He was so close to getting it. Jacob Mantle, the newly-elected thirty-something Conservative MP for York-Durham, rose in the House of Commons on Tuesday to make a point about housing costs. “Oxford Economics reports that Toronto’s housing market ranks among the worst in the world for affordability. At the same time, mortgage delinquency rates in Toronto are higher than at any time during the pandemic. The financial burden is suffocating the next generation of homebuyers.”
But Mantle wasn’t actually interested in proposing solutions to that problem. Instead, he wanted to whine about the fact that the Carney government isn’t going to table a budget until the fall, which the government has defended on the basis that it will be better able to account for the fallout from Donald Trump’s tariffs by then. And despite his supposed concern over housing, Mantle was dismissive of the government’s plan to embrace and scale up modular housing in Canada.
“My generation refuses to live in a shipping container,” Mantle said.
For what it’s worth, I suspect many members of his generation (and mine) would be happy to live in the sort of modified shipping containers that are being designed and built right now, including the ones in his own city. But modular housing is so much more than just the use and conversion of shipping containers. It’s an entirely new approach to homebuilding, one that uses factories and their inherent economies of scale to drive down costs. They can be one or two-storey, single or multi-family, and configured in any number of layouts and sizes. In an environment where driving down construction costs is a nearly existential issue for Mantle’s generation, you’d think he would be more open to new ideas and economic innovation — especially when it promises to use more Canadian materials and labour.
Then again, if you’ve been paying close attention to the Conservative Party of Canada’s approach to this issue, his behaviour was entirely predictable. Under Pierre Poilievre’s leadership, the party and its MPs have repeatedly highlighted the very real problem of rising housing costs in Canada and the disproportionate impacts they have on younger people. But when it comes to actual solutions to that problem — ones, at least, that don’t involve cutting taxes or regulations and assuming the market will magically solve the problem it has helped create — those same Conservatives either disappear into the metaphorical bushes or come out on the other side of the issue.
In Calgary, for example, opposition to a city-wide measure to increase affordability and density while reducing sprawl came mostly from Conservative-leaning councilors like Dan McLean, Peter Demong and Sean Chu, with some conspicuous cheerleading work coming from federal Conservative MP Greg McLean. In British Columbia, provincial Conservative party leader John Rustad decided to go to bat for the very “gatekeepers” standing in the way of new housing that Poilievre had repeatedly promised he would eliminate. Even in Ontario, where Conservative politicians have been more visibly and vocally on-side with pro-supply measures, the results of the Ford government’s efforts have been underwhelming, to say the least.
We are not in a moment where we can afford to reflexively turn our noses up at potential solutions. And yet, Conservative politicians like Mantle seem determined to find fault in every proposed approach that doesn’t flatter their own pre-existing ideological and political biases towards cutting taxes and reducing government involvement. Modular housing will not be, in and of itself, the solution to a problem that has been building for more than two decades. But that’s only because nothing on its own will, or could, be the solution.
Instead, we need every possible lever being pulled right now, from regulatory reform and improved operating efficiencies to direct government involvement, procurement, and even development. Mantle is right that the status quo has failed his generation. But he’s wrong to indignantly oppose a good-faith effort at challenging and changing it, and all the more so as he pretends to speak on behalf of an entire generation.
We can only hope that his party and its online proxies don’t decide to turn modular housing into this year’s iteration of the 15-minute city and throw a self-evidently good and decent idea into the stew of online conspiracies it always seems to have at low boil. Yes, that might feed the eternally hungry appetites of their increasingly online political base. But it won’t do anything to address the problem Conservatives like Mantle claim to care about. At some point, Canadians may conclude that they’re not actually all that interested in solving it.
Comments
The easiest job in the world is being a critic and the Conservatives excel at this. What they don't do is offer any solutions to what are undeniably complex problems.
Conservatives will oppose everything, even if their campaign also referred to the same. Pee Pee never has a solution to offer, just opposition.
The problem is that the Cons cannot differentiate between the words 'opposition' and 'obstruction' and what they do is obstruct which damages the lives of all Canadians because they bring the HofC to a standstill and absolutely nothing gets done. Despite their very childish behaviours over the last 10 years the Trudeau government got many, many things done to benefit the population and if these horrible world events ever allow things to settle down again someone will write about how this Trudeau government was the best government in many, many years in Canada. The trouble with these present day Cons is their so called leaders were so full of envy and jealousy over the 'Trudeau' name that their main goal was to damage the name. But, alas, they've failed at that also. But their names, Harper, Poilieve, Scheer and some of their underlings will definitely be remembered in the trump book that you'll be able to pick up in garbage bins someday 'before' they are burned, possibly to keep someone from freezing.
Well said. That's it in a nutshell.
Complex problems are not easily solved with overly simplistic solutions, therefore the conservatives cannot offer one. Only overly simplistic solutions are on their menu.
A key here for me is this line: "nothing on its own will, or could, be the solution."
The fact is that things are complicated. I'm a far left ideologue, so of course I think it's key for the government to directly build lots of homes. But that's not a simple thing--it requires that the government build the organizational muscle to get it done, it may require laws and regulations, it may require a public bank, it may require a public timber company, to be efficient it may require things like this modular building technology and other technologies (many of them in use in Europe), and so on. There are lots of things and it matters if the government has people who understand them and can do the complicated stuff, and it matters if the people at the top have some idea how it all works.
But the modern Conservative ideology is post-competence. They embrace the business school idea that nobody has to understand anything except money, and the neoliberal idea that markets will magically solve anything while governments will anti-magically do a bad job, so there's both no point in the government doing much of anything useful and no point in politicians that lead the government knowing how to do anything. All a Conservative politician needs to know how to do is cut revenues and privatize government functions. It actually HELPS to be ignorant and bloody-minded enough not to understand or care what you're destroying.
Just to be clear, both these ideas are false. Many huge corporations have been brought to their knees by replacing people who understood the specifics of the business with people whose expertise was money; Boeing is perhaps the most dramatic example. And, markets are by definition terrible at delivering public goods, because it's really hard to get people to pay for them. They're terrible at natural monopolies--they either don't do a monopoly, which is very inefficient for natural monopolies, or they DO do a monopoly and then abuse it horribly because there's nothing to stop them and their objective is profit. They seem to be rather bad at insurance. They seem to be bad with things where demand is very inelastic because people can't do without whatever it is, because they take advantage of having people over a barrel--health care is the key example here. Which means there are quite a few things governments should actually do, and it matters if they do them well, and doing them well requires knowing stuff about how they should be done as well as knowing stuff about how to find out what the public interest really is and respond to the public's needs.
So you can't have people in government who are against governing, and even against knowing how to govern. Because governing does need to be done.
Good summation. Time to just say it out loud--conservatives have TWO ideas, neither of which are in keeping with the times, so neither of which will WORK.
So despite the attempt to make over the CPC brand into a younger cohort compared to the "old stock Canadians" Harper spoke of, turns out their "traditional" roots haven't gone anywhere (a definitive feature of "traditions" after all.)
Conservatives main base is online Max says. No surprise since it's tailor-made for them-- propaganda central, and a gathering place for the absolute worst of human nature, i.e. the freedumb of speech crowd.
Some nice posts here, but like most of the economic and political commentary it focuses on supply side, taking demand for granted. In a market situation, "demand" is only effectively present when folks can afford the "supply". Wages have not kept up with the cost of housing, which since 1980 or so, has been a commodified investment - not a home. Public housing, when built and subsidized, will bring the cost back into line with wages, but if done on sufficient scale, will destroy housing as an investment. Those that manage to hang on to their homes will still be able to move houses, trading one home for another home, just like we did before commodification.
One can expect Conservative parties and many Liberals to be against any ideas that cause the price of investment-houses to decrease. At best we can hope for sufficient building to cause a price plateau for 10 years or so while wages catch up.
To be clear: If you are not paid enough to afford an investment-house, then you are not part of 'housing demand' - you are a part of rental demand (or homeless).
Better to bring the cost of houses down by removing profit, rather than trying to boost wages so that wage earners can afford to pay investor's profits in the current market.