● Protect the existing stock of affordable housing by funding the purchase of buildings by non-profit and cooperative affordable housing organizations.
● Expand the Rapid Housing Initiative to bring new affordable and supportive housing onstream without delay. With this expansion, more quality projects with funding and agreements already in place can quickly become affordable or supportive housing.
● Invest in construction and operation of 50,000 supportive housing units over 10 years.
● Build and acquire a minimum of 300,000 units of deeply affordable non-market, co-op and non-profit housing over a decade.
● Create a Canada Co-op Housing Strategy and update the mechanisms for financing co-op housing, in partnership with CMHC, co-op societies, credit unions and other lenders.
● Require covenants to ensure that subsidized construction remains affordable over the long term
● Restore quality, energy efficient housing for seniors, people with special needs and low-income families, by providing financing to non-profit housing organizations, cooperatives, and social housing to build and restore quality and affordable housing.
● Implement integrated housing, so that everyone can afford to live in the communities in which they work and under quality conditions. Restore tax incentives for building purpose-built rental housing, and provide tax credits for gifts of lands, or of land and buildings, to community land trusts to provide affordable housing.
● Remove the “deemed” GST whenever a developer with empty condo units places them on the market as rentals.
● Re-focus the core mandate of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) on supporting the development of affordable, non-market and cooperative housing, as opposed to its current priority of supporting Canadian lenders to de-risk investment in housing ownership. With many housing markets demonstrably overvalued, and home ownership rates among the highest in the world, individual home ownership should not be the preoccupation of a public service housing agency and a national housing strategy.
● Appoint a Minister of Housing to meet the needs of affordable housing that are unique to each province, oversee its implementation in collaboration with provincial ministers, and build on other aspects of the housing and homelessness crisis in Canada to tackle these issues.