Remarks by the Deputy Prime Minister announcing new actions to build secondary suites and unlock vacant lands to build more homes

October 8, 2024 – Ottawa, Ontario

Check against delivery

Introduction

Good morning.

I’m going to start on a very celebratory note. I want to start by congratulating the amazing Geoffrey Hinton on his Nobel Prize in physics. He is a great Canadian. He is absolutely brilliant. He happens to be a constituent of mine and, as the father of AI, is the teacher of generations of great Canadian intellectual leaders who have been taught by him, and who have learned from him at the University of Toronto. What a wonderful accomplishment. This is an honour which is richly deserved, and I think I speak for all Canadians in saying we are so proud of you and so grateful to you.

Today, I will tell you about the new measure our government is taking to build new housing. Minister Jean-Yves Duclos (Minister of Public Services and Procurement) will tell you about the latest additions to the Canada Public Land Bank, a very important program that continues. And after that, Minister Terry Beech (Minister of Citizens’ Services) will tell you about the impact of these measures for Canadians.

I do want to start by talking for a moment about the good economic news we’ve been having in recent weeks. Canada is leading the G7 in achieving a soft landing after the COVID recession. Inflation fell to 2 per cent in August. That is a 42-month low and it means that, for all of this year, inflation has been within the Bank of Canada’s target range.

Thanks to that inflation trajectory, the Bank of Canada led the G7 in cutting rates. Canada was the first G7 country to cut interest rates for the first time, we were the first G7 country to cut interest rates for the second time, and we were the first G7 country to cut interest rates for the third time.

Wages have been outpacing inflation for 19 months in a row now. What all of that means for Canadians is their paycheques are going further. And for people who own a home and have a mortgage that is coming up for renewal, the fact that interest rates are coming down is a source of really great relief.

Now on our announcement. We are announcing today new rules about secondary suites, and we’re issuing technical guidance for lenders and insurers to offer refinancing for secondary suites. These will come into force on January 15th.

The idea here is to make it easier for people to build a secondary suite in their home, for someone to build a basement flat, a garden flat, or laneway housing. This is all about gentle density, creating more homes for Canadians to live in. It builds on the secondary suite loan program, which was announced in Budget 2024.

Specifically, we’re going to allow refinancing of insured mortgages to build a secondary suite in your home. You will be able to access up to 90 per cent of the home value, including the value added by the secondary suite, and you will be able to amortize your refinanced mortgage for up to 30 years. The limit for insured mortgages, if you are building a secondary suite, will be $2 million and that will be particularly important to recognize—and is a recognition of conditions in the GTA, and in the Lower Mainland.

This is really about giving Canadians, Canadian homeowners the opportunity to be part of our great national effort to build more homes faster. It’s to let a family who already owns a home and maybe would like their grandmother or grandfather, or both of them, to move in with them to give them access to a little bit more money to build that basement flat, to build that garden suite, so that grandparents can move in.

It’s also about grandparents who have a big house. Maybe they are alone in that house, and they’d like a grandchild to be able to move in with them to go to school. This is about making it easier for them to build that extra space. And we see this as a measure which goes alongside other measures that we’ve put in place—designed for the big builders to get more homes built faster, to get more rental units built. This is about saying regular Canadians should have the ability and access to the financing to build gentle density in their neighbourhoods. To build density that their families and their communities need.

The second announcement is a consultation on taxation of vacant land. We believe that good land should not be left unused. Ireland, for example, has a measure like that. Today, we are announcing consultations with municipalities, provinces and territories to discuss whether we need such a measure here in Canada.  And the objective, like all our objectives concerning housing, is to build more housing faster. We know that Canada needs this.   

We know that one of the most pressing issues for Canada, for Canadians, is housing. And we know that the centre of that issue, the centre of the solution, needs to be to get more homes built faster. Today’s announcements are another arrow in our quiver of measures to get more homes built faster in Canada. This is about getting 4 million homes built.

I’m now going to turn it over to my colleague, Jean-Yves Duclos.