Dear Editor,
The responsibility to provide housing in Canada is shared by all three levels of government.
The CMHC is responsible for implementing Canada’s National Housing Act and is a federal Crown corporation.
While all levels of government are involved in housing programs, the constitutional authority for housing is vested in provincial governments, which may delegate housing responsibility to regional and city governments.
Over the decades, both senior levels of government have squandered billions of dollars while completely dropping the ball on housing, leaving it all to the municipalities.
I believe that we’re finally understanding that the root of the public erosion and divisiveness we’re now seeing within communities and between neighbours around the issue of housing is an abject failure of senior governments.
The demands being downloaded to private property owners and local governments today, with misguided expectations to solve the growing housing shortages, are reprehensible.
I do not pay property taxes for Port Moody or private property owners to solve housing problems, and why would I, when I’ve already paid various other taxes to senior governments for that purpose?
Furthermore, senior governments have the market cornered, employing the best career housing professionals available, most with enviable salaries and pensions.
Port Moody and other municipalities can’t afford to triplicate these positions (which are in short supply and the source of great competition between communities), already strictly constrained by senior government in their ability to collect revenues other than property taxes to cover basic services to residents.
In 2023, the province of B.C. imposed new responsibilities for its cities to address housing gaps and needs by preparing a Housing Action Plan comprised of Bills 43, 44, 46 and 47.
As a small city, Port Moody had none of the required professionals on staff (that senior government has) to make sense of this mountain of new legislation and begin making significant changes to decades-old planning and development policies.
Port Moody was forced to reassign its best-suited staff resources to this work, previously allocated to other civic priorities.
This unplanned burden severely hindered Port Moody in attaining its other strategic goals and priorities (including delaying the updating of its Official Community Plan by nearly two years) necessary to maintain the quality of life we have become used to. A relatively huge amount of Port Moody’s centre falls within TOA legislation when compared to other communities.
The role of our local government in housing has traditionally been limited to zoning, bylaws, facilitating building applications and the planning process, establishing and regularly updating the Official Community Plan, partnering in Metro regional planning and other related activities.
The bills introduced by the province establish new minimum height and density requirements in designated Transit-Oriented Areas (TOA). If a private property owner in a TOA area wants to keep it simple and build a 20-storey building to meet these requirements, the ability of the city to negotiate for density bonuses is now essentially neutralized.
For Port Moody and other municipalities to collect sufficient amenity cost charges, development cost charges, density bonus fees, etc., from private property owners, the province has effectively set-up a community divide between those residents who don’t mind density (and the associated community and monetary benefits) and those residents who oppose the density required to attain those same benefits.
This adversarial situation has been created by the province and the continuous failure of the federal government in planning for growth through its immigration policies.
This abdication of their responsibilities is at the root of community conflicts between residents and deflects our attention away from them, the instigators. Senior government leadership has been silent for generations on the issue of housing and now they’re successfully deflecting the blame to local government and private property owners.
It bothers me that some of my neighbours go to council chambers (or more readily to social media) to complain that Port Moody must increase hospital spaces, accessibility to doctors, more schools, roads and other infrastructure, stop traffic, etc., before new homes are built, but fail to hold responsible those in senior government that are legislatively required to deliver these things.
Those levels of government must be held to account for increasing competition for resources and services and the very real result, which is ugly social division.
-John Grasty, Port Moody
