» Poilievre turns to number one issue for younger voters

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On Tuesday morning, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre stood in the middle of a new housing development and promised to make life more affordable if elected. With construction workers in the background, with half-finished homes still under construction behind him, Poilievre said he will take steps to make buying a new home more affordable.

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While voters 55 and over are flocking to Mark Carney and the Liberals and are mostly concerned with Donald Trump, voters under 55 and under are more concerned with inflation, the cost of living and being able to afford a home.

It’s like we are having two separate elections. One for retirees who own their homes and don’t care about fixing the economy and one for everyone else trying to get ahead.

“Nobody can afford this,” Poilievre said of homes in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

“Mark Carney is out of touch and doesn’t understand that Canadians are being forced to move away from the towns and cities they grew up in.”

Poilievre is promising that if a Conservative government is elected, he will eliminate the GST on new homes up to $1.3 million in price, taking up to $65,000 off the price of a new home. It’s an update from his previous promise of eliminating the GST on homes of up to $1 million but said that’s because the Liberals have simply made the housing crisis worse since he made that initial promise.

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The benchmark price of a home in Vancouver has risen to $1.195 million and in Toronto it has risen to $1.089 million.

“In B.C. and Ontario, the cost of new home, 30% of the cost of a new home, though, is just taxes. More money for a new home goes to bureaucrats in office buildings than goes to these builders who actually build the homes,” he said pointing to the tradespeople standing behind him.

As Poilievre was speaking, he pointed to problems that he said Liberal Leader Carney helped create in the housing market when he was the Chair of the Board at Brookfield Asset Management. Poilievre said that Brookfield has been buying up apartment buildings across Canada, making a few cosmetic changes and jacking up rents, all under Mark Carney’s watch.

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“In a report by the Office of the Canadian federal housing advocate for 2022 Brookfield was criticized as being one of the leading North American companies engaged in predatory financialization of the real estate market,” he said.

Before Poilievre had even spoken, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh had already gone after Carney for Brookfield’s role in what he said was targeting Toronto tenants. Singh was sitting with a woman from Toronto named Erin Gilby who has lived in a building for more than 18 years and said things were good until Brookfield took over.

“It really feels like this landlord doesn’t have a sense of caring about the people who live here, about my neighbors and about our community, and that’s a problem,” Gilby said.

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That doesn’t sound like the progressive kind of person that Carney wants to present himself as. Of course, if you’ve followed the fact that Brookfield denied medical care to miners with black lung, raised road tolls on poor people in Peru, all under Carney’s watch, none of this should be shocking.

Singh said that as board chair, Carney had an option to act and did not.

“The chair of Brookfield, the board, the chair of the board is Mark Carney. The chair of the board has incredible power,” Singh said. “So, Mark Carney oversaw this company as they made a strategic decision to go after people like Erin in the city of Toronto to go and squeeze as much profit as possible out of everybody they could.”

A lot of NDP voters, a lot of “progressive” voters, have switched from the NDP to the Carney Liberals and they may want to rethink their decision because this guy is not as advertised.

Trump is one issue in this campaign, but shove him aside for a moment and we still have a country where the Trudeau-Carney Liberals killed the housing market, broke the immigration system, allowed crime to run rampant and generally didn’t seem to care. That doesn’t seem like a group of people who should be rewarded with a fourth term.

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