A Phil Hall Op-Ed: No politician is willing to voluntarily take the blame when things go wrong, but few politicians can possibly match the utter lack of responsibility being displayed by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when it comes to admitting their roles in the problematic housing markets of their respective nations.
Over the past few days, the social media pages for the White House have been offering posts designed to convince Americans that the Biden administration was better than the “previous administration” on economic issues. These include two posts that insist the Biden era was a golden time for the housing market, with the president offering sage advice for the market’s progress.
On Friday, the White House posted: “After decades of under-investment in housing, we are seeing progress under President Biden and Vice President Harris – with more units under construction under this Administration than at any time in over 50 years.” The accompanying photo showed a construction site with a quote attributed to Biden that says: “The bottom line is that we have to build, build, build. That’s how we bring housing costs down for good.”
On Sunday, the White House posted: “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the rate of new housing starts is up 16% compared to the last administration. Housing costs less when we build more of it.” This is accompanied by a photo from Biden’s aborted re-election campaign where he is smiling blankly while standing in front of a sign reading “Lowering Housing Costs.”
Seriously? Does anyone credit Biden policies for boosting home construction or lowering housing costs? Where is the data to prove that? As for quotable quotes, housing was one issue that Biden barely acknowledged while in office and only started to talk about in his brief effort to gain a second term. Gaslighting doesn’t get gassier than that.
Unless, of course, you’re Justin Trudeau, who has been in office since 2015 and isn’t up for re-election until next October. On Friday, Trudeau used his speech in observance of Canada’s National Housing Day to rewrite his role in his nation’s housing woes.
“Canada’s housing market just hasn’t been working – ask anyone you know, and they’ll say it hasn’t worked for decades,” said Trudeau, adding that his “federal government is fixing it, starting by making it easier to build homes faster.”
But isn’t it odd that someone who has been in power for nine years is only now addressing a problem that “hasn’t worked for decades” – including the nine years when he was prime minister? And the problems facing today’s Canadian housing market are very different from what the country faced in the 90s, 80s or earlier. Instead, the biggest problem today involves Trudeau’s harebrained scheme for importing hundreds of thousands of immigrants without having proper accommodations for them. As Trudeau acknowledged last month when his government planned to decelerate immigration activity, “Immigration is essential for Canada’s future, but it must be controlled and it must be sustainable.”
Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, pledged that if he became prime minister he would tie the nation’s immigration levels to number of homes being built. “We need to make a link between the number of homes built and the number of people we invite as new Canadians,” Poilievre said earlier this year.
Not surprisingly, Poilievre is leading Trudeau in the polls among Canadian voters. And by this time next year, there is an excellent chance that a newly unemployed Trudeau could be having an ice cream cone on a Delaware beach with an out-of-commission Biden, with both men wondering why voters didn’t believe them.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo courtesy of the Trudeau Instagram page
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It’s easy for a leader to take credit for things that happen during their tenure. The increase in construction starts is attributed to the many builders who waded through government restrictions, permits, zoning, etc., to make it happen. Property “appreciation” is an advantage of homeownership and should not be discouraged. The housing appreciation rate over the past few years has been atypical, but Ohio was slow to catch up to the rest of the country anyway. People can see through claims of success and failure by these politicians. That was made evident in our last election.