Keeping it Real

Ep. 34 What Would Happen to the NDP Housing Policies if they Lose in October?

• Jacquie McCarnan • Season 1 • Episode 34

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Can British Columbia's housing market survive a political shake-up? Join me, Jacquie McCarnan, as we navigate the contentious landscape of housing policies in BC. Discover the transformative initiatives implemented by the current NDP government under David Eby, from strict regulations on short-term rentals like Airbnb to policies enhancing renter security through amendments to the Landlord Tenancy Act. We'll uncover how the NDP’s expansion of the vacancy and empty homes tax, as well as their innovative use of public land for affordable housing in collaboration with First Nations, are reshaping the housing market. Hear about the pivotal Small Scale Multi-Unit Housing Initiative (Bill 44) and the critical role of BC Housing and non-profits in providing below-market housing for vulnerable groups, including single women.

What happens if the BC Conservative Party seizes control? We dissect John Rustad's controversial proposals, including his plan to repeal the co-management of public lands with First Nations and roll back all NDP housing policies. Rustad's preference for relying on municipalities rather than legislating action echoes the ineffective policies of the past and brings to light the challenges of municipal zoning. We’ll discuss the importance of Bill 44 in fast-tracking multifamily unit development and the implications of Rustad's corporate tax cut proposals and private healthcare options on the funding for social programs. Tune in for a thorough analysis backed by research and audience opinions on these pressing housing issues.

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Speaker 1:

Hey kids, welcome back to Keeping it Real, the Vancouver. You know what? If you listen to the podcast, you've heard this preamble 33 other times, so I am just gonna yeah, that's it. You know why you're here. My name is Jackie McCarnon and I am your host for Keeping it Real. I am a North Shore residential realtor who dabbles in all kinds of other stuff real estate related, and we can talk more about that another time.

Speaker 1:

Since this is kind of a long episode, I'm going to jump right in because I don't want to keep you guys much longer than our regular 20 minutes, but this topic ended up being a whole lot bigger than I thought. On last week's podcast, I put out a call asking people for their opinion on what would happen if david eby and the ndp government did not get into, did not win the um october 19th 2024 election, and you answered the call. So this week we're going to talk about what that means, what it might mean if russet gets in, and what your opinions on that were, and I'm going to back it up with some research. So without further ado, let's just jump right in, right? So last week we were talking about what might happen if the NDP did not win the provincial election this year in British Columbia. I figured the best place to start with this would be to talk a little bit about all of the policies that so I want to keep this related to housing as much as I can, and as I was researching it, I was trying really hard to keep my own political beliefs at bay. You will see them sneak in as I am talking to you in this podcast, because I just can't help it and some of the stuff that I discovered that's out there for everybody to discover but not everybody has. Some of the stuff I found out was just you know, I just couldn't let it just sit there. Anyway, here we go. If you have lived in BC for the last couple of years, you obviously are going to notice that there have been sweeping changes to everything from short-term rentals to renting regular, long-term renting, the Landlord Tenancy Act and to housing starts and all that sort of stuff. And it's worth noting that the reason we got here is because in the 80s the federal government stopped mandating building housing and left it up to the provinces and the municipalities and we ended up with a housing shortage as the population grew, and then now we are in a housing crisis, according to every single body.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to do just a quick rundown of some of the policies that the NDP government have introduced over the last couple of years, and I'm going to try to be boring. I hope it's not boring, we'll see. I don't know, not everybody likes politics. So one of the first ones they regulated short term housing like Airbnb and Verbos, and they did so by regulating it, adding a whole lot more oversight, increasing fines for anybody caught not registering their VRBO or Airbnb and making it mandatory that you not have a separate unit that is Airbnb. So that's one of the policies. I'm not really going to go in any kind of order, but another policy is the TOD transit-oriented densification that makes it easier to build more density around transit hubs and that's designated by land that is, within 800 meters of rapid transit or 400 meters of a transit hub, like a bus hub, and the idea is to remove barriers to zoning so that builders can put up more density close to transit, allowing people to obtain or allowing people the option to live somewhere and commute to somewhere else easily. So in theory, you could live in Abbotsford and close to transit and catch the SkyTrain into Vancouver. There's no SkyTrain in Abbotsford yet, but that's the idea.

Speaker 1:

The NDP also introduced new legislation very recently to change the Landlord Tenancy Act and you can go back and listen to a podcast that I did earlier about that. But essentially, the idea is to help renters gain a little bit more stability and security gain a little bit more stability and security, decreasing unease among renters. So they tightened up the rules around serving eviction notices. You now have to go through a portal with the landlord tenancy branch. There's a tax credit for renters up to $400 a year that you can apply to apply on your 2023 tax return, and they are providing loan options for homeowners to build secondary suites. Recently, the BC government expanded the vacancy and empty homes tax to include more cities across the province. It used to be just for bigger cities, but when they saw that it increased the amount of housing by 20,000 units, they they decided to spread this across the province, so hoping that it increases the number of units available for rental.

Speaker 1:

The provincial government, along with First Nations, have a new plan to use public land to build affordable housing. Public land is another word for crown land, so we are seeing a whole bunch of initiatives across the province where the provinces use crown land or public land and work with First Nations in order to develop that and provide some affordable housing. It's not all affordable housing and again, I did a podcast on this earlier. I'm going to try that link to all the podcasts I did about these particular issues in the show notes. Another one of the things that I covered was the SMU SMU Small Scale Multi-Unit Housing Initiative, bill 44. It's been an incredibly controversial bill because on the on the uh, if you just look at the bill, it looks like the province is mandating that the municipalities change zoning from single-family homes to multi-family. Um, but it's more nuanced and complicated than that. But for all intents and purposes, the idea is to encourage infill housing in communities across the province that are over 5,000 in population and I did a couple of podcasts on that one. So again I will link in the show notes. All right, another one Working with BC Housing and non-profits like the YWCA, the provincial government is providing low-cost or well below market housing to some of our most vulnerable citizens, including single women, which is interesting.

Speaker 1:

There's a big project going on in Vancouver at the moment. That covers that and I'll end it off with the province's promise to increase student housing around schools throughout the province so that it takes the pressure off of renting possible long-term rental units very close to universities. So if you ever, if you ever, if you move to vancouver in august, like I did in august 1992, we intended to move to vancouver and we tried to get an apartment, and all the apartments on the west side of Vancouver were taken already in August by students going to UBC who were starting in September. And that was in 1992, when we weren't in a huge housing crisis. So you can imagine what's happening now. You know students are relegated to 100-year-old homes that are falling apart and landlords that don't really care much and just want to get the amount of money per bed. A lot of that happens. I'm not saying that that's every landlord by any stretch, but the province wants to build more student housing so that they can accommodate more students and take them out of these other situations that are maybe taking advantage of students.

Speaker 1:

I think that one's a good one, I think by any metric when it comes to government, the David Eby NDP government has put these policies into place in a very short period of time and when that sort of thing happens you're always going to see a whole lot of pushback and boy, have they ever seen a lot of pushback. But also, I think they were ready for it because they had some fairly significant policies in place to deal with that. Without rehashing the podcast I had earlier called, is West Vancouver David Eby's Problem Child? Just very quickly, the municipality of West Vancouver, district of West Vancouver, really did not like being told what to do by the province. So they basically said no, we're not going to do that. And the province said well, yeah, you are. And once the province threatened to just implement the policy without municipal support, the municipality came on board, I think. Anyway, I haven't actually checked that lately, but I'm assuming that's what happened because there really was no choice.

Speaker 1:

All right, let's jump into the political side of this. So, as you likely know, the BC United Party, which was formerly the BC Liberal Party under Kevin Falcon, falcon, falcon, falcon, I don't know. So it looks like Falcon, like the bird they withdrew from the provincial election, stating that they were afraid of having two right wing parties that would split the vote and hand the election to the NDP. Would split the vote and hand the election to the NDP. So they, the other party being the BC Conservative Party under John Rustad or Rustad one or the other, you pick. At the time the announcement was made last month, it was very shocking, particularly because Rustad and Falcon have a previous relationship. For example, falcon fired Rusted from the BC Liberal Party for making bizarre statements in social media about climate change so interesting Interesting that he'd throw his support behind him. Now it's pretty widely recognized that Falcon's move to rename the party is a direct cause of its loss of voter confidence.

Speaker 1:

So, anyway, we're not here to talk about the former BC United Party. We're here to talk about what might happen if the NDP were to lose the election to the BC Conservative Party. One of the things I do want to say, though, is that Falcon has said that the BC Conservative Party was starting to sound like a conspiracy theory party, and I'm trying hard not to make this a super political episode, but, again, I think I'm going to have some difficulty because, yes, rusted has some wild conspiracy theories that are worth noting, and voters should know about them. Last week, on this podcast, I asked you, loyal listeners, what you think would happen if rusev becomes our premier, and? Um, maybe I only attract people who think similarly to me, but the general consensus of the um, of the comments that I received and I received a few uh was that that we're hooped. So you know, not a very articulate answer, but yeah, hooped, I think, is probably a really good way to describe what might happen to the province should John Rusted become premier of BC. I'll just go through them one at a time, but so, and I'll just go through them one at a time. But so he believes that BC's 204 First Nations co-management of public lands should be repealed and feels that it is concerning or actually here's a direct quote it's an assault on your private property rights and our shared rights to use crown land, and he pledged to repeal that. Now, if you listen to the episode about West Vancouver, you'll realize that we actually we don't really own land here in Canada, so it is within the purview of the provincial government to use land in any way they feel is appropriate for the citizens of the province, feel is appropriate for the citizens of the province and in this case, that land use is supposed to help BC residents.

Speaker 1:

When he was addressing the Victoria Chamber of Commerce, rustad made some fairly significant statements, including the fact that he intends to roll back all of the NDP government housing policies, not some. All which is concerning. When asked what he would do, rousset said that he would work with municipalities. We're talking specifically about Bill 44. He said he feels that the provincial government has to work with municipalities in densification rather than legislating action, which is exactly what the previous BC Liberal Party's policy was, which didn't work and didn't actually create any sort of actually create any sort of increase in building units. And it actually, from my recollection and you can fact check me on this, because I'm not saying this is fact, I'm saying this is my recall I believe that it was actually quite difficult to get permits going through the municipalities to rezone lands, and the Bill 44 is simply there to make it easier to have land rezoned from single-family to multifamily. It's not a mandate to build multifamily units on that land, it is a policy that makes it possible to build multifamily units on single family lots.

Speaker 1:

When tasked with figuring out ways to improve housing affordability in British Columbia, one of the biggest things was build more units. So one of the ways to build more units is to make it easier for builders to build more units. And making it easier to build more units would require some level of automation or pre-approval at the municipal level, because that's where things get tied up right. So if the municipal government has an application for rezoning and that takes a year to get a place rezoned and then it takes a year to get building permits, we're, you know, five years out before you actually have new building on a property, and that's just too long, according to the provincial government, and so they tried to make it so that you could. You could take care of those things much quicker. I don't know that. That's a terrible policy, to be honest with you. There's's a pretty specific argument against Bill 44 that everybody trots out when they are saying that Bill 44 is a terrible idea, and that is that there is no infrastructure available. But, as you know, if you listen to the podcast, there is a large multi-billion dollar infrastructure fund available through the federal government for municipalities that comply with Bill 44, comply with infill housing throughout the country. So I think that people don't bring that up very often because it's a different level of government from the provinces and the municipalities. We don't hear about it often, but there is money there to increase infrastructure for this infill housing policy. So it's conveniently left out of the conversation when people are saying that Bill 44 is going to ruin British Columbia.

Speaker 1:

In preparation for this episode, I watched an interview with Rustad on YouTube and I'm going to have to tell you guys, I'm gonna be perfectly honest with you I watched 30 minutes of this 90 minute interview, um, mostly because it was sponsored by enbridge, which is a oil and gas company, and I I'm not sure that that's the kind of like. I think that sort of tells us the sort of bend of the interview and it certainly. I didn't find out about Enbridge until after I watched the first little bit, but I just I wanted to. I wanted to see Rustad speaking and, make no mistake, he's a pretty eloquent speaker. He, he sounds reasonable If you don't listen to the words he's saying. He sounds super reasonable. And this is where I'm going to get a little political. I'm really sorry if you don't believe the same way I do. I am absolutely a left social democrat, for sure.

Speaker 1:

But and I'm trying to keep it sort of toward the middle but essentially the gist is that he said a few things that really I can't imagine are going to be good for the province. First of all, he's going to implement large tax cuts to corporations. Obviously, the province gets a lot of their money from taxes from corporations and a lot of the money that we get in taxes is used for social programs. So I'm not sure how he thinks he's going to fund any of his initiatives if he's going to continually cut taxes. Private health care option, which didn't work out very well in ontario under ford, but um, there are very, there's very little information about how that's going to look.

Speaker 1:

He wants to eliminate restrictions on short-term housing and mandate that public employees return to the office, which is interesting. He doesn't think that $10 a day child care is possible, but he gives no policy for how the government might help with that and instead has said that the private sector should come up with ways to help with child care, and I suspect he means that corporations would supplement child care costs for their employees. I don't know, but I'm not sure that that's fair. If you have two people working the same job, one of them has children that are in child care and the other does not, is it fair to give one of the employees more money because they have kids? I don't know, but I think that's the policy that he's referring to, although he does not say it specifically, he wants to end the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for public health care workers and he wants to fire Dr Bonnie Henry. He's also stated that he will end safe supply and decriminalization programs and has suggested on an involuntary pay attention, involuntary recovery program. So this is interesting.

Speaker 1:

The implication here is that Rustad supports the idea of involuntary recovery, recovery which means that people would be put into recovery programs not of their free will. So he doesn't, doesn't mention anything about the um, about the human right to, you know, have ownership over your own welfare, whatever that. Anyway, he anyway he doesn't say he doesn't, he doesn't elaborate on this at all, but essentially he wants to put drug addicts into recovery programs and he also doesn't say who's going to pay for them. Now would the province pay for those recovery programs, those involuntary recovery programs? And I think there's a ton of research about putting people into programs like that, where that, where they just don't work because you have to make that decision yourself on whether you're ready for recovery, right? I mean, you know what. This is not my area of expertise either. I am the first to admit. I'm only doing the research and if I'm wrong, please let me know If you have some statistics on involuntary recovery programs, working and getting people off the streets and into, you know, a safer, more secure lifestyle. Heck, I want to hear all about it. I just don't know that that's the case.

Speaker 1:

If I were getting political in this podcast which I know that I have a little bit and I'm trying really hard not to but except for this part coming up, one of the things, another one of the things he said is that he's going to repeal the carbon tax and he continually refers to the climate crisis as weather. So anybody that knows anything about the climate crisis knows that it is. Climate and weather are two different things. Weather is today it's cold. Climate is the oceans are rising because they're getting warmer. There is a big difference between what is happening in real time and what is happening over decades. And the climate crisis is happening over decades. No-transcript days of 40 degrees in the past, which we'd never seen before. You're going to we're going to have to start incorporating ways to cool off people who live in high rises, that sort of thing, anyway. High rises, that sort of thing, anyway.

Speaker 1:

If if Roostead doesn't believe in climate change, I don't think that he could be a valuable advocate for British Columbians that's my opinion. Other people obviously are going to have different opinion about that, but to me that's a big thing. And yes, climate change is incredibly well related to the housing and the housing crisis. So, in answer to the question what would happen if the NDP didn't win the provincial election, I think the response that we're hooped is fairly accurate.

Speaker 1:

All these policies that Eby and his government have implemented over the last couple of years are all long-term policies. They can't. You can't. You can't just have a government come in and repeal them all with no specific mandate or no specific plan in place to address the housing crisis and the climate crisis, which just doesn't make any sense. And yes, the Conservatives well known for their tax breaks for corporations. But is that? Is that going to serve British Columbians? Is it going to make the price of groceries come down? Is it going to make the price of housing come down? I don't think so. You can let me know what you think and I do know that people enough people listen to this podcast that I do get responses. So happy to hear your response, but you know what do you think? As always, thanks so much for listening to Keeping it Real. You can get Keeping it Real on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts or info at newfanhomesalescom slash podcasts. We'll see you next week. Have a wonderful weekend.

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Jacquie McCarnan

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