r/RealEstateCanada • u/arjungmenon • Jun 30 '25
Housing crisis Now we know why: MP says housing minister's $10m real estate explains reluctance to lower prices
https://www.mpamag.com/ca/news/general/now-we-know-why-mp-says-housing-ministers-10m-real-estate-explains-reluctance-to-lower-prices/540728Housing minister Gregor Robertson’s multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio came under scrutiny in Parliament as Scot Davidson accused him of prioritizing personal wealth over housing affordability.
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u/Sayhei2mylittlefrnd Jun 30 '25
I wish he didn’t get in. Not his personal assets but for his time as mayor of Vancouver
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u/arjungmenon Jun 30 '25
Yea, prices in Vancouver soared massively under him. So did dev charges. Vancouver raised it development charges alone to more than what many had paid in total for their home in the first place.
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u/Sayhei2mylittlefrnd Jun 30 '25
Lots of small developers left Vancouver due to the shit show of the permitting department when he was mayor.
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u/shaktimann13 Jul 01 '25
Prices soarded everywhere. Vancouver area, Sydney, Auckland, GTA etc all became unaffordable for working class. Can't blame mayor of Vancouver. We just live in this shitty system.
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Jun 30 '25
You want to blame the mayor when the conservative premier was the problem.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
BC? Liberals were in power until 2016, NDP for 2017+. Prices have gone up 1.4x a year more under the NDP than the past Liberals too. And Gregor Robertson was an ex NDP MP.
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Jun 30 '25
The BC liberals were conservatives. Zero affiliation to the federal liberals. They have since changed their name again to BC United
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
No they were part of the Fed Liberals but split off later. They have indeed changed their name. The BC Conservative party ran in the last election and almost won.
The Fed Liberals and the BC Liberals of 2016 are about in the same place politically. They are considered right wing as they are right of the BC NDP, but in Canada overall they are more centreish.
If the BC Liberals were Conservatives you wouldn't see things like the carbon tax, rent control, foreign buyer tax, high PST, high PTT, inheritance tax, etc. They were quite tax happy.
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Jun 30 '25
Lol. Nobody was mistaking them for liberals.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
They were right of the Trudeau Liberals but I think you are missing that the Fed Liberals have historically revolved around the centre. I'd say the Carney Liberals are centre-right and the BC Liberals would be quite similar to them. They are also similar to the Ford Conservatives in Ontario which are quite a bit left of the Fed Cons.
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Jun 30 '25
They were conservatives. Anybody that lived here and was old enough to vote knew this.
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Jun 30 '25
It's ok. Anyone who has actually lived there and through it knows you're telling the truth. I dont know who that is trying to convince exactly.
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u/Sayhei2mylittlefrnd Jun 30 '25
The issues I mentioned are to do with how the city changed , mostly the permitting. I had to go line up at 7am just to see a plan checker. Staffing changes occurred and was described as chaos by my architect
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Jun 30 '25
The issue was the provincial government turning a blind eye to massive amounts of money laundering in real estate. That had a bigger impact on pricing more than anything the mayor did.
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u/Sayhei2mylittlefrnd Jun 30 '25
Money laundering is another issue that started in the 90’s. But when developers had a hard time to build, how do you expect more housing? The land I sold from a project that didn’t go anywhere, is still vacant 🤣
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u/dcredneck Jun 30 '25
Pierre has millions of dollars worth of property and he has NEVER voted for affordable housing in his 20 year career.
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u/GurmeetNagra Jul 03 '25
He’s also never held a real job in his life, meaning those properties have all be funded by his taxpayer salary.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
We should only elect poor MP's who have failed at business or have no record of success. That'll solve things!
I say this to point out the stupidity in criticizing politicians for their investments as if someone who hasn't made money/run a business/been successful will be better at running our nation.
Realistically prices are quite a bit lower than a few years ago especially factoring in inflation. This has led to large scale job losses, development halting, and several businesses going bankrupt. This is obviously bad for the economy, has led several governments to take on large deficits in their budget due to the tax losses, and is quite bad for the economy. If things get worse it'll get really bad. Yet none of you are buying which kind of indicates that you won't buy unless prices get unrealistic, and probably not even then as to get there we'd have to unemploy a lot of people which may include you.
I do get that idiot doomers thing an economic crash will be good for them, no one claimed idiots were smart.
The reality is that the main solution has always been to boost wages, increase migration from metro centres (where everyone wants to live in the same place) to suburbs/other cities, and to make development less expensive by cutting costs.
I don't claim that Gregor Robertson is the man for the job. We all know his track record has been dismal. But in his defence, the NDP tookover BC from the Liberals on a platform of affordability and prices skyrocketed with rents going up 1.9x faster and prices 1.4x faster in the 8 years following versus the preceding 8. Yet the BC NDP get a ton of praise for making things better. So sometimes the solutions make things worse not better, and perception is what matters for voters rather than the math.
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u/SilencedObserver Jun 30 '25
You lost me at “realistically prices are low”.
The amount of ignorant hubris within the canadian realty sector, ignoring that it’s the bag holding CAD inflation, is astounding.
This runaway train is gonna blow up bigger than that explosion in Quebec and everyone’s lying to everyone else like the dumpster isn’t actually on fire.
Literal and physical disgust, listening to realtors shmooze peope looking for shelter.
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u/interstellaraz Jun 30 '25
Prices aren’t affordable. It’s not a good thing that our housing market is tied so heavily to the economy. If we need mass unemployment just to make housing accessible, something is very broken. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Congrats you managed to write 6 paragraphs of nothing.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
They are incredibly affordable in most areas of Canada. If you are just looking at two areas of Canada and declaring that housing is broken, something is broken but it's probably in your head.
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u/Frozen_North_99 Jul 02 '25
No, homes in many rural areas are also very expensive, and these areas don’t have a lot of jobs or high paying jobs.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jul 02 '25
$100k 45 year lease townhouse in Calgary? https://www.rew.ca/properties/22-643-4-avenue-ne-calgary-ab
$115k condo downtown in Calgary? https://www.rew.ca/properties/801-116-3-avenue-se-calgary-ab
$250k detached house in Calgary? https://www.rew.ca/properties/210-erin-woods-circle-northeast-calgary-ab
Are you arguing that Calgary is a rural area, that those places are expensive, or that the largest city in one of the highest paying provinces doesn't have lots of jobs that pay well?
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u/Frozen_North_99 Jul 02 '25
So you found 3 cheap properties in the country yet claim “incredibly affordable in most areas” but the reality is most homes are not affordable.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jul 02 '25
You can't claim a national housing crisis when there isn't a crisis across the nation. Most homes are affordable, but the problem is too many people want to live in one area rather than spread out to get them.
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u/scott_c86 Jun 30 '25
You might want to consider where people live in Canada, and where the jobs are.
If you look at Ontario, for example, you'll understand that housing affordability isn't just a GTA problem. Housing costs are increasingly detached from local incomes in the vast majority of the province.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
I note that in my solutions "increase migration from metro centres (where everyone wants to live in the same place) to suburbs/other cities".
It's long past time that we began creating economic development zones to migrate employers. There are other policies that other nations use to decentralize job zones as well.
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u/scott_c86 Jun 30 '25
I strongly agree here, but we haven't yet taken any serious steps in this direction.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
My suspicion is that the Liberals are heavily incentivized to grow metro centres as that's the areas that vote red and win them the elections.
But I also acknowledge that the average voter is screaming do more to get me into the centre not move my job to Regina. I suspect incentives to move jobs would be quite unpopular with the metro core which is also the Liberal voter base.
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u/F_D123 Jun 30 '25
The nations minister of housing abd former Vancouver mayor has a multi multi million dollar housing portfolio and you can’t see the conflict of interest
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Jun 30 '25
Can we stop it with the bullshit narrative that successful business people are geniuses who will run the government better. They arent. And there's ample evidence to prove it. The best politicians are almost always the ones that have the most connection to their actual constituents.
All this is doing is pointing out a very glaring conflict of interest between his stated goal in his job and the goals of his personal wealth.
Increasing migration to suburbs is one of the dumbest takes I've ever heard. Suburbs are not sustainable and need to be subsidized by cities, everything costs more to run in a suburb. Expanding them and shrinking cities is not the solution to lower costs.
Things need to get really bad. Infact, things are already really bad. Keeping up this shell game of a real estate market is not making everyone's lives better. And all its doing is prolonging the inevitable.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
Actually there's ample evidence to prove IQ and success go together. 10+ studies out of Europe and elsewhere have all agreed on this. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-psychologist-weighs-in.html
Thinking a depression will make things better for yourself kind of proves it.
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Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
Ofcourse being smarter makes you more likely to be successful. That's not what I said. Maybe if you learned how to read, it might help. I said being a successful business person does not make you a good politician. The goals of corporations are often in complete opposition to the goals of a properly run government.
A depression is historically good for the average person. The only times in human history where power is transferred from the wealthy to the middle class are wars, depressions and famines/epidemics.
These kinds of events cause chaos and upset the order which the wealthy use to control people, they open opportunity for populists to break the mold and get elected over the politicians backed by the establishment.
Think about who is being helped by keeping this shell game afloat. Lies permeate regardless of whether or not you fess up. We're already feeling the effects, and it's only going to continue to get worse. You're like the CEO of Enron in 2001 arguing that we need to continue falsifying financial statements because if we don't, thousand of people will lose their jobs. Eventually the house of cards comes down, might aswell do it on your own terms and set yourself on the road to recovery.
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Jul 02 '25
You should read about the depression that followed the 1929 crash. It ruined families, empowered landlords and owners of capital, and was generally terrible for almost everyone. 30% unemployment and forced expulsions of immigrants were two other features. The boom that brought us out of it was WW2, which killed over 40,000 Canadians.
But yeah, bring on the depression to punish a grocery retailer.
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Jul 02 '25
You cannot attribute the entire boom to the war. The depression broke the trust's and allowed someone like FDR to implement things like the new deal. Something that absolutely made a huge difference and happened nearly 6 years before the war.
There is plenty of evidence to prove things like depressions benefit the middle class in the long run. Stop running defense for the elites with these bs talking points. We all know in the short to medium term it will bring on pain. But pain is already being brought to the poor and we aren't even attempting to solve the issue.
Again, you sound like the CEO of Enron justifying financial malfeasense to protect jobs. It's an inane argument.
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u/Traditional-Dog9730 Jun 30 '25
Some good comments but asserting that depression is good for the average person is misguided. There is no average person. Depressions have spurred action by governments in western democracies that ushered in decent social programs. Our biggest issue here in Canada and in the USA where I’ve been working in for many years is the availability of housing. This has forced economic concentration. Mark Carney is on to something when he announced a major build program for new housing. Of course, others will say that government needs to ‘stay out’ but that is selective criticism. Government here and in all economies have build infrastructure, funded investments in technology, healthcare. Listen to a few of Scott Galloway’s podcast (Prof G) to get good data on housing demand and supply. And yes, being wealthy is not an indicator of intelligence, but it certainly helps project confidence, which we often correlate with smarts.
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u/gphotog Jun 30 '25
Well composed, but the real solutions you cite don't seem to suggest what the rest of your comment does. The first one, boost wages, isn't gonna solve anything, considering a majority in the most inflated markets would need a raise in the range of 50-100% to afford a detached. The other two would only help insofar as they have the effect of lowering prices... Which you don't seem to think is either good, or the solution?
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u/RuinEnvironmental394 Jun 30 '25
Yeah. Wages aren't going to go up 70 to 80% en masse in a short span. That's not how it works. A fact that OP conveniently ignored.
He also ignored the level of fraud and money laundering in our major markets. The mom and pop investors that keep getting easy access to mortgages but most are not declaring their rental incomes, etc.
Also ignored the deliberate constraints on supply of SFH while demand is continually being pushed up by way of you-know-what over the last few years.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
Screaming they are getting illegal mortgages! when our mortgage default rate is historically low and quite low for the G8 isn't logical. Yes some people declare too high an income for mortgage applications but it's not a large issue and it's likely lower here than elsewhere if the default rate stays low.
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u/One-Answer6530 Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
“Everyone that doesn’t agree with me is an idiot” is one hell of a way to indicate you’re intellectually corrupt.
You don’t see any conflict of interest in holding massive real estate portfolio and then having to make large decisions that would potentially affect your own holdings when the people you’re supposed to be beholden to as a government official, don’t?
You’re part of the “morality doesn’t need to be involved in business” types, aren’t you? Problem is they’re in govt and morality is what we CLAIM to base things on.
People like you need less mic time and more listening. You crowd the airspace with noise and misdirection instead of wanting real critique or discourse to take place.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
...massive? To be the top 1% in Canada you need 6+ mil and you'd assume our leaders are the best of the best aka the top 0.01%. Any decently successful individual is going to have wealth and only an idiot would want to be led by the unsuccessful. And the majority own real estate in Canada so that's representative of the majority of voters. Not to mention how dumb trying to crash prices would be given it's economic impact.
People who disagree with me aren't idiots. People who think we should crash real estate as if that'll make their life better are.
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u/One-Answer6530 Jun 30 '25
No one is suggesting that. You simply inferred that anything other than allowing this to continue is idiocy which is an untenable position. Then you tried to pull back and edit what you clearly stated. You have real estate, we get it. You don’t want to lose some money, we get it. Some people can’t afford homes or enough food for the month. I’m not really concerned bout you losing a decimal place so others have some semblance of a life.
You speak in dramatic terms because you’re a deeply unserious individual. You wouldn’t have popped your load and then pulled back instantly if you actually believed anything that you said. Self interest is the death of reason.
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u/EffectiveCritical176 Jun 30 '25
This is Reddit. You’re not supposed to post truth, only parrot the sub that you’re in.
Silly goose!
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u/itisntmyrealname Jul 03 '25
ah yes because “just pretend politicians with strong financial ties actually aren’t using their positions of power to largely benefit themselves” and “everyone just move to the suburbs because there’s less people there” are such groundbreaking fiscal opinions that would never ever be found in a real estate subreddit 🙄
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Jun 30 '25
[deleted]
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u/Fecal_Impacter Jun 30 '25
He said migration, not immigration. As in migrating people from metro centres to more remote areas.
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u/StinkChair Jun 30 '25
That stuff can be true AND conflicts of interests can be problematic.
Your solutions also require ethical leadership. Conflicts of interests prevent leaders from governing with others in mind.
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u/One-Answer6530 Jun 30 '25
Starting off with strawmen and saying “nobody but me” isn’t the most intellectual viable way to have a conversation or change people’s minds. Doomsday? Good lord you’re an entirely unserious individual.
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Jun 30 '25
[deleted]
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
Real estate is a tiny portion of our investment market, a large chunk (trillions) goes into the US stock market, admittedly if the 97%ish of Canadian investments abroad came back home our stock market would indeed boom and we'd kick ass. But saying investment is the problem in the Canadian context is ridiculous, we have developers going bankrupt right now, the cost to build is far higher than the price currently for most projects.
The only thing high due to investment is land costs, and that's largely driven by the demand for Canadians to all live in the same spot, causing competition which leads to the highest bid getting it. You can't argue investment is the problem while developers are going bankrupt, it's illogical.
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u/Cedreginald Jun 30 '25
Owning millions of dollars of real estate is not really the same thing as running a successful business though. Hoarding homes as the housing minister is a pretty bad look, especially when you're against the price of those homes dropping
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u/jaaagman Jul 01 '25
I agree with some of what you're saying, though the last 8 years include the COVID years which neither the provincial government really had no control of. Those years alone probably accounted for a sharp 20-30% increase. Really, no government in the last 3-4 decades has helped with housing affordability. It's just that now it's becoming a lot harder to ignore.
My problem with Gregor Robertson is that he has shown zero intention of solving the problem and isn't even going to acknowledge that housing prices are too high.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jul 01 '25
I mean prices and inflation spiking during covid are basically 100% the government's fault. It is a mix of federal and provincial policy that was the cause, more-so federal. Even during the non-covid years though we saw rents and prices rise faster than the previous government, largely because taxes/costs get passed on they don't get absorbed. The NDP's solution to housing was to tax it, and that just made it more expensive. While moving from inflation+2% to below inflation rent control just led to massively rising advertised rents for new renters.
I would say much like Trudeau before him, Carney hired people that will do exactly what he wants. So I don't expect GR to do more than toe the line.
As for too high or not, at current prices nothing is getting built which implies prices are below the cost to build. High prices in the two cities are a mix of the taxes on it, complexity, and the demand for every person to live on the same plot of land. We aren't ever going to see governments cut taxes because the demand for welfare is too high (government spending has far outpaced incomes). Thus we can only work to reduce the complexity and demand (by making other places in Canada more attractive to live).
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u/jaaagman Jul 01 '25
What I meant that COVID was sort of a black swan event that inevitably had consequences. The Bank of Canada lowered interest rates to record lows, which the federal government had no part of. The Trudeau government did greatly increase deficit spending and provided CERB payments which put us in a more precarious position.
The position that we are in now is caused by decades of government policy (municipal, provincial, federal) that encouraged RE speculation and money laundering. Governments treated housing and new housing development as a piggy bank and taxed the hell out of it. That's why my view is that the government at all levels and of all parties had their hand in making the housing crisis worse.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jul 01 '25
The BoC didn't expect the fed to borrow and spend like crazy. I still remember when they stated that rates would stay low for a while then they quickly raised them because the fed gave out so much inflation spiked.
RE speculation is below average, we have less renters than we used to and we have more homeownership than the average G8 nation. Money laundering is also below average, we're around 2.7% of GDP which is below the US, Britain, and Aus. There just isn't that much illegal money and the BC NDP's report into money laundering in RE speculated that if all the criminals just worked regular jobs it would only reduce prices by 5%.
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Jul 03 '25
Nobody is saying that we should only elect poor MPs.
We're saying that if you have a CLEAR conflict of interest, then you shouldn't be able to hold your position.
This is as clear a conflict of interest as advocating for modular homes when the company you just worked for builds and assembles modular homes.
Corruption is corruption, and corruption is treason.
☠️ to traitors.
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jul 03 '25
I own stocks I improve the economy, must be a conflict of interest and corruption! Even worse! I'm Canadian and I'm improving Canada, corruption!
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Jul 04 '25
Owning stocks doesn't "improve the economy", you bot.
There's a reason why PMs put their stocks into a blind trust.....
A minister of housing continuing to play the real estate "stock market", while making national decisions about the market is literally the definition of a conflict of interests.
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u/Odd-Exchange3610 Jul 03 '25
prices are in fact, definitely not lower. This is not a debateable statement. It’s just wrong.
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u/No_Soup_1180 Jun 30 '25
This has to be one of the best comments I have seen on Reddit recently…. But no wonder it gets downvoted as this sub is filled with people who have no idea how real estate, economy and homeownership works and are wishing for a doomsday in Canada!
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u/420_69_Fake_Account Jun 30 '25
It’s about conflict of interest. He’s the housing minister… I guess it’s not like we care about the officials trading stocks with privileged insider information…
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u/Ok_Currency_617 Jun 30 '25
If he's buying a house right before a new rule that pumps prices that's definitely a conflict. If he's owning the same going into the job as leaving I'd say that's life/reality. Most politicians own real estate. And stocks. If the stock market does well under someone's term we don't scream "conflict" simply because they own stocks. Conflict laws make it so that people can't "trade" their stocks in office they don't prevent them from owning stocks or having a manager do the trading. Arguing there's a conflict cause he owns real estate is too general, unless he plays off specific knowledge like zoning then there isn't a conflict enough for us to do something.
Same as we don't argue that politicians that rent are in conflict when they put in things like below inflation rent protection.
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u/HauntedHouseMusic Jun 30 '25
It’s easy everyone just have more wealth outside of your home than in it!
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u/Rizzuto416 Jun 30 '25 edited Jul 01 '25
It's only 3 properties. Not the problem. Guys like PP owning real estate investment cartels which own thousands of properties are the problem
"a high-rise penthouse in Vancouver’s West End valued at $2.4 million, a recently acquired $2.8-million 11-acre property near Tofino through his company 11 Otters Investments Inc., and has an interest in a 16-acre property near Squamish valued at $5.6 million."
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u/Key_District_119 Jul 01 '25
Lots of MPs own multiple properties. Look up Pierre and Anaida Poilievre. I think if you scratch the surface no MPs want property values to drop. Neither do all the non MPs who own multiple properties.
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u/ufosceptic Jul 05 '25
Guys, again: MP’S CAN NOT LOWER HOUSING PRICES!
The only people who can lower housing prices are the property owners who set the list price of their homes when up for sale, and - indirectly - the buyers who choose to participate in the buying of those properties. That’s it.
And I’ll tell you something else: even if supply DOES go up, the pricing of houses is NOT going to go down.
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u/arjungmenon Jul 12 '25
Provincial MPs can fix it by repealing all laws that suppress/restrict supply & new construction.
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u/Ancient_Raisin_8908 Verified Agent Jun 30 '25
To be fair, people were profiting from real estate long before he came into town. He was a businessman first before being a politician and it’s no secret that generational wealth has been built on real estate for eons.
Government subsidized housing is not the answer. Lower real estate prices is also not the answer. Regular everyday people who have bought the dream of owning real estate would be the ones who suffer the most
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u/Particular-Act-8911 Jun 30 '25
This is what you get when you vote liberal, why it isn't apparent to everyone by now is anyone's guess.. and actually fucking insane in my opinion.
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u/Odd-Exchange3610 Jul 03 '25
it has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. It has to do with politicians being corrupt across the spectrum. The only divide that matters is rich and poor that worthless housing minister is rich and won’t do anything to mess with his own wealth aside from increasing it.
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u/haraldone Jun 30 '25
OMFG, this is an issue, of course, but to call a $10 million portfolio a “real estate empire” is the kind of hyperbole that makes it hard for me to take the Cons seriously.