Letter: Former B.C. premier's housing remarks 'a distraction,' New West mayor says

The Editor:

Re: Comment: A 'make or break' time for real action on housing affordability (Oct. 9, 2024)

I am taking the unusual step of writing a response to an op-ed published in the Record, in part because the content was disconnected from the reality of the housing crises facing British Columbia communities, but mostly because it was penned by one of the architects of the current housing crises, former Premier Gordon Campbell.

The core of the housing crises being suffered in Canada today traces back to Paul Martin’s disastrous austerity programs of the 1990s, and his decision to get the federal government out of the business of building affordable housing.

In the four decades following the end of WWII, the federal government built tens of thousands of affordable housing units in communities across Canada every single year.

This was the foundation of a social system that allowed everyone to have access to secure housing. These were times when homelessness was an anomaly, not something suffered in every city in Canada.

In British Columbia, this disastrous austerity was followed by Gordon Campbell’s equally appalling decisions in the early 2000s to gut provincial affordable housing programs.

This brought to a virtual halt the construction of new affordable, subsidized and co-op housing in the province. As the housing market in B.C. boomed and prices spiralled out of reach of more and more working people, the programs to support those who the market left behind were abandoned. The working people of the province were abandoned.

Two decades later, the cheques Gordon Campbell refused to write have come due. Only in the last couple of years have we had a provincial government who truly recognizes that investing in social housing is an investment in our communities. Alas, with a 20-plus year backlog of need, relief is understandably slow to roll out.

The most egregious part of former Premier Campbell’s opinion piece is his suggested solutions: cut the very taxes needed to fund more affordable housing and prohibit local governments from funding vital transportation, sewer, and water infrastructure that supports growing communities.

Not admitting the colossal failure that his trickle-down austerity approach has proven to be, he doubles down on the same mistakes, and has the gall to call this “bold action.”

I call it an embarrassing failure to understand the scale of the current crises, and a distraction from the important work we all have to do — cities, province and the federal government — to dig this province out of the housing hole he dug and left behind for us to manage.

- New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone