Graham Smith’s Post

Transcript

Imagine this. You wake up one morning and open your phone to look up the new home listings, only to discover something shocking. Everything has doubled. Yet this isn't fiction. It's reality for hundreds of thousands of desperate people looking to be homeowners. After nine years of the NDP Liberals, rents have doubled, mortgage payments have doubled. The minimum down payment needed for the average new home has doubled. Double trouble. Under the NDP Liberals, housing costs in Canada have outpaced people's incomes by more than any other G7 country. Let's take a look at what that means. Nine years ago, it would have taken you 25 years to pay off a mortgage. Today it takes 25 years just to save up for a down payment. Three out of five Canadian renters have completely given up on the dream of home ownership, and 80% of Canadians believe that owning a home is now reserved just for the very rich. In Vancouver, you now need to earn $219,000 just to qualify for a mortgage on an average home, and just shy of 200,000 in Toronto. This is the housing held that the NDP Liberals have created and it's not a global problem, it's made in Canada. Look how much worse things have gotten. In this RBC chart. It shows that back in October of 2015, the month when Justin Trudeau won his election, it only took 39% of the average family's income to make payments on the average home. Now it takes 60%. In Vancouver, it takes 98.6% of the average family's pre tax income to make payments for the average home. In Toronto, it's 77%. After taxes, there's nothing left over. And Speaking of taxes, they're one of the biggest reasons why housing is so expensive in the 1st place. Let's look at the tax facts. Taxes on new housing accounts for about 30% of the cost of a new home in Ontario and British Columbia. The federal government takes the biggest share. About 39% of the total taxes on a new home build in Ontario goes to the feds. This means that politicians and bureaucrats are making more money on the sale of a new home than are the carpenters and electricians who actually build the homes. No wonder housing is so expensive. In this country, one of these taxes that had so much of the cost to homes is the sales tax. When the GST was introduced back in 1991, the government offered a GST new housing rebate for homes up to $450,000. Back then, 95% of houses qualified at that low threshold. But not anymore. According to Statscan, the cost of a new home is up 120% since 1991, with most of those increases having happened in the last nine years of the. DP Liberal government. But the rebate thresholds have not changed from that $450,000 cap. Good luck finding a house for 450 grand today. But it gets worse. Currently when the federal government charges GST on a new home, they are charging a tax on other taxes already charged by other levels of government. The sales tax was never meant to apply to the essentials of life, like groceries for example. Yet. You pay it on the most essential thing of all, a home. That's why today common sense Conservatives are announcing that we will axe the federal sales tax on all new homes sold for under $1,000,000. That is right, zero GST on new homes under $1,000,000. Here's what it will mean on an $800, 000 home purchase. This Conservative tax cut will save you a total of $40,000 or. $2200 a year in mortgage payments and I'll push the provinces to match this tax cut by axing their sales tax on the cost of your new home, saving you 10s of thousands of dollars more. Less money for big banks and greedy governments, More money for you and your family. This tax cut on new homes will spark 30,000 extra homes built every single year. You're probably asking. How do we pay for that? Common sense. Conservatives will fund this big tax cut for home buyers by ending failed Liberal housing policies like their housing accelerator fund which gives money to big city governments that block housing construction with red tape. The NDP Liberal housing ministry even admitted this program doesn't actually build homes. It's also important to understand the housing accelerator fund doesn't go toward the cost of building houses. 2 year old announcement, $4 billion. The housing fund doesn't actually directly build home. There's $3 billion left in this program. It should go to home buyers and builders, not to City Hall bureaucrats. You'll also cancel other multibillion dollar housing programs that have built no housing whatsoever. And the 30, 000 extra homes that tax cut spurs will generate more income tax revenue from the businesses and workers who build homes. Common sense Conservatives will axe taxes to build homes. You will have the government's hands out of your pocket and a roof over your head. And we will restore Canada's promise that hard work earns a powerful paycheck that buys affordable food and homes in safe neighborhoods. That's common sense. Let's bring it home.