NDP bashed over housing
Kirk Penton - Sep 19, 2019 - Biz Releases

Photo: The Canadian Press
B.C. Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson.

Kelowna’s HM Commercial Group held its annual “crystal ball” gathering on Wednesday afternoon.

And when provincial Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson gazed into the orb, he saw nothing short of a catastrophe when it comes to affordable housing in the province if the NDP are still in charge.

“There’s an approach to housing that the NDP take that means you penalize your enemies, you restrict demand, and you say, ‘We’re gonna to take care of our friends,’” Wilkinson said following his address at The Laurel Packinghouse. “Government should serve everybody, with no friends or enemies, and we need to build more housing, which is not what the NDP are doing.

“There are going to have to be incentives for people to build lower-end rental housing, for people to build full-scale rental housing all over B.C., because there’s a major crunch there where people can’t find a place to live or when they want to move to a nicer place they can’t move. And that leads to a very restricted way of life and very frustrated people.”

The event technically serves as the release of HM Commercial Group’s annual report, but the company invites experts to peer into the “crystal ball” on current real estate issues. There are few issues more pressing than B.C.’s affordable housing situation.

And it’s fair to say there were few NDP fans in the room because of the bleak picture, which includes out-of-control rents, not enough supply and taxes upon taxes upon taxes for developers.

“All of these statistics outlined in this year’s HM report are fairly gloomy compared to last year, with all the arrows pointing down,” Kerkhoff Construction president and CEO Leonard Kerkhoff told the crowd. “So while (B.C. Premier) John Horgan is claiming that their strategies are a success, all their strategy is doing is compounding the problem of low supply. This is failure.”

The speculation tax was an expected target of criticism from the group of speakers, which also included Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business professor Andrey Pavlov. He said the government’s planning for $185 million in annual speculation tax revenue really made his “blood boil.”

“The vacancy tax is supposed to improve affordability or increase supply,” Pavlov said. “The vacancy tax was never meant to increase supply. If the vacancy tax is supposed to work … this number would be going down, because there will be fewer and fewer empty homes.”

The main theme of the event was that the NDP government needs to go, which Wilkinson said will result in the construction of more affordable homes through better policies.

“We need to supply more housing, and the private sector needs to build it,” Wilkinson said. “Our municipalities need to plan for it. In some cases that means bigger buildings, more density, but we’re going to have to accommodate a million people (moving to B.C.) in the next 25 years.

“It’s gotta be the private sector. We cannot have government trying to house a million people. The NDP may think that way, but it’s never going to work.”

HM Commercial Group principal and co-founder Jeff Hudson hopes the affordable housing discussions will continue until a solution is found.

“I don’t think anybody’s got the perfect solution,” Hudson said. “That’s what this whole thing was about, was trying to create not a spirited debate but a conversation, like, what are the ideas?

“You don’t have to create new ideas. There’s a lot of other cities and countries out there that are already doing that stuff, so let’s just borrow from that concept.”


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