Whether you like him or not, Trudeau is being honest when he says that housing costs are largely outside the jurisdiction of the federal government. No government, Liberal, Conservative, or NDP can solve this issue at the federal level.
These are the concrete actions that would have a real and discernable effect in making housing more affordable:
- Significantly increase housing supply
- Increase density of housing developments
- Add more subsidized public housing
- Reduce the number of low-density single-family homes being approved and increase multi-family options (high rise condos, town houses, midrise apartment buildings, etc.)
- Solve the
"missing middle" problem
- Ban short-term rental homes (i.e. AirBnB) or have punitively high property taxes for these types of non-resident housing to make them non-viable as money-making schemes
Each of these options fall under the jurisdiction of local municipal governments, not the feds. And all of them would be bitterly opposed by home-owning boomers because it would reduce the value of their most important asset ("F you got mine"). It would be political suicide for a local mayor and council to enact these policies on a scale that would result in any meaningful change in housing affordability for younger Canadians. So instead we get inadequate half-measures like making borrowing money for a mortgage easier which only results in housing prices being inflated even further.