Carney evades question on whether housing prices should be lower
Prime Minister Mark Carney said it isn’t a “yes or no question” when pressed on his own position on the cost of housing.
Author: Clayton DeMaine
A week after Canada’s new housing minister said housing prices don’t need to go down, Prime Minister Mark Carney said it isn’t a “yes or no question” when pressed on his own position on the cost of housing.
Despite his recent appointment as housing minister under Carney, Gregor Robertson stated last week that lowering housing prices was not his goal.
When questioned about lowering housing prices, Minister Robertson disagreed with that idea. He emphasized that his main goal was to increase the number of homes available and stabilize the market. At the same time, Robertson said his government would make housing more affordable.
Asked in Rome during a media event at Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural mass whether housing prices should decrease, Carney evaded the question saying that it’s not a simple yes or no issue. He explained that the answer depends on the timeframe and the specific type of housing.
“It’s not a yes, no question,” Carney said. “It is a question which relates to different time horizons, and it relates to different houses.”
Carney said his government’s priority is to make housing “more affordable,” rather than solely bringing costs down.
“It’d be lovely if we could always give very simple yes, no, up, down, question answers to the economy. But we’re talking about time horizons,” he said. “The core issue for younger Canadians, for all Canadians, is that the level of house prices goes down relative to their incomes, so the affordability goes up for them, and both in the immediate, the medium term and the longer term, that’s what we’re looking to do.”
He vowed several policies to lower prices, including some borrowed from the Conservative platform during the election.
“For new home buyers…cutting GST on homes, new homes, and ensuring that, particularly younger Canadians, get the benefit from that,” he said. “We will put in place measures…to strip out, in fact, half the development charges for construction on homes.”
He also said one priority will be to “help develop a much more efficient home building industry” in Canada.
“So all of those factors are going to help to improve affordability,” he said. “The exact level of house prices, of course, is going to be a function of a variety of factors, including where incomes grow, but the key is that we’re building new homes, and the purchase of new homes becomes less expensive.”
That's a pathetic con! Con carney is a poor liar, and that makes his a low level con artist, but a con artist anyway,
Translation: We plan to build low income housing for all but the richest people in Canada, and I am looking for a company to do it that is under Brookfield's portfolio.