Municipal government has grown too big and its slowness in granting approvals is adding to the housing crisis, according to Erin O’Toole, former leader of Opposition and Member of Parliament from Durham Riding.
“Housing is one of the top issues facing the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), facing families here. There are many young people including up into my generation, Genexers, that can’t afford homes,” he told Durham Post.
“I know of families with children in their 30s living with them, with their grandkids which, 20 years ago, never happened. A 30-year old couple would have their own home,” he pointed out.
O’Toole said a solution will require all three levels of government [federal, provincial and municipal] to work together.
“In our platform last year, we had a very detailed policy on that… we were going to free up federal lands for development; we were going to give more flexibility with mortgages for first-time home buyers with longer terms and amortization periods; we were going to tie transit investments to density and speed of building, so if municipalities are not building quickly, they’re not going to get the transit money as quickly either,” said the former Leader of the Conservative Party.
“I really like what [Ontario] Premier [Doug] Ford is doing. He’s giving mayors more powers , starting with Toronto and Ottawa, to advance housing more quickly. I really think that after years of crisis, all levels of government are finally realizing the crisis is so acute they have to change”.
Municipalities grown too big and too slow: O’Toole said “without ascribing blame, the municipal level of government has grown too big and too slow”.
“The delays I hear from both housing and commercial developers in terms of how much they had to pay for permitting and other things, how slow the approvals are… the cost of holding property or delaying development, that is driving higher prices as well as development charges, said the Conservative stalwart.
However, in a separate interview, Clarington Mayor Adrian Foster blamed developers for delays in not applying for permits. He was responding to a question on why Clarington saw a 32 per cent drop in residential permits in 2021. He also blamed city planning staff shortage.
O’Toole said municipalities have too many employees. “All of those employees are on big public pensions. We got too much government, particularly at the regional and local levels. We need to make sure we are not growing bigger than our means. We need to speed up and lower the cost of getting homes built, and have a mixture of low-income housing, alongside of mixed development and single-family units”.
O’Toole said we didn’t get into this housing crunch just in the last 48 months. “This has been 10 years. For every four or five families that were moving into the GTA just from immigration – not somebody moving from Nova Scotia – new families, new Canadians, for four to five families there is only one unit”.
Below are excerpts from the wide-ranging interview.
Broken Immigration System
Durham Post (DP): Canada needs immigrants, especially critical staff, but the immigration system is lagging behind. What is needed?
Erin O’Toole (EOT): You have a crunch…we need, actually, a lot more immigration…but we have to make sure that housing, in a mixture of rental, low-income and single family, keeps pace. I’ve been talking about how broken our immigration system is for years.
We also need people that come to provinces, if they’re sponsored under a provincial nominee program say to Nova Scotia, they have to be able to settle and stay in Nova Scotia. We should not let everyone come to the GTA at a time when we don’t have housing and don’t have the supports. New Brunswick – that province is losing population.
We have to make sure that our program is faster.
Right now, we need an emergency all-hands-on-deck approach. Families right now can’t even get answers on where the status of their family unification is, for example. Skilled immigration through the Express Entry program is delayed, and so is refugees, of course (I’m trying to help 8,000 in Afghanistan).
Time Limits: We need more civil servants in immigration. We need an almost business-style approach – that we have 60 to 90 days to clear each file and no excuses, because it is unfair for families.
Once we get the backlog down to a normal, more manageable system, then I think we can increase even faster the skills route. We have huge labour shortage. Once we get the families that are in the pipeline and the backlog down, we need to go back to accelerating workers for skilled areas, but not at the detriment of making families wait three years for a family reunification.
Healthcare Crisis
DP: How can we overcome the healthcare crisis with even hospital emergencies shutting down?
EOT: All the calls into my office or most of them recently, are all healthcare related. I was committing an additional $60 billion over 10 years – would have been an increase of about 6 per cent each year. I would have met with the Premiers in the first 100 days just on healthcare. What the premiers really want is a predictable stream of new money because when they’re negotiating to retain nurses (nurses are burning out and a lot of them are leaving. They’re only held to 1 or 2 per cent salary increase when inflation is at 8 per cent). You’re seeing a 6 per cent drop in the effectiveness of your salary. So, provinces need Ottawa to really step up for the long term – not little band-aids, not tying money to special projects.
I think Premier Ford is doing a fantastic job. He’s actually met with all the Atlantic premiers to talk healthcare. All of our systems are overloaded.
I lived in Nova Scotia when I was in the military and at law school. Atlantic Canada has a smaller population. It has the highest aging population in the country and the lowest tax base. If we think there’s a healthcare crisis in Ontario, Atlantic Canada is much worse. Kids are getting educated at all these great universities and they’re going west. Canadians consume about 90 per cent of their healthcare costs in the last five years of their life.
I think Premier Ford is showing great leadership. I also think the BC premier has shown great leadership on this too.
The federal government is funding partner for healthcare, the province is delivering partner for healthcare.
High Inflation
DP: Bank of Canada is trying to stem inflation, but how did we get into this mess in the first place?
EOT: A year and a half ago when we started raising the alarm bell on inflation, the [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau government ignored it. And, when inflation started coming up, they said it was transitory, they said it was temporary.
There were two reasons for inflation – there was excessive spending by the government and too much money in circulation and that is his (Trudeau’s) fault. They extended the CERB for six months longer than it should have been. That should have been temporary in the worst of the pandemic when we thought the economy was going to collapse. It should have been rolled back.
It should never have been provided for students. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars for 15-year-olds living at home with their parents to collect the CERB. It is a cause of inflation, and it has also changed our labour force…it has changed the culture. The over-spending part of the inflationary problem is 100 per cent Justin Trudeau’s fault.
Our workers policy, for lower income families, especially those in retail or service, or new Canadians that might be working in hospitality, they’re getting squeezed. Price of rent is going up, price of gas is going up, food has gone up 15 per cent on average.
We were going to get a doubling of the Canada Workers Benefit for lower income people, which would have resulted in several thousand dollars more in their pocket. For a family it would have been over $4,000 paid quarterly in cheques. At a time of cost-of-living crisis, I really think that policy would have helped people pick up the bills.
I wrote the Prime Minister on the wider supply-chain shortages about a year ago asking him to coordinate our efforts on everything from microchips, semiconductors, steel, and aluminium with the United States. We need to get back to that integrated Canada-US market. I don’t call it North American because for some of this technology, Mexico is a labour source, not a high tech and IT source.
We should really get back to solving supply-chain crunches together, including for the electric vehicles (EV). Critical minerals should come from Canada, not China, not Russia – and this is another issue I’ve been advocating for many years. The U.S. needs our support for these resources.
We could have been tackling supply-chain with the United States. I think this one is slowly going to sort itself out after China resumes normal shipping.
Canada Divided
DP: Why does there seem to be more political divisions, fractures and ruptures?
EOT: People are becoming, because of social media, angrier and angrier, and they want only their concerns to be listened to. That’s not a democracy. You have to be willing to – at times – put a little water into your wine or juice, to make the country heal.
If I’ve learned anything in my almost 10 years of politics, travelling the country many times, working on many files, we got the greatest country in the world… the diversity of it is incredible. And when I say diversity, I don’t mean just new Canadians. I mean what a farmer in Nova Scotia thinks is a priority, may not be the priority of the farmer in Saskatchewan. Even people with the same job have a different outlook, depending on where they live, depending on their background, depending on their religious faith, depending on their income level.
Democracy needs to respect everyone. No one has the perfect answer to anything. It’s a matter of working together and having smart compromise.
Separation Movements: Right now, if people are saying there’s some differences or divisions within our party, our party is reflection of the country. There are divisions and differences dramatically in our country, and Trudeau has tried to ignore this and gloss over to say I was exaggerating it – you just have to look at the people that are giving up on Canada.
There are separation movements in three provinces now – not just Quebec. In Saskatchewan and Alberta, serious ones. You saw people going to Ottawa, breaking the law – I didn’t agree with that. They’re law-abiding people, but they were doing that because they thought they were being ignored or demonized.
We need a Prime Minister that starts uniting the country. You’ve seen some Liberal MPs speak out against Justin Trudeau’s Emergencies Act. I do think our party is a reflection of the country. Right now, the country is in a bit of a difficult area.
I’ve said publicly how I’m very concerned about some of the populism that’s out there, particularly it’s sort of angry. I hate seeing the flags that say: ‘F Trudeau’. I think Canada is great where we can disagree without being disagreeable. I don’t like that type of angry populism.
But after many years of division by the Liberal government, we’re seeing that, especially in the west, and even in rural parts of Ontario. I don’t think that’s healthy, but it’s a product of the times. Politics is an extension of what the people are saying, and right now the people are mad and angry, uncertain, frustrated.
I hope we can get through this period in a way that doesn’t see division or xenophobia or any of the things we’ve seen in the United States or in parts of Europe.
Covid Impact
DP: How did covid impact the last general elections?
EOT: We had a great platform. It was only in the last two weeks when the Delta wave of the pandemic really hit Alberta, that people started getting nervous again. And Trudeau really played on that nervousness, playing on the vaccine mandate and divided people over vaccines in different parts of the country – so we have a very divided country now.
We got the popular votes – we got more votes; we just didn’t win the seat count.
We really had a great team. It’s very hard from me because we had a move from some in our caucus – they wanted to support the issues that I thought would just divide the country.
Our platform had really the recipe that Canada needed; it’s just the pandemic prevented us getting out there.
Mr. Trudeau called the election for two reasons. Election was carried out on a Sunday. Three or four days before that, out of the blue, Trudeau announced the vaccine mandate for the federal civil service and for federal jurisdiction. Four months earlier he had said we will never make vaccines mandatory in Canada, we need to encourage people to get it. He reversed his position. There was no bill in the House of Commons, no debate, no explanation, no proposals to make sure people didn’t lose their jobs.
He called the elections then because he knew that Alberta hospitals would fill up, and he knew that if he took advantage of that, covid would be back on the radar in the final 10 to 14 days of the election. He saw the polling, people were scared and if you were worried about covid and unvaccinated, you supported mandates. In Quebec, they were even going to start fining people. People were getting a bit, I would say, irrational because of their fear. Trudeau played on that.
It was not Jason Kenney. Trudeau saw the modeling… there was going to be a resurgence of the Delta wave. I was very, very pro-vaccination but I didn’t think anyone should lose their job if we could accommodate with rapid tests, social distancing, masks as some businesses did. There were options they could have explored.
China Interference
DP: What was behind China’s interference in the last general elections?
EOT: Let me be crystal clear: Beijing’s interference in our elections did not change the result.
This is something I’m raising because we have to have more safeguards. Canadians need to be aware – particularly Chinese Canadians in targeted areas like the GTA and the Greater Vancouver Region. Between seven and 12 seats were directly impacted to the point that I believe we lost the seat due to interference. And those are in the Markham-Richmond Hill areas of the GTA and in the Richmond Tri-cities area of British Columbia.
I’m going to be talking more about this over time, not because I’m crying about the election result. This is going to continue, and if we don’t prepare better and educate people that they need to not trust all the news sources they are reading, it’s going to take hold.
There’s been multiple countries trying to interfere in our elections – China, Russia, North Korea, probably a few countries in the Middle East as well. I think the most effective have been China and Russia.
Russia just wants chaos. They just want us fighting, to undermine democracy. China actually has some objectives where they want Members of Parliament who are sceptical of Beijing in highly populated Chinese communities, they want them taken out. They want pro-Beijing voices, and that’s very, very dangerous for our democracy.
Trade relations with China? We have to work with our allies and make sure we are not dependent on China for anything that is critical. We have to push China to end their transhipment of goods. Their Road and Belt initiative is making some developing countries almost beholden to China.
We really have to work with United States and a lot of our G7 (Group of Seven nations) allies, and particularly countries in the Quad as well, including India, to try and counterbalance the size and impact of China, particularly on critical commodities like steel, aluminium, mineral resources, energy, to the point of tariffs based on China’s trade policy.
Why would we allow their higher emission aluminium to come into Canada when we have carbon taxes on our own? Our policy had a border carbon adjustment tariff on those sort of resources.
I also think we should have a complete ban on products that are made in regions of China where there is forced labour and genocide. When I was leader [of Opposition], we highlighted the genocide toward the Uighur population in western China. That is now quite publicly well known. We should have traceability [on] goods that come from there.
Is Indo-Pacific Strategy a counterbalance to the Belt and Road initiative? Right now, Canada has no Indo-Pacific Strategy. I’ve been talking about it for many years. Our allies have an Indo-Pacific Strategy, but Justin Trudeau isn’t invited to the dance. There’s the Quad that we’re not a part of, and there is Aukus (Australian, UK, U.S. alliance) that we’re not a part of either.
Both of those organizations will be lead on trade and security in the Indo-Pacific, including the South China Sea. We need to be at those tables because Canada is a proud Pacific nation as well. I went to Seoul, South Korea to finalize our first Free Trade Agreement with an Asian country.
We have to really, really put a lot more emphasis on Indo-Pacific Strategy, more linkages with India, membership in the Quad and in Aukus. I think we have to continue to build up our port resources in Vancouver to avoid the rail and port backlogs. Once the economy returns to normal, we’re going to go back into having backlogs.
[Editor’s Note: The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue comprises the United States, Australia, India, and Japan. They’re trying to redefine ‘Asia-Pacific’ as ‘Indo-Pacific’, to deal more effectively with the rise of China, the Middle East and Africa.]
LNG Exports
DP: Qatar, for example, ships natural gas in huge LNG carriers around the world. Why can’t Canada?
EOT: It’s not difficult for Canada. It’s difficult for a very ideological Left Trudeau Liberal government. When I heard Mr. Trudeau saying there is no business case for LNG exports, that is a complete joke. First of all, Mr. Trudeau wouldn’t know what a business case was if it fell out of the sky, he never worked in business. I’ve been meeting with German ambassadors and representatives of industry for the last seven years on the interest for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from Canada, whether it is in Nova Scotia, St. John (New Brunswick) or Quebec – I was sadly the only major supporter in Quebec of a project called GNL Quebec [which] because of hydroelectricity would have been the lowest carbon-emission LNG facility in the world. In fact, they had a plan to make it net zero.
And Germany wanted all of that gas.
There were three projects. The only thing stopping these projects is Justin Trudeau’s laws. Currently, there is no viable hydrogen market to get into. I support the development of hydrogen too, but that’s more than a decade away. For the next 10 to 20 years, Canada has some of lowest emissions natural gas, and we should be exporting it instead of Russian, Venezuelan and other bad sources of energy.
We could supply for both Asia and Europe. There are two projects in slow development in British Columbia. Over the last few years there have been three possible projects in Atlantic Canada – all of them have been held up or cancelled by the Trudeau government.
So, for him to say there is no business case is disingenuous.
Future Plans
DP: What do you plan to do?
EOT: [Apart from the above] I am dedicating myself to some specific issues that are very, very critical to our long-term prosperity [such as] nuclear energy. With Pickering, Darlington, Port Hope, Ontario Tech and Durham College, we have a hub that could not only help our local economy, but help reduce emissions around the world.
Another issue I’m working on is Afghan refugees. I have a proposal to the government on bringing back about 8,000 refugees that are stuck in Afghanistan. They are entitled to come to Canada because they were translators or contractors during our mission in Afghanistan, and they have been left behind. I’m going to advocate on that. There is a growing Afghani population in Durham region. Almost each week we hear from a new family about a loved one there who is at risk.
I’m doing a lot on Ukraine. I’ve been helping, trying to get military equipment and support on the ground in Ukraine. I have some friends that were texting me from Kyiv giving me updates.
And, on anything energy. Anything having to do with Canadian resources and how we can export them to Germany or around the world. I really think that’s not only important for our economy, but it’s also important for our national unity.
Your choice of next Conservative Party Leader? As a former leader, I am neutral in this race.
Our party needs to work together. We also need to put the country first. Sometimes, Conservatives who are Members of Parliament like me, or members of the party or someone who boasts Conservative, we have to get a little bit more accommodating. You have to be willing to get two-thirds of the things you’d like to see in a platform reflected.
Right now, the country is so divided. I hope the next leader (of the Conservative Party) will really consider the unity of the country in everything they do.
[Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before Saturday’s election of Pierre Poilievre as the new leader of the Conservative Party.]
Do you still have a shot at the country’s leadership? Me? I am not planning on that. I was fortunate. I consider myself being very lucky to have served in cabinet, to have represented Canada on world stage at events, and to serve as Leader of the Conservative Party. We almost got six million votes in the last election. I don’t come from a wealthy family. My dad wasn’t Prime Minister like Mr. Trudeau. I consider myself very fortunate and I’m MP for my hometown.
Whether I’m leader or backbencher, I consider that to be an honour, and I’ll support whoever the next leader is.
But, you never say never to anything in politics.
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