Luke is the Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives and founder of the Tory youth organisation Blue Beyond.
Every week, a different video surfaces from Canada, sending Tory Twitter into overdrive. Air rights in urban areas, fiscal incentives for local authorities which build, and an unapologetic removal of bureaucracy from the planning system.
Yes, it’s the Trussite housing policy that supply-side reform aficionados were clamouring for last year – except it’ll be taking place in London, Ontario rather than London, England.
Each video depicting Pierre Poilievre, the forty-three year old Leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, lamenting the struggle that so many millennials have when trying to rent or buy a home – is as refreshing as the last. In one he asks: ‘How do you bring home a date if you’re 35 and living in your mom’s basement?’.
Yes – it is tongue-in-cheek. But it frames the Canadian housing crisis in terms that anyone under the age of forty here in the UK can understand: a broken housing market isn’t just an economic failure, but a social one.
Housing in Britain, as well as in Canada, the USA, Ireland, and even to some extent in the Netherlands, is in crisis. Chronic undersupply and rapid increase in population has commodified housing to such an extent that those who bought in the late Eighties and early Nineties are now asset millionaires.
And whilst those who do want to get out of the rental trap and onto the property ladder don’t need to be millionaires, they certainly need to be rich themselves (or have parents who can hand over about £50,000 for a deposit) because spiralling rents have made saving impossible.
The economic disadvantages to the average age of a first-time buyer being thirty-six in Canada are clear for housing policy nerds. But what Poilievre has tapped into for the Canadian electorate is the moral, social, and conservative consequences of our housing market.
As conservatives, we believe in financial independence and that hard work pays off. We believe that capitalism is morally good and can lift us all up. We believe in family: the importance of starting your own, and that society only exists because of families.
These are the right values for any centre-right party. But they are increasingly difficult to sell to an electorate suffering from an overheated housing market.
Those who cannot save money due to record high rental costs, cannot invest or become fully financially independent. Those who cannot invest in an asset, or own property, will struggle to see the point of capitalism. Those who cannot afford to move out of a flatshare simply cannot start a family.
These are some of the core principles of conservatism – and are at risk of losing salience and their appeal with voters.
In Canada, Poilievre has recognised that housing is infantilising entire generations which are barred from truly having a stake in the capitalist society that so many of us believe in. This message is perhaps part of the reason why the Conservative Party is heading for victory in the next Canadian election – and it resonates with many here in the UK.
Moreover, it is more than just rhetoric. The Canadian Tories have accurately diagnosed the housing crisis as a crisis of supply, and they seem to be the only party in the Anglosphere with a serious plan to address it.
Poilievre’s aims are very simple: increase supply, not demand. The Canadian Tories will incentivise local authorities that build with financial stimulus – and they will penalise those who don’t. Every single new federally-funded transit station will have to be pre-approved for high density apartments.
Air rights will be granted in urban areas where there are train stations and metros. Development charges, government regulation, and taxes that make building expensive will be slashed. If Poilievre heads to Ottawa with a Tory majority on this manifesto, many of his British counterparts ought to be miffed.
In the UK, we could only dream of solutions such as these. Both the Conservatives and Labour indulge in every debunked myth that they can. As Rishi Sunak reheats myths about the “scourge” of land banking, Labour MPs shout about foreign investors buying up thousands upon thousands of empty properties.
Meanwhile, both parties talk up brownfield sites as if they’re an untapped resource that no one has thought of before.
These all sound effective, but a quick Google will show you that land banking is a myth, that the UK has the lowest number of empty properties in Europe, and that brownfield development still gets blocked by NIMBYs – just ask Theresa Villiers MP.
Both Labour and the Conservatives will do what they can to avoid accepting any blame on the dearth of supply. Every proposal is just another way to further stimulate demand and increase the number of buyers in the market.
You can, as Labour is, promise to prioritise first time buyers as much as you like. But the average price of a flat in London will still be £560,000. That will not change until there is significantly more housing.
The Canadian Conservatives have realised this, and are showing to the public how capitalism can fix housing and make us all richer, why won’t our Conservative Party?
In part, because both parties are running scared from the Liberal Democrats. The political power of a bespoke NIMBY party is not to be ignored: their only notable achievement in the last seven years has been to kill off Boris Johnson’s housing bill via a shock victory in the Chesham and Amersham by-election, secured by whipping up cold fury about an already built underground tunnel and scaremongering about a block of flats being added above a Waterstones.
It is a simple but effective campaign strategy: finding any new proposed development (literally any), and scaring the living daylights out of everyone. It could be a water reservoir, an already-built tunnel for HS2 or it could be housing that isn’t even in your constituency.
All parties are of course guilty of this. But the blueprint was designed by the Lib Dem by-election machine. And yes, in isolation, most of these proposals will not solve any crisis – it’s a very big crisis. But each blocked development adds up.
The Canadian Tories have seized housing as an opportunity to sell conservatism and right-wing thinking to the electorate. I hope their sister party in the UK will too.
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