Published at 12:59 am. Updated at 06:00.
Bang, bang and bang. We don't know what Pierre Poilievre ate before making this so-called “documentary” about the housing crisis that is all the rage on social networks, but we suspect that it was not a biscuit with social tea, but a relaxing one herbal tea.
The video, subtly titled “Housing Hell,” has been viewed more than 400,000 times in English on YouTube (compared to around 12,000 views in French, an otherwise interesting difference). It will also air on other platforms1.
As usual, the Conservative leader is pulling his punches, pointing an accusing finger at one and only one culprit for the housing crisis rocking the country: (you guessed it) Justin Trudeau.
The video is fascinating from multiple angles. On the one hand, it is sometimes extremely effective to show the extent of the problem and to illustrate certain undesirable developments in government action. On the other hand, it is full of demagoguery, creates confusion and often uses crude abbreviations.
The problem is that with such a mix of genres, it's really not easy to tell when Mr. Poilievre is right and when he's exaggerating. In short, information tends to go hand in hand with disinformation.
Take the claim that “Rents in Toronto are so high that students are living in homeless shelters.”
O captain! I said to myself. I found this to be an obvious exaggeration. I suspected that the Conservative leader had made up an anecdote.
Well, I was wrong. I quickly found an article from the Financial Post in which the manager of a homeless shelter in Toronto claims that almost a third of his clientele are students2.
PHOTO CHRIS YOUNG, CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVE
A man collected materials at a homeless camp near Kensington Market in Toronto last November.
The Conservative Party referred me to other articles documenting the same phenomenon. Researchers at the University of New Brunswick have even released preliminary findings suggesting that 4 to 5% of university students in the country are homeless3.
There is no doubt that the crisis is severe and the leader of the official opposition would do well to point this out.
I also made the jump by trying to refute the statement that “today it takes 66% of average monthly income to cover the monthly payments on an average single-family home.”
If we use the median annual household income before taxes ($61,700) and the average monthly mortgage payment ($1,922), we arrive at a much smaller share of the household spent on housing (37%). However, this percentage applies to the average apartment and not just individual houses.
After consulting with the Conservative Party, it appears that Mr. Poilievre is using an index developed by the Royal Bank of Canada that includes not only mortgage payments but also all housing-related expenses (taxes, electricity, hot water, etc.).
Is that misleading? I'll let you judge. But this index exists and it represents Canadians' actual spending.
Some claims in the video are much more dubious. For example, Mr. Poilievre says the average one-bedroom rent has doubled since 2015, as has the average mortgage payment and the average down payment. This is exaggerated, as Radio-Canada has shown4.
PHOTO MIKE SEGAR, Portal ARCHIVE
The window of a real estate agency on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. To claim that the same house sells 4.5 times more in Canada than in the United States is misleading and absurd, writes Philippe Mercure.
The Conservative leader later falls into pure bad faith when he puts a home in Niagara, Ontario, up for sale for $679,974, compared to a supposedly similar home for $150,265 across the border, in the state New York, is sold. This order is confusing. The numbers shown on the screen do not match those in the real estate listings presented to us and we do not know what is in American dollars and Canadian dollars.
But let's be serious: the assumption that the same house will sell for 4.5 times more in Canada than in the United States is misleading and absurd.
Mr. Poilievre does it again, showing a graffiti-covered semi-detached house in Toronto that would sell for the same price as a 45-room castle with a cinema and private beach in Scotland. Or is it more like a 20-room castle in France? Once again, the video is confusing and the words are intended much more to stimulate the imagination than to inform.
Mr. Poilievre also says Canada's enormous size should make it easier to build homes and help keep prices low.
Obviously, one doesn't need a PhD in urban planning to understand that the wide open spaces north of Lebel-sur-Quévillon or around the Great Slave Lake have no impact on real estate prices in downtown Toronto or Montreal.
In the quote presented at the beginning of this text, Pierre Poilievre bluntly criticizes Justin Trudeau for transferring funds to municipalities for housing construction. It is true that municipal bureaucracy sometimes harms real estate construction. But to conclude that Mr. Trudeau is “literally funding the hiring of bureaucrats who are hindering the construction of houses” is really going (too) far.
We could go on like this for a long time.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVE
Economist Jean-Pierre Aubry points out that Pierre Poilievre never addresses the impact of immigration on the housing crisis.
The economist Jean-Pierre Aubry, for example, judges that Pierre Poilievre's analysis that it is the federal government's deficits that are driving up real estate prices is “simplified and very nuanced”.
He also questions several of the Conservative leader's proposed “common sense” solutions, particularly his clear anti-regulation message.
“Of course there are inefficiencies, but we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A large part of this regulation has the long-term goal of increasing the well-being of citizens,” recalls Mr. Aubry.
He also points out that Pierre Poilievre never brings up the pandemic when he talks about the Trudeau government's increase in public spending. Also not a word about the impact of immigration on the housing crisis.
However, Pierre Poilievre did not need to exaggerate to describe the devastating effects of the housing crisis. In this way he manages to make us doubt – even when he is right. I don't know if the exercise will benefit him politically, but one thing is certain: it serves the public interest very poorly.