Editor's note: For the 2019 federal election, BarrieToday teamed up with a journalism student to provide extra coverage on important issues.
The interviews conducted during this Q-and-A series were done by Emily Hsueh from Algonquin College in Ottawa. The issues and topics of discussion focused mainly on youth and young adults in Canada and the Barrie-Innisfil riding. The answers have been edited for length and clarity.
This installment touches on the the issue of homeless youth in the community.
Liberal candidate Lisa-Marie Wilson and People’s Party candidate Stephanie Robinson could not be reached after several attempts.
With the rising cost of housing in Ontario, what solutions are you proposing to help homeless youth in your community?
Conservative John Brassard
We've been asked for a series of measures to increase affordability for home ownership. Much of that is reflective of what we heard from the homebuilders and the Canadian Association of Realtors.
We propose to extend amortization for home buyers to 30 years. That doesn’t necessarily address the issue of homelessness among young people. There are various organizations within Barrie that assist in transitional housing for young people, whether it’s the Davis Busby Centre or other organizations as well.
The issue of affordable housing in Barrie is one of particular importance, because we have got one of the highest rental rates and lowest vacancy rates in the country. So, anything we can do to assist in affordable housing, transitional units, there are other models that exist.
Homebuilders are starting to come up with innovative models like, for example, micro housing and other forms of housing that make housing that much more affordable. But as a government it’s incumbent upon us to assist in the affordable housing.
One of the things that the previous Conservative government found was a success was the First Housing Model. To continue along that line, I think every party and every government understands the importance of affordable housing, making sure we are partnered not only with municipalities, but with the provinces to assist in that issue.
We’ve announced a series of measures for homeownership. The 30-year amortization becomes critical for first-time homebuyers, because it spreads it out a little bit further.
The other thing, too, is looking at surplus federal lands, ensuring that any of those lands that are developable will come on stream, which will help with respect to the supply of housing. And that really is a significant issue, not only with the supply of housing, but the supply of affordable housing.
Now, in Barrie we are in a unique situation where we’ve got expansion to the south of our border, where we’re going to be adding 40,000 more people, which means that there are varying types of housing models that will exist outside of our southern boundaries. So I know that the City of Barrie has taken the issue of affordable housing seriously. Through their affordable housing strategy, not necessarily rezoned but allowed for secondary suites, for example, which can address the issue of affordable housing.
But also in the annexed lands, where this growth is going to happen, there is a wide range of housing models that are intent of being affordable for young people as well. So going back to what I said earlier, there’s a lot that the municipality can do and they’re already doing it. But in terms of overall affordable housing, there’s certainly a role for all levels of government to play, making sure that we meet the demands of housing.
Green Bonnie North
Barrie is actually the fourth most expensive place to live in Ontario if you want to rent. That’s significant if you think about how we’re only an hour and a half north of Toronto.
Homelessness is a big problem here. Affordable housing problems: that could be sleeping rough, that could be couch surfing, that could be trying to find an affordable place to live because Georgian college is one of the biggest educational institutions, around in this area.
So, people come from all over to go to Georgian College and they have problems finding a place to live. All of these issues fall into a category and on top of it all, if the young people are college students, then they are struggling to make ends meet often because now we’ve had cuts to OHIP through the provincial government.
Put onto that, the pressures of just finding an affordable place to live here, which is really hard to do here because of the vacancy rate and because of the rent.
Greens believe we should legislate housing as a human right. We think everyone deserves a home to live in dignity, no matter what their situation is in life. We want to appoint a minister of housing and establish a national housing strategy to address the needs of each unique jurisdiction.
What’s a problem in Vancouver is not necessarily the same as Winnipeg or what’s a problem in northern Ontario is not the same as Windsor. These regional and local jurisdictional issues need to be addressed.
The worst part is to look at this problem when we have various levels of government involved in the housing makeup. We have municipalities, obviously, that are on the front lines of what happens with housing. They have all kinds of bylaws and all kinds of restrictions that don’t really allow for creative solutions like tiny homes.
Some communities are even hostile to cohousing, like locally the absentee landlord situation where the landlord is nowhere at all in the community, but the rent homes out. That has created quite a bit of tension especially close by the college.
Here in our community, the pressure for rental houses, especially near Georgian College, can spill over. People are unhappy because there are a lot of people living in a house and the landlord never goes to check out what’s going on. There might be noise complaints.
If we had a minister of housing and a national housing strategy, they would start looking at these jurisdictional, unique things.
We also need to make sure that there’s a mechanism for the federal government to bridges the gap between the province and municipalities in order to deal with these issues in a systematic way.
In Ontario, and Barrie in particular, we are dealing with an affordability crisis. With respect ot our homeless population here, Barrie is a central stop between the criminal justice system in Penetanguishene and so people who have been released from (Central North Correctional Centre in) Penetanguishene and people who have been released from mental health care.
We also want to refocus the core mandate of the CMHC (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation) and that would be to support affordable non-market and coop housing as opposed to supporting lenders right now.
One of our targets, working with the provincial ministers, we would like to look at 25,000 new homes and 15,000 renovated homes over 10 years to make the supply more available and to build up supply in intensification, not necessarily in sprawl.
Barrie has a terrible problem with sprawl. In my ward, there is only one, just one, purpose-built rental apartment building. Everything else that is in the rental market in my particular ward is either investments that an absentee landlord has purchased and then rented out or condominiums that people purchase.
We need to do a better job in our city with respect to building up and we need to do a better job in our city with respect to avoiding those kinds of sprawl issues.
NDP Pekka Reino
First of all, we need to make post-secondary (education) a little but more affordable for young people. They’re coming out of university and college with huge debts, and that debt means they aren’t able to get into the housing marking. They’re struggling to find a place to rent and it’s causing delays in their lives when they try to move on and start a family and that kind of stuff.
We need to makes sure that they’re not coming out of college and university with a huge debt. What we’re looking at doing is eliminating interest rates on their loans. We’re also looking at capping tuition and slowly starting to lower tuitions across the country. So that’ll help lots of young people in our riding. They go to Georgian College, they go to university throughout southern Ontario, they live here, but we need to help them a little bit and that’s one what that we’re going to do that.
There are a couple things we can do. I know a lot of young people are having a hard time finding places to rent because it’s very expensive. So what the NDP has proposed is that we will be giving a subsidy of up to $5,000 to people who spend more that 30 per cent of their income on rent. So, that may help a small portion of those youth who are homeless, who are trying to find a place to live, but they can’t afford it.
I think the other issue in terms of youth homelessness might be mental health. We need to make more investments in mental health across the country and that would address youth homelessness, I hope.
Other topics in the Q&A series are: food distribution, the youth job market, crime, LGBTQ issues and the environment.
The federal election is Oct. 21. More local coverage is available here.
