Carney, Singh announce housing plans; Poilievre pledges to fast track resource projects

Liberal Leader Mark Carney and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh both released housing pledges Monday, while Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he would create a “national energy corridor” across Canada.

The pattern of daily policy rollouts continued into the second week of the campaign for the April 28 federal election, but party plans are likely to be disrupted later this week, when U.S. President Donald Trump is scheduled to reveal “reciprocal” tariffs on a wide range of countries.

Also, the one-month pause on 25-per-cent tariffs for goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is set to expire on Wednesday.

Mr. Carney released his party’s housing platform on Monday at the College of Carpenters and Allied Trades in Vaughan, Ont., presenting it as part of his planned response to U.S. tariff threats.

“We are facing the biggest crisis of our lifetimes, and we are going to build our way out of it,” he said, adding that current high housing costs are due to limited supply. “We will build at a pace not seen since the Second World War.”

The Liberal Leader is promising to halve municipal development charges for five years and create a federal agency aimed at boosting the speed of residential construction.

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The party is promising to double Canada’s current rate of residential construction over the next decade to reach 500,000 homes a year.

One of the central planks is the creation of a new federal entity called “Build Canada Homes,” which would act as a developer and take over some responsibilities from the existing Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

The party said the new entity would build affordable housing at scale, including on public lands. It will also issue bulk orders of units from manufacturers in a way that encourages skilled trades apprenticeships.

The notion of building more homes on federally owned land – such as old post offices, office buildings or parking lots that are often in central areas of cities across the country – has gained increasing attention of late as a response to growing housing pressures. Such properties are sometimes referred to as “lazy land” by housing experts, because they could be put to more productive use.

A Globe and Mail analysis published last year found that there is enough federal land available to house 750,000 people. While Ottawa has historically sold off its unwanted properties, the 2024 budget promised to put homes on “every possible” site of federal land.

The Conservative Leader has also campaigned heavily on a pledge to boost housing, but with a different approach.

He has said the Liberal plans are overly bureaucratic. He has promised to cut some existing federal housing programs such as the Housing Accelerator Fund to offset the fiscal cost of significant tax breaks for the purchase of a new home.

Mr. Poilievre was also in Vaughan last week, where he announced a plan to waive the GST for homebuyers on the purchase of new homes less than $1.3-million.

Just days before calling the election, Mr. Carney made a government announcement that said Ottawa would waive the GST for first-time homebuyers on homes at or below $1-million.

Mr. Singh promised last week that he would use suitable federal Crown land to build more than 100,000 rent-controlled homes in the next decade and $1-billion to purchase more land for construction.

The NDP Leader announced more housing pledges Monday in Victoria, saying the NDP would retrofit 3.3 million homes in Canada and pay for it by cutting supports for big oil and gas companies.

Mr. Singh said 2.3 million low-income households would get free energy-saving retrofits such as heat pumps, air sealing and fresh insulation under the NDP plan. The party would spend $1.5-billion annually over 10 years to complete the upgrades.

The NDP said it would pay for its proposed retrofits by cutting annual subsidies and tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. Citing figures from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the party said cutting those supports would save Ottawa $1.8-billion a year.

Meanwhile, Mr. Poilievre expanded Monday on one of his campaign’s core themes: that the economic threats from the United States warrant an aggressive expansion of Canada’s oil and gas sector.

Speaking in Saint John, Mr. Poilievre pledged to create a “national energy corridor” across Canada, within which approvals for pipelines and other critical infrastructure would be fast-tracked, to help ship resources across the country or globally while bypassing the United States.

He said this would help Canada reduce its dependence on the United States and export petroleum and goods to global markets.

Inside this corridor, Mr. Poilievre said, all levels of government would provide legally binding commitments to approve projects. “This means investors will no longer face the endless regulatory limbo that has made Canadians poorer,” the Conservatives said in a statement.

“My ‘Canada First National Energy Corridor’ will enable us to quickly build the infrastructure we need to strengthen our country so we can stand on our own two feet and stand up to the Americans,” Mr. Poilievre said.

Speeding up approvals of infrastructure for new markets is a hot topic in this campaign.

Just before the federal election campaign began on March 23, Mr. Carney also promised a raft of measures – which would take months to roll out – that would foster and speed up national-interest infrastructure projects and resource extraction.

Last week, Mr. Carney pledged $5-billion for a Trade Diversification Corridor Fund to invest in infrastructure that helps raw or finished goods get to market.

With reports from Nojoud Al Mallees and The Canadian Press

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