capital. Building materials have become more expensive. Developers and trades assume

more risk building the new supply. All factors that are included in the final market

cost of the real estate product.

The financial landscape is challenging the modern homeowner and homebuilder with super-inflated

property values, building costs and higher interest rates. As fixed-term mortgages

come due and existing homeowners are facing down dramatically inflated mortgage payments,

with the majority of those payments going directly to the interest, paying down very

little of the principle, marginal homeowners become more housing insecure.

The water is slowly rising. In the next 18 to 24 months, we will see them increasingly

unstable as well, with more of them drowning as a result of the economic system that

is predicated on maintaining the value of a commodified housing unit rather than the

value of well-housed, secure people.

Now, you might wonder at what point I'll get to the legislation in front of us. Good

fortune to those who wait or to those that are locked in House duty, whichever it

might be, as they look at their watches for their escape.

In passing new laws and soon-to-follow regulations on short-term vacation rentals,

this government has shown a willingness to experience some political discomfort around

housing. They demonstrated this in 2018, when they passed the speculation and vacancy

tax. Unlike some I've witnessed, this B.C. NDP government was unflinching when they

passed that tax.

Bill 44, as best we can see, removes single-family zoning and allows three, four or

six densities on a lot and potentially manifests billions of dollars of real estate

wealth for those who already benefited from being born at the right time and further

widens the gap between those who hold real estate and those who do not.

It dramatically increases the potential impact on outdated, underscoped, unfunded

physical infrastructure liabilities in every community of over 5,000 people in British

Columbia. It removes the ability for local governments to capture critical revenue

needed to pay for infrastructure upgrades that are limitations on the scale of approved

densification.

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

point.

It replaces one-off public hearings with the requirement for more detailed housing

needs assessments and frequent community planning engagement processes. It allows

secondary suites and suites and accessory dwellings in every community in the province.

But it does nothing to require affordability or increased incentives for non-profit,

cooperative, co-housing and other rate-controlled housing options.

When I was a councillor in the district of Central Saanich, my job, for my first term,

2008 to 2011, was chair of the water and wastewater committee. This was where I met

former North Saanich mayor Geoff Orr and how I was introduced to the physical limitations

of our infrastructure.

The infinite growth model needs to have access to an infinite amount of capital to

build and maintain all the structural and mechanical resources necessary so that when

little Susie turns on the tap and when little Johnny flushes the toilet, the expected

happens.

[3:00 p.m.]

The infrastructure built over the last 100 years has done pretty good, but a lot of

it is getting old and nearing its end of life. Much of it is undersized. Think culverts

meet atmospheric river. The Minister of Transportation remembers what happened then.

None of it had an investment program for replacement, nor did we consider applying

an inflationary factor in the accounting to accommodate the reality that a new bridge

today does not cost the same as the one that it is replacing.

I run into this every day in my constituency office, with respect to B.C. Ferries.

I fight hard to make sure that B.C. Ferries supports the beautiful communities and

needs of my constituents, and the drive-on experience that I had when I was a kid

— when my dad and I would go over to the Pacific Coliseum and watch our hometown boy,

Russ Courtnall, play for our beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.

The marine highway system we expect, based on our past experience, has changed. Standards,

costs and labour markets are just some of the reasons why the system that we've come

to expect to deliver in a certain way is no longer able to meet those expectations.

This government expects the infrastructure — which, we have known for decades, will

be insufficient — to suddenly and magically become sufficient.

Earlier, I shared a pivotal moment in my life, sitting on my seatless couch, my grandmother's

couch. There's another such moment when I sat in the chair in Gary Nason's office.

He was the chief administrator in the district of Central Saanich, and I was a four-

or five-month-old councillor, eager to do all the things. I had a big learning curve,

as a kid who grew up on the other side of the line — the side without zoning, planning

and development, public hearings, development cost charges, land taxes, mill rates

and constituents.

Gary was patient, and he was a great leader and teacher, as was the mayor at the time,

Jack Mar. Gary spent time with me to show how the federal and provincial conditional

granting systems worked — or didn't, depending on where you were located. On the federal-provincial

side of the equation, they got to collect a vast majority of the wealth from a seemingly

limitless tax potential and then distribute it based on their own politically driven

priority.

One year, we were looking for funds for a fire hall, but Christy Clark was funding

park benches. We borrowed the money for the fire hall, and we applied for a grant

for the park benches. On the municipal side of the relationship, you just take what

you're given. Even though politically, mayors and councillors are closest to the public,

and much of their work is driven from grassroots community advocacy, it's beneficial

if their priorities align with the federal-provincial priority. How else are MPs and

MLAs going to cut ribbons?

Sitting in that chair in Gary's office that day, I realized my path was to the provincial

government. Ottawa is too far from W̱SÁNEĆ. At the 2009 Association of Vancouver Island

and Coastal Communities, I stood and asked the then Leader of the Official Opposition,

B.C. NDP leader Carole James, if she formed government one day, would she fix the

broken fiscal system supporting our local governments? She said no, she would not.

When Premier Gordon Campbell took the stage the next day, I asked him if he would

change the framework that funds municipalities and regional districts so that they

were not perpetually chasing funds for critical infrastructure investments. He said,

no, he would not. They both kept their promise.

In 2010, I was part of the conversations at the Union of B.C. Municipalities that

produced important advice on how the provincial government could secure the fiscal

futures for local governments. Thirteen years later, that project is still incomplete,

and our infrastructure continues to decay. From the multi-billion-dollar surplus found

by the Finance Minister prior to Budget 2023, the Minister of Municipal Affairs announced

a $1 billion fund and a new distribution formula, which mostly worked.

[3:05 p.m.]

The exception is to help people who live in electoral areas. Particularly in my riding,

the ones in Saanich North and the Islands, on the southern Gulf Islands and Salt Spring

Island, were not treated equally to their urban cousins. I shared this with the minister.

I shared this with the Minister of Housing. I shared this with this government. Nothing

changed.

This program is a hopeful start, but it could run for the next 100 years, and it would

still fail to meet the need of local governments, never mind the added pressure that

Bill 44 will create.

Going back to Central Saanich and the conditional grants, this is how absurd the current

system is. The federal government creates a fund matched and administered by the province.

Central Saanich has a critical sewer pump, desperately needing replacement — a high-pressure

system, densely populated neighbourhood, adjacent to a sensitive ecosystem. They applied

and are denied. They applied again and were denied again.

Look, if the government's model is to borrow for this replacement, then it won't be

long before the community has reached its borrowing capacity, and that will be well

before there is suitable infrastructure across the municipality. Overlay this with

the pressure Bill 44 puts on that sewer pump. It's a single-family home neighbourhood,

8,000- to 14,000-square-foot lots, big lots.

None of what Bill 44 has considered was considered when the neighbourhood was originally

developed. It was designed for single-family homes. The underground and aboveground

infrastructure was not scoped for a 400 percent increase in density, and now the provincial

government has unilaterally stated that the neighbourhood can load an extra 400 percent

more density there without planning.

Ad hoc, top-down decision-making, designing the future of a place without the context

of the place. That's the reason why it leaves the taste in my mouth that this makes

more sense as a real estate investment play than it does making healthy community

development. And that is not assuming that the system that we currently have is achieving

healthy community development, because it's not. Not necessarily, I should say.

As I mentioned, the health care system can barely deliver substandard care now, never

mind piling 400 percent more people into the same space. The schools in those neighbourhoods

are currently running at 95 to 98 percent efficiency. That's almost the perfect number.

That means they're being funded, and they're not overcrowded. The buildings are aging,

but the condition of the buildings is still good.

This is not the case everywhere in every community across the province. The health

care systems and education systems are not funded or flexible enough to handle this

scale of change. What is most disturbing is that there doesn't appear to be any inkling

that this government has any intention of thinking about the planning that is needed

to support local governments in making these investments in their infrastructure.

As a passing comment in the Housing Minister's briefing material for Bill 44, they

celebrate the $1 billion building communities fund and pretend like it will be enough

to placate the needs of our local government colleagues. It also mentions a $51 million

promise that was made at the UBCM this year.

Both of these numbers are remarkably low compared to the well-known infrastructure

needs of our communities. The fact that we have not got a system that was designed

to support the renewal of our infrastructure. We just had a history of building it

and then pretending like it was going to last forever.

Well, a lot of that infrastructure is coming to the end of its life. That's why earlier

this year, I called on the province to commit to make this building communities fund

an annual payment, $1 billion a year, at least until the new fiscal foundation is

created to support the growth of our communities as it was envisioned here.

I can't think of a better way to actually put the onus on the provincial government

to do the necessary work and to commit to the necessary work to opening up the resources

so our communities can actually support the burden that this provincial government

is downloading onto them.

[3:10 p.m.]

So how does Bill 44 impact my communities in Saanich North and the Islands? I'll separate

them into three distinct categories: the Saanich Peninsula, Salt Spring Island and

the southern Gulf Islands.

The communities on the Saanich Peninsula are the classic definition of urban sprawl,

single-family homes, from modest to massive, on large, unserviced lots. The primary

challenge I've heard about this change to zoning is the range of issues I raised just

previously about the capacity of the urban infrastructure to support the increased

density.

I have long recognized that our land settlement pattern through the 1960s to the 1980s,

when most of the neighbourhoods on the Saanich Peninsula were developed, was inefficient.

The vast majority of the housing stock built on these massive lots is large, single-family

homes built parallel to the road, directly in the middle of the lot, with 4,000 to

6,000 square feet of lawn in the front- and backyards. The value of those properties

has increased from about $100,000 when they were brand-new to around $1 million today.

The shoreline on the Saanich Inlet, Satellite Channel around Roberts Bay in Sidney–North

Saanich represents some of the most expensive real estate in British Columbia — not

old-money Victoria, like Oak Bay, but deep pockets, nonetheless. Many of those houses

— not all, many of them — are part-time residences, real estate investments, some

project real estate, people building a dream home to sell to someone else to live

in.

While Central Saanich and North Saanich have had modest growth. Sidney's commercial

area has seen a boom in condo development. My office is in one of those buildings,

all of which have been — except the one that I'm in, actually — market product. They

provide a little case study, for the Housing Minister, of what happens when property

is redeveloped based on a philosophy that if you build more supply, you automatically

get lower prices in a market that doesn't restrict who can enter it or artificially

cap the price.

Hundreds of new units have been added to the housing market, and as you guessed, the

vast majority of them have been at current market value. The aging affordable housing

it replaces is gone, and the people that lived in those spaces have been displaced.

I've been around local government on the Saanich Peninsula for 15 years. I'm not the

rookie councillor anymore. I know the state of our infrastructure; I know the state

of the reserve funds. With hundreds of millions of dollars to repair and upgrade the

infrastructure, I know that without the capacity to raise those funds through development

cost charges, which are usually applied at rezonings, or a fund — reliable, from the

provincial and federal governments — to support the infrastructure, Bill 44 is little

more than a government appearing to do something.

On Salt Spring, things get more complicated. I know that the Premier and his Housing

Minister know this, because they've been involved in several meetings where the problems

and the challenges have been described with clarity. Salt Spring has more than 12,000

full-time residents. It's the largest unincorporated community in the province, managed

by federal, provincial and two local government bodies. The CRD provides the services.

The Islands Trust, which operates on a preserve-and-protect mandate, does the land

use planning. It is somewhere between the 25th- and 30th-largest community in the

province. There are about 200 municipalities in the province.

Historically, land use zoning on the island created massive, multi-acre lots, serviced

by a patchwork of locally run improvement districts that manage local water and sewer,

or the properties were individually serviced by wells and septic tanks. The roads

are owned and managed — with all due respect to the Minister of Transportation — somewhat

poorly by the province. B.C. Ferries provides the transportation connections to the

rest of British Columbia.

[3:15 p.m.]

Salt Spring finds itself in a rurban purgatory in British Columbia. It is considered

rural when it needs to be urban, and it is considered urban when it needs to be considered

rural. Its connection to the capital regional district is both beneficial and a drawback,

and its inclusion into the Islands Trust wraps it in an argument that is grounded

in a legislative policy designed to address problems of 50 years ago, not the problems

of today.

That is not the dog whistle that people on both sides of this deeply entrenched battle

between growth and no growth may think that it is. It's not. There's no such thing

as infinite growth. Salt Spring Island is an island and has real limitations on the

number of people that it can carry.

Again, with unlimited money, energy and ambition, we could build unlimited water desalinization

plants, wastewater treatment facilities and new pipes everywhere to accommodate infinite

growth. However, as the Premier and the Ministers of Housing, Transportation, Health,

Mental Health and Addictions, Education, Public Safety and Finance have all made clear

to us, there's not an infinite supply of cash for Salt Spring. There's not even a

modest amount of money, nor a desire to create land use and community planning that

could facilitate it.

Instead, we have B.C. Housing fluttering around the island, claiming that they are

going to purpose-deliver 24 or so modular units of supported housing, and somehow

that will create housing stability for the thousands of people who are currently housing-insecure

— trades and other working professionals, front-line workers that are needed for the

basic functioning of a community. They even suggested that since they were building

these supported units, the emergency shelter was no longer needed.

We fought back and let them know that the need is so much greater than their paltry

offerings that they announced nearly two years ago and have yet to even break ground

on. Just as we warned, B.C. Housing has run into the wall of bureaucracy and the real

physical limitations, including purchasing modular units that were not suitable and

had to be renovated. This project has ground to a halt. Now people have just turned

the site into a campground.

I facilitated dozens of meetings with the Housing Minister, the Premier, local elected

officials and B.C. Housing officials to plead with them to take a different approach

with Salt Spring Island. I pled with the Health Minister and the Mental Health and

Addictions Minister for them to spend some of the billions they brag about spending

in these portfolios. Each of them shrug and tell me there's nothing they can do.

Perhaps it's time for this government to have their words reflect the body language

and just admit to the people of Salt Spring Island that the bureaucratic administration

that is being managed here is so broken that there's nothing that can be done for

this community. I don't believe it, but we need to start to see real action. My local

government colleagues are exasperated. They need this government's support, not the

understanding and well-wishing.

On the outer Gulf Islands — Pender, Mayne, Galiano, Saturna, Sidney, Piers — 60 of

them, each of these communities face similar issues as Salt Spring but each to their

own contextualized extent. All of the issues I've raised regarding Salt Spring exist

on the other islands. The challenge they face with building four to six units of affordable

housing is inexplicable: hundreds of hours of volunteer time, like Sisyphus endlessly

pushing the boulder up the mountain, each obstacle navigated revealing another obstacle.

I only separate the southern Gulf Islands from Salt Spring because the scale and scope

of the challenges they face are dramatically different. The call to the provincial

government remains the same.

We can celebrate opening a child care facility on Mayne Island together — I know that

members of this government leaned heavily into that one — but if there's no housing

for early childhood educators, if there is no housing for teachers in the public school

and no action is taken to address the systems that continue to fail those communities,

then what progress has been made?

[3:20 p.m.]

Bill 44 does nothing to create or incentivize the construction of affordable, rate-controlled,

non-profit, cooperative and co-housing options that would allow more upward potential

for people in the rental cycle.

In the second reading speech made by the minister in support of Bill 44, there was

only a passing reference to affordable housing that may be possible if someone chooses

to build it, an admission that this exercise is an exercise in market housing. It

does not qualify any of the wealth that can be extracted from turning a $1 million

home into three, four or six $1 million homes. It doesn't say: "Look, if you're going

to take this golden handshake from the Housing Minister, then you have to produce

a percentage of units that are below market value." It doesn't do that.

Every single unit of housing created through Bill 44, with the exception of the few

that choose to build below market, will go into the real estate market with the assumption

that we will get a different outcome than the one that we've been getting since social

stability became the sacrificial lamb for the housing market. It's remarkable.

I have a constituent who read Les Leyne's

article quoting me talking about decommodifying

housing and remarked that I sounded socialist. Another person suggested to me that

I wasn't compassionate enough about the effort and hard work they've invested into

buying their home. I'm sorry that our society hasn't got over the fears of socialism.

It's a long history, but in the end, it's the constructs of capitalists protecting

their individual interests.

university where the curriculum clearly fails to accurately define socialism and communism

and Marxism. This speech is not about socialism. It's about reimagining an interconnected

world where we look at each other and we agree that it is better for all of us if

each of us is securely housed.

Decommodifying housing is not about destroying people and their economic security.

It is the opposite. It's about rebalancing markets so they serve, not dominate, the

humans and human societies that constructed them.

It made little sense for us to strip the natural resources that sustain life on planet

Earth, and it makes even less sense for us to defend socioeconomic systems that do

the same thing to our communities and our societies. But that's exactly what we've

done.

I think we need to recognize the damage that toxic levels of individualism have done

to our communities, to our planet, to our quality of life. People are struggling to

keep up — keep up with the demanding expectations, keep up with the bills, keep up

with the Joneses, struggling to have good food energizing them, sturdy shelter over

their head.

Housing and food are human rights. It's what a compassionate and just society promises

to their people. And if that doesn't motivate you, well, worry not because it's also

good economics. The instability created by food and shelter insecurity, by the housing

system designed to create wealth now creating poverty, is going to be far more costly

for us all.

We need to have the difficult and uncomfortable dialogue about resetting our expectations

from the returns on our real estate investment. We need to destigmatize renters as

second-class citizens. There needs to be a massive realignment so that rent and mortgage

payments, property value, are aligned with what people who live and work in the community

can afford to pay without bankrupting them, without limiting their decisions about

post-secondary education and their desire to start a family.

This topic is hugely toxic because there are so many hopes, dreams and promises, expectations

and wealth attributed to it.

[3:25 p.m.]

But government needs to get creative about how we can recognize some of that wealth

that people have built over the decades in other ways, through other means — just

like the W̱SÁNEĆ people did by having free food but food with value — not stigmatize

or leave people behind who weren't born at the perfect time.

HÍSW̱ḴE SIÁM .

A. Walker: I appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak to Bill 44, which represents some

of the most significant changes that we've seen in the way housing is regulated in

this province, probably since the Agricultural Land Commission was brought in in 1973.

I've shared stories in this House before about some of the challenges that renters

in our community face, whether that's seniors who are living in their cars, relying

on the pool to get cleaned up, relying on where they park to ensure that they're safe,

or whether that's people who are working — sometimes, two people in a household —

jobs and living in trailers and campgrounds just trying to get by, not getting ahead.

The housing challenges in our provinces are real.

I say this without irony, but when you talk to a parent who lives in a school bus

who is raising a child to go to school that isn't able to every day make sure that

that child has lunch, a lot of this comes back to housing and security. For those

that are in campgrounds — in many ways, they're the lucky ones.

The housing challenges have meant that homelessness in Oceanside has increased by

20 percent in the last two years. It is very timely to mention that we don't have

a cold weather shelter in Parksville or Qualicum Beach, so those folks that are unhoused

right now are going to look for a dark and cold and wet winter ahead.

I appreciate the impetus for amending the way housing works in British Columbia. I

think, fundamentally, the intentions of this act I agree with. The idea that local

governments have to plan for not five years' worth of growth, but 20 years' worth

of growth — there's tremendous value in that to ensure that official community plans

align with the housing needs of our communities and to focus the community building

exercise around official community plans instead of individual spot zoning.

There are some significant values to that, but the challenge is that there are lots

of pieces in this bill that I think communities like Parksville-Qualicum will have

some real challenges with. In our community, most people live in single family homes,

so this will disproportionately impact communities like French Creek more than other

parts of the province.

I'm just going to quickly run through the bill here and what some of the changes will

mean in our community. The first one that jumps out is the limitation on local governments

to be able to rely on previous protections when it comes to enabling this new small-scale

multifamily housing. That means in a single family lot, we can now expect to see three

or four or six or more homes, depending on what the regulation states.

Previously, prior to this bill, local governments, when they were adopting zoning,

could rely on some protections that would limit growth, limit density and limit investment

into housing in areas where the protection of the natural environment, it's ecosystems

River and the corridor that's there is relied on not just for the fish and all the

aquatic habitat, but that's where we get our water.

The city of Parksville has been working very carefully over the years with the regional

district of Nanaimo, with Land Trust of B.C. and B.C. Parks Foundation and all these

great organizations to preserve this land.

But once this bill passes, local government will not be able to say no to the density

in these areas based on the protection of the natural environment. That will mean

that it will lock these areas in to higher densities, and it will drive up value of

this land, making it very difficult to renature these areas for the future.

There are regions — and I'll focus on Qualicum Beach, because it's my home — where

there are protections in place that limit development in hazardous conditions. What

that means in Qualicum Beach is we have this sand bank that runs along the highway

that, in the event of an earthquake, would pose significant challenges, not just to

the people on the highway below, but those that live above, so restrictions exist

right now within the development permit areas that restrict density and restrict growth

in areas that could potentially be a hazardous condition.

Once this bill is brought into effect, local governments will no longer be able to

say: "No, that's not where we want to see development." The same thing takes into

account floodplains.

[3:30 p.m.]

The development in a floodplain…. Once it is built, it is very expensive to then relocate

those people. The ability for local governments to restrict density in those areas

is gone. The protection for farming is no longer permitted. The protection of a revitalization

area with a commercial intent is no longer permitted. The protections of former character

covenants…. Of course, we can recognize that does drive up the cost of housing.

In communities like Qualicum Beach, which have spent generations and invested heavily

in the character of our village neighbourhood, there is a desire to be able to maintain

that.

I find it shocking that even the ability to promote energy conservation, water conservation

and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not things that can be considered by local

government, once this act comes into effect, when it comes to these new, small-scale,

multifamily housing units.

The other challenge is when it comes to heritage properties. Again, they — local governments,

our town councils, our city councils — will have much less power to protect the historical

buildings in our communities when those could be used for housing.

The next item that jumps out to me is: when you have an official community plan that

designates an area for density, or just an area for development, if the application

is in line with the official community plan, the local government is no longer allowed

to hold a public hearing.

On the surface, that's probably not a bad thing. I mean, we really want to focus a

lot of our planning processes into the official community plan and take away from

the spot, one-off public hearings, where neighbours come in and talk about traffic

and parking and some of the things that we hear when we're on councils. The challenge

with eliminating the need for public hearings for rezoning for anything that aligns

with the official community plan is it has the risk of dramatically politicizing the

official community plan process.

We do not want to be in a situation where communities are really underestimating the

development that they would see in a downtown area, where we want to see development,

just because they lose control over that type of development. That is a concern I

have, but I think it can be moderated through policy.

The official community plans that communities have will now be required to anticipate

the housing needs in our communities. That is an incredibly useful thing. Reflecting

on members who have served on town councils, who have taken the time to go through

the planning process, we want to make sure that these official community plans…. They

are long; sometimes they're 300 or 400 pages long.

They should talk about the growth, that they can anticipate where that growth will

be and what that will look like. This bill will require that every five years, the

housing needs assessment will be received by council, and within a year of that, that

councils then go through the official community planning process again.

I think that makes sense, the idea that the official community plan is aligned with

the housing needs assessment. But the challenge is: when you look at a bill like this,

where everything is mandated as opposed to encouraged, where we're really using the

stick on something like this, it runs the risks of unintended consequences that can't

be foreseen.

A perfect example is chatting with a mayor — I won't say which community in my constituency

— when this was introduced. He said: "You know, we're going to make sure the council

changes our growth containment boundary to align with our downtown core, so none of

these rules apply." When you have rules or laws that mandate local government do something,

you run the risk that…. These are creative people that will find ways around it that

will have a detrimental impact on creating more housing that we desperately need.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

The act states that these new rules will come into effect June of next year, which

will likely mean that anything between now and June of next year will be put on hold.

There's a tremendous potential for up-zoning and more return on investment. So there's

a chance that we will actually see a reduction in development over the next little

while, while the regulation is being developed and until this act comes into effect.

One of the things that's interesting in the way this is written is if you have an

existing single-family lot, if there's a house that doesn't have a suite in it, councils

have to accept that. If there is an additional building, councils have to accept that

there could be a suite in that.

The process right now, if somebody wants to put a suite in their yard…. In Qualicum

Beach, in Parksville, these are encouraged right now. It goes through a public engagement

process, where the neighbours can talk about the impact of having a two-storey suite

in their backyard that overlooks the neighbouring yards, and it becomes a more collaborative

process.

[3:35 p.m.]

When you require that local governments have to accept these things, there will be

unintended consequences in communities that will create animosity between neighbours.

There's a provision in here that the maximum units, if you are near a bus stop, is

more than the minimum. So we've heard the minister refer to the minimum new single-family

zone to be three or maybe four units. I'm not sure. Regulation will make that clear.

And near a bus stop, it will be six or more units.

In a community like mine, where the bus stops change, it creates an interesting situation

where you could have a lot that has six units on it that is all of a sudden legally

non-conforming as these bus routes change. I would hate to see…. As this act states

so many times that things "must" be done instead of "may," I would really hate to

see communities come together to try to have less bus stops to try to ensure that

there isn't density that comes into their neighbourhoods. And that's a significant

risk.

When we have rules that mandate local governments do something, and those governments

represent a community that doesn't want to see these things, they will get creative,

and it will have impacts on our communities.

Now, these rules won't affect every single-family lot. There are some carve-outs here.

Land that is already protected under the Heritage Conservation Act…. Those will not

be applied here. What I find interesting is the heritage designation process. If your

property has been designated by a local government before the act comes into effect,

it's fine, but you won't be able to protect those properties after the date.

There's also a requirement that for this to come into effect, you have to be connected

to a water and a sewer system operated by a local government. It doesn't have to say

that that water system has enough water to serve the neighbours. It just has to be

connected.

It also doesn't apply to lots that are more than one acre, and we've heard that, through

regulation, there will be additional changes that will come from this. It provides

government with the ability to define what an urban containment boundary is. It allows

government to define regulations around what bus stops could be and the sighting and

the size and the dimension and location of the housing units.

Basically, the things that matter to people in my community…. You know, what's the

setback? What's the maximum coverage on a lot? What are the height restrictions? So

these will be set through regulation later, which creates some challenges.

This act is going to be coming into effect June of next year. If these regulations

were a little bit more thought through, we would be able to start that zoning process

in our communities to see the types of housing that this government wants to see.

But by having all of this in regulation that comes in after the fact, we're going

to see a lag between when the act is coming into effect and when some of these housing

units will come through.

The zoning bylaws are also changed in the sense that local government has to accept

these numbers of units in these single-family lots. They have no choice. They must.

But it also changes the Local Government Act to require that councils accept all zonings

that meet the permitted use and density within the official community plan.

So it'd be interesting to see what that looks like in practice, but it could very

dramatically change not just the process for what is approved, but as I said before,

when you go through the official community planning process, local governments may

be downzoning things just to ensure that they are not going to see the types of development

in their community that would happen without their control.

The provision that has come up in question period is the parking provision. So if

you live near a bus stop, local governments will no longer have the ability to require

off-street parking. I think, in most circumstances, that's probably reasonable. We

want to ensure that people get out of their cars and create less car-dependent communities.

I see that as a plus.

The challenge is, again, that local governments are not allowed anymore to even have

a conversation about what that off-street parking looks like. We want to encourage

people to take a bus. But if you create a neighbourhood where the density is so much

that people can't park in their own communities, it makes it very difficult to raise

a family in a community where you have to walk several blocks every time you hop in

your car.

Qualicum Beach…. Much like many other communities in this province, they're car-dependent

communities, and that could create some challenges for folks.

There are some additional powers that have been granted to the minister. I won't go

through these. The act is important in the sense that it's creating an opportunity

for housing, but a lot of these powers are going to be coming through regulation.

[3:40 p.m.]

If a rezoning is taking too long, as far as the small, multifamily sites or even in

general, it provides power to the government to step in, to mandate local governments

to move forward with that zoning. Oddly enough, that power is no longer applicable

after 2031. I'm not sure what happens after that point, but maybe that's the end of

our housing crisis. It provides for additional powers here and then goes through the

Vancouver Charter.

In our communities, the challenge with this upzoning is that it doesn't take into

account the strain on our infrastructure. We know that this will impact communities

like Parksville, Qualicum Beach and French Creek more so than other communities, because

this is how our communities were built. They were not planned for four units on every

lot in these subdivisions, which means we don't have the water infrastructure. We

don't have the sewer infrastructure. To require this on government without really

planning it through is going to have some significant unintended consequences to the

ratepayers.

To dramatically upsize the water service or the sewer service in a community that's

already established is a very expensive undertaking, and it will refocus government

from focusing on their downtowns, where we want this development, into these other,

more car-dependent communities, which I'm not sure is really what the goal of this

act is.

Local governments know best about their own communities, and they are the ones that

are able to listen to the needs of their community. In French Creek, for example,

we don't have the water units for any new developments, full stop, regardless of these

new rules. If somebody wanted to subdivide a lot and put a new home in, there is not

enough water in French Creek for that. We've seen the water aquifer go down substantially,

both in quantity and quality. To force local governments to rezone these properties

to allow for four or more units in a community that doesn't have access to the water

is incredibly shortsighted. If you have a house that when you turn on the tap, water

doesn't come out, that is not a home.

When we look at the wastewater treatment plant, there's a $123 million investment

that's going to be required for that wastewater treatment plant. When the Minister

of Municipal Affairs did her tour on the Island, announcing different investments

in the areas, the regional district of Nanaimo was overlooked. This is a significant

investment that is going to be required in order to see more homes built in our community.

It is just not acceptable to leave that to local government. So $123 million for a

community as small as ours is a significant burden, and it's holding back development.

The other challenges are not just…. When we talk about infrastructure, it's not just

water and sewer. We have infrastructure like the hospital in Nanaimo. We have seen

some investment from this government, and I appreciate that: the new high acuity unit,

the new intensive care unit. But that's six net new beds.

If we dramatically increase the population in the cities of Nanaimo and Parksville

and French Creek and Qualicum Beach, we're going to need to see more investment in

our hospital. Local government has stepped up. They have the ability to pay for a

patient tower and a catheterization lab. But the province isn't coming to the table

to do their 60 percent of this investment.

When I was on council, we always heard about downloading. I thought: "This is great.

Local government is in a position to be able to best represent its community, tax

directly and be more responsive." But when you have a provincial government that is

forcing local government to build more homes, but doesn't come to the table for the

wastewater treatment plant and doesn't come to the table for the hospital, it's putting

an unfair burden on communities like Parksville and Qualicum Beach.

That also extends beyond just health care. It's getting into transportation. Traffic

is something we all live with. On our island, for whatever reason, we don't have interchanges

at many of our major intersections on our highway. The more we build up, the more

that pressure is going to be felt.

I think there are some misconceptions, as well, when we talk about increasing density,

that that's going to necessarily lead to more affordable options. We have two communities

in the constituency side by side, Qualicum Beach and Parksville. Parksville has been

growing at a fairly good clip. We've seen apartment buildings go up quite dramatically.

Qualicum Beach has been pretty quiet.

Even with that dramatic growth, we haven't seen the cost of rent go down. In fact,

the average cost of rent with this development has gone up. My concern, as we look

to increase housing density, is that if our goal is to increase affordability, this

may not get us to where we need to go.

[3:45 p.m.]

Of course, there are the environmental concerns. People move to Qualicum Beach, and

they move to Parksville, because they want to live in a community that is in nature.

If we increase the parcel coverage dramatically, we're going to see the deforestation

of our communities. We're going to see a lack of tree canopy, which, again, creates

It's not just about habitat. These natural assets are absolutely integral to ensuring

River or elsewhere.

It's not just about habitat. These natural assets are absolutely integral to ensuring

that our stormwater is able to repenetrate into our aquifer, which we rely on for

our drinking water. So when we talk about environmental impacts, it's not just that

we don't want to see change. It will have a dramatic impact on our ability to be able

to provide water to our community.

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

I think it's important that when we talk about our housing changes, that we talk about

some of the alternatives that we could be doing in our province. When we focus on

densifying suburban regions, which is what this act does, it takes the planning energy

away from the downtown cores, which is where we want to see that density. It's where

we want to see that investment.

In our community, I can just imagine, once this takes effect, the impact it will have

on our planning department, neighbour against neighbour, asking: "What is allowed?

Why can they do this? How do we stop it?" Our planning departments are only so large,

and if they can't focus their energies on our nodal communities, we will not see the

growth where we want it, and that means that we will not see the vibrancy of our downtowns.

These are where people go for experiences. We go to cafes, we go to bookstores, pubs.

It's about bringing people together. If we're forcing more people to live in more

suburban areas, all we're doing is relying on our cars. That's not the future that

I think that this government, and it's certainly not the future that I want to see

in our province.

When we look on Vancouver Island, we have a lack of Crown land, which is a challenge

when we want to look at provincial investment into public housing. But we still have

a corridor that runs the length of the island. The Island Corridor Foundation currently

owns it. It's being broken up, and that rail corridor could dramatically link our

nodal communities together in a way that creates communities that are interconnected,

that don't rely on cars, that can see density go up in places that people would accept

them.

I would certainly hope that, as we see other housing bills move forward and other

investments into housing on the Island, this government looks at that that corridor

as not only for movement of goods but the movement of people, so that we can build

communities that don't rely on the automobile.

As I mentioned, in this province, 93 percent of the land is owned by us: taxpayers,

people in the province, yet I haven't seen an initiative for a new community in our

province since the failed attempt just on the Malahat there. This is a tremendous

opportunity for the province to really show leadership in housing. We want to see

walkable communities. We want to see communities that people can use active transportation,

communities where we have 30 percent of the land dedicated to nature.

We can do that from scratch. We have parts of Vancouver Island, parts of the valley

that are owned by the province that really wouldn't even require significant investment

from the province. It's just a matter of granting developers the right to develop

communities in participation with First Nations with a clear vision of what we want

the future of British Columbia to look like.

I think downloading the density into suburban areas, onto local government is…. I

mean, that's one way of building more homes, but I would much rather see purpose-built

communities that people from around the world would look at and say: "That is the

future of housing, and that's what we want to see in our own community."

The member for Saanich North and the Islands mentioned the idea of prefabricated homes.

We see in California and Washington State some companies that have set up very impressive,

premanufactured home opportunities where they can, in a factory setting, build a four-,

five-, six-storey apartment building, flatpack it, ship it to a site, and, in less

than a week, have an entire apartment building built.

If B.C. Housing used an initiative like that where they prebought 10,000 units and

then asked local governments, "Where do you want them?", I can assure you that there

will be communities that say, "Yes, please. Right here." The province can get that

money back.

It's not like we're talking about massive amounts of money that will be invested and

not recuperated, but we could set up a structure where that money is then brought

back into government and government is made whole so that we could see housing built

quicker, more cheaply, with quality homes that people could move in in a very quick

way.

There are some great programs that exist right now through B.C. Housing. HousingHub

is a good program. The challenge is that it hasn't really kept up with the rates of

inflation and some of the challenges that developers are facing.

[3:50 p.m.]

I would hope, as we discuss Bill 44 and the massive densification of our suburbs,

government would also look at some of the programs that already exist in our own province

that aren't really working to their maximum potential.

When B.C. Housing does commit to make a presentation to a local council, as we saw

in Parksville recently, I hope they would show up. Local governments want to work

with government. They want to work with B.C. Housing. They want to address the needs

in our community.

We saw recently that the city of Parksville invited B.C. Housing to come and answer

questions. "Where is it that we are going in our community?" "How are we going to

address the need?" With ten minutes of notice, B.C. Housing said: "We're just not

going to be able to make this meeting today."

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

The last item I want to quickly mention is the first-time-homebuyers grant. We talk

about the ability to dramatically densify our suburban areas. But when you're a first-time

homebuyer and you look at that cap…. It says $500,000 is the limit, and you will not

be eligible for the grant otherwise. Even with laneway suites, if we set them up as

stratas, in our community, you're still looking at a half a million dollars. I would

hope the government would look at this first-time-homebuyers grant as an opportunity,

adjust the levels and ensure that we can get first-time homebuyers into homes.

I just want to reiterate that I fully recognize that we're in a housing crisis. We

see not just seniors. We see everybody struggling with this. Families are having a

hard time paying their mortgage or paying their rent and looking after other bills.

As we hear from the opposition all the time, B.C. is now the most expensive jurisdiction

in all of North America. That's not something to be proud of.

While this will increase the number of housing units in some of our communities, it

doesn't address the core issue, which is that housing is just completely unaffordable

for many people in our communities. As the member for Saanich North and the Islands

mentioned, this is a windfall for those that own homes. For those who don't own homes,

it may not provide that avenue to get into home ownership.

We need to ensure that there's business certainty. It's not local governments that

build housing. It's not the province that builds housing. It's builders that build

housing. And when the rules change or when there are proposed rules and the re