Federal housing minister says progress is being made on building homes in the Maritimes

New numbers were released by Statistics Canada that show a drop in building permits for properties all across Canada.

In an interview with CTV Atlantic on Monday, Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser says while the numbers may look worrying, there has been some progress made.

“I try not to get too excited when the numbers are good month-to-month, and I try not to get too down when month-to-month they shift they other way, but when you look over a longer time horizon, you have to follow the trajectory of what’s actually playing out, month-to-month construction conditions, weather patterns, the investment decisions of companies can vary significantly,” said Fraser.

“But if I actually compare the last six months that we have data for, the beginning of this year to the end of June, in Atlantic Canada and Nova Scotia that’s a 64 per cent increase in the number of homes being built. Here in Nova Scotia that means last year we were dealing with a ball park of 2,500 homes that got under construction and this year we’re more than 4,000.”

Fraser says while there is still work to be done, there are signs of progress.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you the housing crisis is solved, far from it, there are real people that are struggling in real ways, but we’re seeing signs of progress as a result of the measures we’ve put in place.”

While the new projects and programs implemented by government has been successful for putting pressure on prices, Fraser says it’s tough to tell when prices will begin to drop.

“There’s a lot more that goes into the price of real estate separate and apart from government policy, you deal with the access to labour, you deal with the cost of land materials, supplies, there’s a number of factors that go into play, but when you start to see prices flat line or potentially drop a little bit, it’s when you have supply that exceeds the demand that exists,” said Fraser.

“We need to continue to build more and more, the numbers that I’m seeing coming in with the recent report we’ve seen from CMHC indicate that we’re trending in the right direction.”

In addition to building more homes, Fraser says affordability is also a huge factor.

“We have to make sure that there’s enough affordable housing being built for the most vulnerable members of our community.”

Fraser adds that pumping more money into a broken system won’t help to fix the problem.

“You have to fix the underlying structure, but still make the investments necessary. The answer to challenging housing or health care dynamics is not to pull investments out of the system, it’s to fix the structural deficiencies but then make the investments necessary to achieve the outcome you want to see,” said Fraser.

Fraser says we must also change the way homes are built, and explore home-building opportunities in other sectors.

“In addition to the traditional homebuilding sector, there’s massive opportunity to invest in factories to have manufactured homes. We’ve made an investment, low cost loans to Nova Scotia companies just a few weeks ago that is going to help them scale up their productivity,” said Fraser.

“This allows you to create another workforce, it’s not usually competing with the same tradespeople who are in conventional homebuilding, but if we scale up the training for the traditional homebuilding sector, if we have targeted immigration programs where the skilled labour doesn’t exist in Canada, and we invest in building homes differently by embracing manufacturing, we can dramatically scale-up the level of productivity to get the number of homes up.”

Fraser said while he believes immigration is one factor in the housing crisis, he doesn’t believe it’s the only factor.

“There is an issue when you’re dealing with the how many people live in a community compared to the number of homes that you have. I do believe when it comes to permanent residency we are growing at a pace that we can sustain, in face we’re building enough homes now to roughly cover that number of people that become permanent residents each year, but we have challenges in our temporary programs,” he said.

With files from CTV's Todd Battis.