Government by crisis - whether in health care or housing - is no way to go.
Students did not cause the housing crisis in Canada.
Yet the federal government is going to limit the number of visas available to foreign students and make it harder for them to bring their partners and spouses into the country. It’s all in an effort to discourage foreign students from coming to Canada, thereby lowering demand for housing.
Well, that's the official reason.
We have a housing problem because the population is growing (that’s good) even without foreign students and for a bunch of different reasons we haven't been building enough houses to meet needs. (That's bad).
On top of that we have a raft of other housing issues, whether it's substandard housing, people living rough, and so on, each of has its own reasons and challenges when it comes to fixing them.
What the feds are doing really is about making it *look* like the federal government is doing something moreso than, you know, actually doing something.
Don’t be quick to feed your cynicism, though.
Politically, federal parties are tuned to Canadian issues enough to understand housing is a major problem across the country.
They can see it.
They know voters are concerned about it.
Politicians don't want to ignore the problem and risk losing votes.
But they know these issues are really provincial, not federal, and complex.
So they do stuff like this knowing it won't actually fix anything.
Or as in many provinces, including this one, cutting back on foreign students will make another problem - properly funding universities - that much worse than it already is.
Ask Gerry Byrne. The guy’s been doing a decent job attracting more people to this province. Now he's been caught in a drive-by policy shooting about something else. If you think he's pissed about redfish quotas, ask him about foreign students.
The problem practically fir those federal politicians is that housing is a provincial issue and across the country individual provincial governments don’t have the same ability or interest in some cases in dealing with housing compared to other priorities. Been like this for years. Some, like Newfoundland and Labrador, bring their own peculiar local details and compkexities to add to the mix of issues that the governments share when it comes to housing.
Housing is a big issue and has been for a long time but the reasons why housing has been an issue for a long time all still apply. You can see all of them in the piecemeal way that governments have tackled housing now that it's come up as an issue catching media headlines.
Again.
Let’s start with the federal students-and-housing moves if only because it shows so clearly what’s going on.
All the federal parties understand the housing issues. In 2021, their party platforms all had housing planks in them. In some cases it looked more like a good subfloor, not just a spindly single bit of wood. The Liberal platform had 16 items in it, and since they won the election and formed government, their ideas matter most. The list covers the full housing scene from those people who are chronically unhoused - living rough as the Brits like to call it - to parts of the country where local markets are overheated by foreign property speculators to the real crux of the problem in many palces, which is the lack of new housing.
None of the ideas involved cutting down on the number of foreign students. That’s because they are not an issue when it comes to the shortage of housing. Well, not unless you want to include all the reasons our population is growing nationally, which, by the way everyone sees as a good thing generally.
More people living in Canada is such a good thing that the guy in charge of federal housing policy in the federal cabinet these days used to be the guy in charge of immigration who allowed more foreign students into Canada. His former housing colleague is now the guy in charge of immigration.
But here’s the thing: these guys who have swapped jobs know the students aren’t a housing problem and they know all the other great things the Liberals had in the platform are the needed answers to housing in Canada. Not all maybe but some and the ones that are there are generally pretty good.
They just take time. Or they are complicated. Or they involve provinces doing stuff, which adds more complications.
Cutting back student visas doesn’t help and it makes other problems crop up but it's easy. Nor does giving universities cheap loans to build or buy more housing, another federal policy announced last week, fix the student housing problem. In facts it's weird to cut the number of students and at the same time build more student hiusing.
But more loans is easy even if it contradicts the other student announcement.
They are temporary patches to what are in some cases highly localised problems or aspects of a bigger problem. They might be nothing more than something aimed at specific parts of the country where the Liberals and Conservatives are fighting for dominance in advance of a federal election coming sooner rather than later.
So yeah, it's short term, disconnected, and partisan political.
Notice, though, that the low-cost loans for universities to build student housing is a twist on the low cost loans for developers announced last fall, which itself is really driven by current high interest rates that are themselves just a temporary answer to inflation. More student housing when there'll be fewer students sounds like a contradiction and it but this isn't about logic. It's about having something to announce or talk about.
Meanwhile, another chronic issue - housing for Indigenous people - made the news again last week. It does from time to time - like this funding announcement eight years ago or another story about a “human rights failure” - but it’s not an issue that anyone manages to fix. Why? Because the solutions are all complicated and governments these days don't do complicated.
In that context, you might now understand the housing loans program announced last week by the provincial government. Good in the short-term but notice it is nothing more than a policy echo of last September’s federal plan. And you can tell the provincial response is a hastily cobbled together echo not thought of by provincial officials before last September because it isn’t being run through the housing corporation like other housing funds just like it.
The provincial government found the money for last week's announcement in the business innovation fund, which normally gives out cash to a completely different part of the economy that has difference characteristics and that looks nothing like housing development. That tells you they didn’t have new money or didn’t have cash and staff able to work on this in housing. They had to graft it on to an existing cash pot and use the people who normal hand out money to completely different kinds of people doing completely different things using different types of factors to determine who qualifies, who doesn’t, and so on and so on.
And there were three ministers in the announcement, with the innovation minister’s quote coming before the finance minister's quote which came before the housing minister's quote. Adding ministers to an announcement is a way of making something seem bigger than it is. Or masking something government is sensitive to, like say the curious way this the fund is organized.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a great program. It will do good. But it’s only $50 million for what can be expensive projects plus the maximum size of any one grant is $10 million. So you could see lots of little projects or as few as five bigger ones. Either eay, that's not even a ding in the hide of this province’s housing needs.
The latest provincial funding announcement also shows you the disconnect between the federal and provincial governments. Feds announce something in September. Province scrambles to catch up and drops something in the news to not much fanfare the better part of six months later. Good on them for the quick turn around but the scrambling has got to be tiring and frustrating. Meanwhile, people with projects that could benefit from both programs have to now deal with two bureaucracies instead of one, two different sets of rules, and all the delays and costs that go with it. Plus, these sorts of supports for low-cost housing are actually needed over a much longer time and not just now that interest rates are high.
You can see how big and murky the swamp is. Feds operating in a provincial area. Provinces and feds disconnected on not just the initiatives but the funding, roll-out, and all the rest. There are also problems within provincial governments because housing touches so many different departments. And within the housing issues, there are more differences.
The folks who were living in the Tent City protests, for example, are folks who deal with health and social services departments, plus public housing. The co-ordination among those departments in this province or even within different parts of the same department can be a nightmare if they happen at all. Some of the people with housing turn up in shelters crowding out people with no shelter at all but there's little to no sharing of information among the organizations providing different services to different groups that could put a stop to that. The bigger result is that officials really aren't sure how much of an unhoused housing problem there really is.
People are asking about a three year deal with a local hotel to house homeless people. But not a single news story noted the same hotel was recently clogged with Ukrainians brought to the province by a government that rushed an immigration scheme without thinking about jobs and housing when housing was already known to be in short supply.
Then there's the cost of housing people in care anyway. Reporters genuinely doing investigations and not superficial, trumped up gotcha stories might want to look at the cost of *this* three year deal compared to the cost of the Ukrainians or of putting people up in hotels because of a lack of transitional housing and so on. It's not just politicians who go for the quick, easy, and superficial or taking related issues in isolation. This hotel deal might be a good one if you look at the whole housing picture.
Meanwhile, back in the wider swamp, people in the new home construction business, the folks in Newfoundland and Labrador that would also be looking at those low-interest loans for student and other low income housing, for example, will tell you about problems with municipal zoning, permitting, and inspections or the difficulties buying property and getting clear land title to build and finance a project because of problems with the government’s outdated bureaucracy. Some ideas to fix this were included in Moya Greene’s expert panel. The provincial government started to modernize the lands, deeds, and related registries and then apparently abandoned the project. Anyone wonder why?
Meanwhile, the problem with clear title - the uniquely local issue related to land title - just makes everyone’s life hell. You can live in a house on land you thought you owned, pay taxes on it, and then find out when you try to sell that the Crown disputes your title and you need to pay again for your own land. That affects not just the Nan and Pop in Catalina CBC reported on a couple of years ago, trying to downsize - and find affordable but smaller housing - but also anyone trying to develop land in municipalities for residential or commercial development. It's a potential landmine awaiting thousands in the province and it wrecks or drives up the costs in countless home sales every year. Big drain on the economy beyond the pain it inflicts on ordinary folks, too.
Not just ordinary folks. Land title and tenure affects industrial development too. Just look at the hydrogen crowd. One set of rules when they started and then a whole, new made-up process three months later.
Like Quebec, this province needs more generating capacity. But unlike Quebec, there's a de facto ban here on new wind-only projects for a bunch of reasons including the obsession with hydrogen and the restrictions or problems in access to land.
All of *that* becomes a challenge for political parties that these days have political attention spans shorter than your young dog in a park full of squirrels. They think in terms of tomorrow’s bright shiny announcement not something that will take months or years to pull together and certainly nothing - like say fixing bureaucratic and administrative problems - that will never get the Premier or minister a nice picture for Da Twitter and da Facebox. And no one genuinely thinks strategically. No one sees how everything is interconnected.
It’s not all black, though.
Last year the national association that represents the real estate industry suggested the feds create a permanent roundtable on housing at the national level. Bring together folks involved in housing to research and analyze housing issues, advise government on ways to integrate social and economic considerations into decision-making to ensure housing is accessible to all, advise sectors and regions on ways to build in principles and practices that promote a fair housing market, promote understanding and increased public awareness of the cultural, social, economic and policy changes needed to improve access to housing, and assist innovative efforts “to overcome barriers to the attainment of sustainable housing.”
Good idea, based as it is on the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy.
But there are a few problems. That thing about innovative efforts is not only meaningless jargon there’s just no sense of how that would work. The biggest shortcoming, though, is that this would be a national group that would be - by definition - far too high up to deliver practical solutions on the ground where the work is needed and where all the legal jurisdiction sits.
Rather than a national group, individual provinces like Newfoundland and Labrador could take up a modified version of this idea to switch from talking about housing to dealing with it. The Provincial Housing Action Force would bring together representatives of the public and private sector across the province with a direct interest in housing. Make it a legislated group like the national environment and economy roundtable. Supported by a small group of public servants and private-sector staff, they would cut across departmental and municipal-provincial-Indigenous government lines to focus on specific issues. They could push ready-to-roll-out solutions because everyone would be at the same table.
They would be able to work on different problems that are not related at the same time. The group would be relatively large but its activities could easily be broken down into smaller groups to tackle specific issues that could also add new members when need and disband when the job was done. Rather than be an advisory group like the national notion, the emphasis for the provincial action team would be working together to build consensus, overcome obstacles, and get solutions in place. Action. Not words.
Three considerations up front. First, this would not be another bureaucracy but a group that advocates practical solutions, including less bureaucracy. That’s why the head of the group should be from the private sector and be someone with a reputation for pot stirring and shit-disturbing in a good way. Take as a model the real Economic Recovery Team from the 90s, the one that delivered both ideas and a wide agreement on how to tackle the problems of development at the same time.
Second, that’s really the key idea: developing agreement and a perspective on how to cope with issues across the province.
Third, think of the political problems this will face. A genuinely revolutionary group will cause all those interested in the way things are or who are working their own game plan to frustrate change. That’s why this new group would need support at the top of government from the Premier and key ministers if it's going to work.
You think everyone's singing kum by yah already? Look at how health “reform” has been not the least bit reformed and you have a sense of how the bureaucracy can congeal or, as Scully and Mulder would know, deceive, obfuscate, and inveigle, in order to keep power where they want it. Ask Pat Parfrey about how easy reform is and he was only talking about health care. Housing is bigger.
On a more pragmatic level, many of the groups you need involved in such a body, especially the ones outside government, just don’t have the in-house capacity or frankly the interest in this sort of thing. They may have a handful of individual members or maybe a couple of prominent and politically connected individual members who dabble in government relations, politics, and policy but as a group, they all-too-often lack the real ability or the interest to work on anything that is far removed from the day-to-day business of whatever their business is.
This is a common issue across many sectors of the economy and society in Newfoundland and Labrador. Heck, it’s a huge problem in government. Some of the most obvious things municipal governments do - building permits and inspections - are beyond what most towns can actually do. Hard to build to standards when there's no enforcement to speak of. And that’s in the ones that are incorporated. Half the communities in the province have no functioning government.
The result is that it often takes a crisis to produce some action in Newfoundland and Labrador but sustained action is difficult if not impossible. Housing is no exception, unless the group is dedicated to dealing with the chronically unhoused in this case. Remember: it took a catastrophic bankruptcy and massive fraud in 2016 to get government and the real estate industry to change the law in Newfoundland and Labrador that is supposed to protect consumers in real estate sales, a law that that had not been changed at all more than half a century after Joe Smallwood’s government passed it through the House of Assembly. Now Google search Indigenous housing and see how many times *that* same story has made the news with any change or real progress. Government by crisis, whether in health care or housing, is no way to go. But sadly it's all too often how we roll.
That’s why it might be not just possible but imperative to cobble together a group of public sector and private sector folks who can fill in that capacity and interest gap in housing. Create a group of leaders and a small group of administrators funded partly out of public money and partly out of private cash from the members involved in the provincial action group. Give it some legal weight and a size big enough and a profile high enough that politicians and bureaucrats have to pay attention.
Frankly, there’s nothing like this anywhere in Canada.
Nothing.
But that’s all the more reason to look at a group that would tackle a long-term problem that is intimately connected to public health, public well-being, and the economy in *this* province. And it would do so recognizing the practical realities many groups and governments face in this province rather than try yet again to apply someone else’s solution to someone else’s problems in a completely different situation.