Nearly six months after

promising

to “build twice as many homes every year,” on Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carney followed the path laid out by virtually every other left-leaning politician in the country by launching a

new government bureaucracy

intended to increase the stock of affordable (read: socialized) housing throughout the country.

You’ll be forgiven if you’ve heard this one before. Promising affordable housing is a

favourite pastime

of the federal Liberals, largely because most of the impediments to building new homes fall outside Ottawa’s jurisdiction. It’s far easier to spend gobs of taxpayer money and create giant new bureaucracies than to actually deal with the reasons why Canada’s housing supply has failed to meet demand.

In 2017, the Liberals launched a $40-billion “National Housing Strategy” (NHS), which has since

more than doubled

in size, with the

goal

of building 125,000 new public housing units, refurbishing 300,000 and cutting homelessness in half within a decade. In the lead-up to the

2021 election

, the government set aside an additional $2.5 billion to create 35,000 affordable units. And the 2024 budget and fall economic statement

earmarked

an extra $8.3 billion for various affordable-housing initiatives.

How successful were these strategies? The proliferation of homeless encampments in our major cities clearly show that, eight years into its 10-year plan, the Ottawa isn’t anywhere close to cutting homelessness in half. Indeed, a

report

last year from Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada found that the homeless population increased by 20 per cent between 2018 and 2022.

Counting the number of homeless people is notoriously hard. Quantifying the affordable housing stock should be relatively easy. But unfortunately, even that is too much to ask of this country. According to

a 2024 report

from the Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative, “There is no official estimate of the size (absolute or proportion of total) for Canada’s social or non-market housing stock.”

The government will brag that the NHS has “supported or committed to the creation of 134,707 new units and the repair of 272,169 units,” but how many of those have actually been completed is far less clear.

Enter Mark Carney with his “

bold new approach

” to solving the housing affordability crisis: spending “unprecedented” amounts of money to fix the problem that the previously unprecedented amount of taxpayer-looted wealth failed to address. His government is launching a new federal bureaucracy — unimaginatively called Build Canada Homes (BCH) — with $13 billion in initial funding.

At the outset, BCH intends to build 4,000 new affordable homes on federal land in Dartmouth, N.S., Longueuil, Que., Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa and Toronto. But construction isn’t supposed to even get underway until sometime next year, and it could be years before any of those homes are occupied.

To spearhead the new department, Carney tapped

Ana Bailão

, a former Toronto city councillor who was on the board of Toronto Community Housing and chaired the planning and housing committee. While the prime minister

hailed her

as a “seasoned leader with deep experience in affordable housing,” her track record on the file is less than stellar.

According to data from the

Low-end of Market Rental Housing Monitor

, Toronto’s stock of non-market housing actually decreased during Bailão’s tenure on city council, from 77,742 units in 2010 to 72,143 in 2022. Even according to the

city’s own numbers

, half way through its 10-year plan to build 65,000 rent-controlled homes between 2020 and 2030, it has only completed 1,242.

The city maintains a running tally of its progress toward its affordable-housing target, which shows that the vast majority of projects are stuck in the pre-planning and application-review stages. And herein lies the problem: even purpose-built government housing initiatives do not have the inertia necessary to cut through the mounds of red tape that municipalities have built up over the years.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre identified this problem long ago, promising to use the federal purse strings to coax cities into relaxing zoning rules and reducing bureaucratic overhead. By hiring a former city planner who presided over an ever-worsening real estate market to head the new housing department, Carney is virtually ensuring that it will be business as usual for Canada’s overbearing city councils.

Worse still, this week’s announcement does nothing to increase the supply of market housing — the type that productive members of society aren’t forced to subsidize through their tax dollars. Based on

promises made

during the election, that plan is still to come, but it will also involve the BCH acting “as a developer” and require significant amounts of public funding.

Carney has clearly failed to learn the No. 1 lesson of the past 10 years of Liberal rule: you can’t solve problems by throwing truckloads of money at them. If the $82-billion NHS failed to bring house prices and homelessness under control, it’s hard to see how the $13-billion BCH is going to fare any better.

Ultimately, our leaders need to realize that more socialism is not a cure for past socialist excesses. Only a free housing market unencumbered by zoning and other laws that prevent densification and urban sprawl can provide Canadians with the housing they need at prices they can afford. Creating a new federal bureaucracy run by a career urban planner is not going to achieve that goal.

National Post

jkline@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/accessd

• Jesse Kline: Mark Carney’s five-year plan for Soviet-style housing
• Tasha Kheiriddin: Carney’s coming housing boondoggle

Following a summer of horrific crimes — a fatal domestic
assault
in the street by a man on release, the
stabbing
of a grandmother in front of a grocery store, the
execution
of a loving father in front of his children during a break-in, to name a few — the Liberals want you to know that they’ve got a plan for justice reform. 

It involves reforms for bail, domestic violence and hate crime — which were already reformed a few years back. Justice Minister Sean Fraser is coming into the fall session with the same old dusted-off stack of ineffective ideas that his predecessors already implemented. 

The Liberals have made changes to bail laws
twice
: in 2019 and again in 2023. 

In 2019, via Bill C-75, the Liberals codified the
principle of restraint
in the Criminal Code, a principle that was first brought into law back in
1972
, and has since been mandated by the Supreme Court on multiple occasions. It requires offenders to be released with the fewest conditions possible to ensure community safety. Practically, the Liberals didn’t change anything. 

More substantial was the Liberal addition of
racial considerations
into bail, primarily aimed at reducing the disproportionately higher prison populations of Black and Indigenous people. While it was marketed as a fairness measure, it was actually the opposite: it became easier for those in groups that most often find themselves in jail to receive bail thanks to this new identity bonus.

And to reduce the number of people being charged with bail condition violations, the Liberals added an option to hold a “judicial referral hearing” instead of laying a new charge when accused persons miss, say, a court appearance. But to the
disappointment of defence lawyers
(and probably the approval of almost everyone else), this provision is not being used in practice. Another illusion of change.

Finally, the Liberals helped along their feminist image by supposedly making it more difficult for domestic abusers to get bail — but only in the slightest sense. For those who had already been convicted of domestic violence, they created a presumption against granting bail, also known as a “reverse onus” provision, that makes jail in the lead-up to trial the default position of the court. Presumptions can be overcome with relative ease, however; they’re a bit like a speed bump in a parking lot.

By 2023 the Liberals learned they could just continue expanding reverse onus provisions to more crimes — various firearms and weapons offences — to create the appearance of progress. And so they did, with
Bill C-48
. Then came another trompe-l’œil of domestic violence reform: instead of just having a reverse onus favouring bail for repeat convicted abusers, this would be expanded to those who have also been discharged (found guilty, but not convicted) for domestic violence. That’s an incremental change of microscopic value. 

They also began
requiring
judges to consider the safety of victims and the community in their bail decisions — which, again, was already the case. How effective was all that? Nothing changed because it wasn’t a real change.

Even more reverse onus provisions are coming to bail in a fall bill, Fraser
says
— which just shows how little thought is actually being put into the justice file. Expect it to be just as inconsequential. This is just spinning tires in the mud while claiming to be getting somewhere. 

As for hate crimes, it’s a similar story. An offence
called
“Mischief relating to religious property, educational institutions, etc.” was created in 2017 with the assent of
Bill C-305
. It expanded the crime of mischief to religious property, which has been around
since
at least 2002, to daycares, schools, sports facilities, seniors homes, etc., used by minorities. It’s there to give the appearance of doing something — but it doesn’t, because regular mischief is an offence that already exists and works just as well. Indeed, it’s more likely to be used because it’s more established in the law, more flexible and more familiar to prosecutors and police. 

The Liberals followed that up with an update to the
old law
against obstructing clergymen, as well as disturbing religious services and gatherings for a “moral, social or benevolent purpose” — which they
actually considered repealing entirely in 2015
— by making the wording of the offence gender-neutral. Their reforms amounted to changing various instances of “he” to “they.” This happened in 2019 with
Bill C-51
. 

Now, the Liberals are
expected
to propose legislation this week that will create a new intimidation offence to ban people from scaring others away from accessing religious properties, and another offence that will criminalize — for the nth time — the obstruction of religious property. 

So, that’s the Liberal formula for dealing with hate crimes: take something that was already illegal, create a redundant provision that makes it doubly or triply illegal, and pat yourself on the back. Meanwhile, hate crimes have surged against Jews in particular, their synagogues becoming absolute magnets for Molotovs, bullets and heckling crowds. 

It’s trite at this point, but the problem lies with policing and prosecution — not enough charges laid on Islamist agitators, and, of the few that actually make it into existence, too many being snuffed out by Crown prosecutors.

The next few months will see another slew of disappointments of a similar theme. Fraser told media
last week
that his new hate crime bill will be coming forward very soon; yet another bail bill is likely coming next month; finally, “later in this parliamentary sitting,” we should expect a bill on domestic violence. 

It’s the fall; Parliament hasn’t sat for all of 2025 save for a few weeks, and Liberals are using their precious time remaining to ban criminal activity
that was already banned long ago
.

National Post

As the recent military parade and meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Beijing demonstrated, the global power structure is unravelling. The magnetic pull of the western alliance is cracking while that of our authoritarian adversaries is intensifying. In the

words

of the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov, the image of China’s Xi Jinping, flanked by leaders of fellow nuclear powers Russia and North Korea, as ICBMs rolled through flag-waving crowds in Tiananmen Square, “marked a new phase in the redrawing of the international order.”

The impulsive, increasingly self-absorbed and often contradictory U.S. leadership of western alliances in Europe and Asia contrasts sharply with the newfound solidarity among China, Russia and North Korea. Formerly putative U.S. allies like India, Brazil, Vietnam and South Africa are increasingly attracted by the certainty, stability and less abrasive manner of China as opposed to the punitive tariffs and often insulting rhetoric from Donald Trump that antagonize governments and their people alike. It is, as Fareed Zakaria

described

on CNN, “the greatest own goal in modern U.S. foreign policy.”

Erstwhile U.S. NATO allies are being bludgeoned by Trump’s unlawful tariff measures. Most have bent their knee to accommodate the U.S. president in the hope of achieving some stability in what, for each, is a major, if not vital economic partnership.

The “America First” lunges by President Trump are stirring similar populist sentiments across Europe. In Britain, Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party lead the governing Labour Party in polls by 11 points. The faces and voices at Reform’s most recent convention had a distinct Trumpian ring, appealing to those who are tired of the government in power and fed up with being told what they should think by the establishment about immigration, multiculturalism, transgenderism, etc. Above all, they fear losing their country to those who despise them.

In France, yet another centrist government has fallen. The new prime minister will be the fourth in one year, and the chaos is only making things easier politically for the party treated as a pariah by the media — Marine Le Pen and her National Rally. As Gerard Baker

notes

in the Wall Street Journal, Le Pen’s designated successor, 29-year-old Jordan Bardella, “has worked with her to detoxify the brand, dispelling its old stench of antisemitism and Nazi-adjacent ideology.”

In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is attempting to stave off growing public anger but is hamstrung by his dependence on the Social Democrats and is losing ground to the far-right, populist Alternative for Germany party.

The Europeans chose not to fight over tariffs, even though they had the economic power to resist. They chose to flatter and appease the U.S. president while trying to rekindle political, strategic and even economic dependency on Washington. But, following hapless concessions and humiliation, the European public must be increasingly indignant. It is time to strengthen the political union, put an end to the “vetocracy” that allows Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to block EU military assistance to Ukraine, and build Europe’s own defence system — a coalition of the willing — that is not completely reliant on the U.S. and can instil some fear in the Kremlin.

European leaders are trying gamely to fill the vacuum created by Donald Trump on the Russian–Ukraine conflict. Their fear of Russia is palpable. But, thus far, their new sense of unity and resolve falls short. Trump is now urging his European NATO members to join in secondary sanctions against countries buying cheap oil and gas from Russia. By repeatedly pausing to impose sanctions, Trump simply encourages more of the same from Vladimir Putin.

Events in Anchorage provided an unwarranted moment of glory for Putin but delivered nothing for the U.S., the West and certainly not for Ukraine. Poorly planned and executed, it revealed the shallowness of U.S. geopolitical capabilities. Before even beginning peace negotiations, the U.S. made unilateral concessions to Russia’s demands. Trump’s real goal on Ukraine remains obscure. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian people suffer escalating missile and drone attacks. Putin obviously believes that Ukraine’s army will break before his economy collapses, and every day without concrete U.S. action makes that more likely. Meanwhile, the 85 U.S. Senators committed to stronger sanctions against Russia sit supinely on their hands awaiting approval from the White House.

The U.S. levied secondary tariffs on India, with which it has cultivated closer, even strategic relations for more than two decades, but spared China knowing that China has real power to retaliate, whereas India does not. But how does this make strategic sense for America?

Russia’s drone attacks on Poland were neither inadvertent nor accidental. They targeted NATO unity and confidence, testing western patience and its inability to act. Trump’s feeble response — “It could have been a mistake” — was swiftly rebutted by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who

said

: “It wasn’t, and we know it.”  But it may intimidate Europeans into prioritizing their own security, not Ukraine’s.

The lack of depth in U.S. geopolitical thinking is clear. Foreign policy is more performative than concerted, more in tune with America First dogma than principled alliance leadership. The Democrats nationally have little to offer. They are in abject disarray and, if their two far-left mayoral candidates win in New York and Minneapolis in November, internal divisions will intensify.

The assassination of youth conservative organizer Charlie Kirk was a severe blow to the civil discourse he championed and is sure to exacerbate already brittle political divisions in America.

Globally, the negative impulses and insults from America will not be quickly forgotten. Because the White House is unpredictable and puts more emphasis on self-serving transactions for headlines than on strategy, it is souring attitudes among would-be friends and becoming more vulnerable to the machinations of would-be foes.

For Canada in particular, there is no reason to believe that good relations with the U.S. are just around the corner. We need to remove the blinkers and make decisions urgently on policies that serve our national interest, not woke symbolism, attract investment and improve productivity. Increased self-reliance is essential together with close relations with others, including China and India, who seek more productive and less abrasive relationships.

National Post

Derek H. Burney is a former 30-year career diplomat who served as Ambassador to the United States of America from 1989-1993

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