Budget will include millions to speed up affordable housing: Freeland

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BOUCTOUCHE • The next federal budget will spend more than $600 million on technologies to build affordable homes faster, similar to the way Canada did it after the Second World War, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said Friday, after touring the Kent Homes facility in Bouctouche.

“It’s great to see how fast you guys can build homes,” Freeland told workers at the Irving-owned plant, which has been in operation for more than 60 years. The plant uses an assembly-line approach to building modular homes, at a rate of one every 14 days. “We need a lot more of that across the country. We need to get more homes built and across the economy we need to become more productive.”

The Liberal government will table its 2024 budget to the House of Commons on April 16.

Freeland was accompanied by Beausejour MP Dominic LeBlanc and ACOA Minister Gudie Hutchings, who visited Moncton earlier this week to tour affordable housing units. She made her speech to employees of the plant gathered on the production floor. A power outage, likely due to a heavy snowfall in Bouctouche, knocked out everything but the emergency lights, but Freeland continued her speech by speaking louder and encouraging people to move closer.

Freeland said funding announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Friday is intended to speed up the production of modular homes like those made in Bouctouche. She said the funding should help boost plants like this to full capacity, which was greeted with applause by Jim Irving, co-CEO of J.D. Irving, Limited.

Freeland said many Canadians are unable to afford a home of their own and the plan proposed for the next federal budget will address that.

“Everyone deserves to succeed,” she said. “But today, for too many Canadians, especially Millennials and Gen Z, your hard work isn’t paying off like it did for previous generations. Your pay cheque doesn’t go as far as costs go up, and saving enough seems harder and harder. It doesn’t have to be this way. Every generation should get a fair chance to get ahead.”

She said young Canadians are renting and being priced out of their communities and families are finding it difficult to find a place to settle down. 

The measures announced Friday, which will be included in the upcoming federal budget, include:

• A $50-million Homebuilding Technology and Innovation fund that will seek to leverage an additional $150 million from the private sector and other orders of government to support the scale-up, commercialization, and adoption of innovative housing technologies and materials, including for modular and prefabricated homes.

• A $50-million program to modernize and speed up home building through regional development agencies. This includes modernizing building practices through modular housing, mass timber construction, robotics 3D printing and automation.

• $500 million to support low rental housing projects using prefabricated and modular housing manufacturers.

• A modernized housing design catalogue which will standardize up to 50 efficient home blueprints. This will include modular homes, row houses and fourplexes that manufacturers will be able to simply and speed up their production.

The federal government said using new technologies in construction will help to overcome the housing shortage, working with the industry and labour unions to develop a new policy for home building.

Earlier this week, the federal government announced a $15 billion top-up to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, a new $6 billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund, a new $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund, and a $400 million top-up to the Housing Accelerator Fund.

“After the Second World War, Canada built new homes at a pace and scale never seen before,” Freeland said. “This happened with the help of a housing design catalogue which included cost-effective, simple-to-build designs that meant people could quickly move into a new home.”