Share this Story: Wall housing policy makes no sense
Wall housing policy makes no sense
" ... how does this policy fit anyone's political narrative — other than Cam Broten's notion that while some chosen friends of the Sask. Party benefitted from the boom, most have not?"
Murray Mandryk
Brad Wall's housing plan helps those who don't really need help, and ignores others, columnist says. Bryan Schlosser/Regina Leader-Post
When you think about Premier Brad Wall's argument for why his Saskatchewan Party should be re-elected, it's pretty compelling one.
On Wall's watch, Saskatchewan has achieved record employment and record population. On Wednesday, we learned the province grew by another 3,691 people in last quarter of 2015, to an all-time high of 1,142,570. Notwithstanding the oil downturn, we evidently have no problem convincing people to come or stay here.
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That, in turn, has produced record housing starts in the Wall era that go along nicely with highest-in-our-history weekly earnings, which soared to second-highest in the nation. What happened to the "have-not" Saskies? Alberta will qualify for equalization before we will.
Even our housing prices — while higher than they used to be — still are nowhere near those in Toronto and Vancouver. In fact, housing prices here have fallen in the last year.
And new owners benefit from the lowest mortgage rates in history.
So why is Wall subsidizing affluent first-time home buyers? Is such government intervention consistent with any known conservative ideology?
And even more bizarrely, Mr. Premier, why would you target the most potentially affluent — double-income, young couples with university degrees who will get the good-paying jobs you say you are creating, and thus can easily handle a mortgage?
Well, it's because when one scratches the surface of this policy, one finds the Sask. Party's rather conservative worldview of pandering to the relatively affluent.
And instead of focusing on the First World problems of ensuring maximum disposable income for the wealthy, shouldn't Wall be looking at the Third World housing problems that exist in Saskatchewan?
But even if you don't buy the social inequity argument, how is Wall's new housing policy fair to anyone? How is it fair to those who have scratched, clawed and forgone vacations to Hawaii or new cars in order to have a bigger down payment on their mortgages because they don't qualify for Wall's program to convert free student loan money to free housing purchase money?
What about those oil workers losing their homes?
Yet there was Brad Wall on Monday, evoking images from his boyhood — the Grant Devine 1980s — of how every grad high school student of his era was given luggage upon graduation in anticipation of leaving the province. But, sir, you keep telling us people aren't leaving any more.
The program he announced Monday is aimed at first-time home buyers already benefiting from his 2007 election promise of Graduate Retention Program tax credits — under which post-secondary graduates who remain in province and work get a tax rebate of as much as $20,000 over 10 years.
Graduate Retention Program recipients will be allowed to convert $10,000 of those credits (potentially, $20,000 for couples) into forgivable interest-free loans on the down payments for their first homes.
In other words, if you really didn't need our tax dollars to get yourself through school in the first place, just feel free to keep them and go buy a house.
Ugh. It conjures up another Devine-era image — his 1986 7-7-7 program that saw guarantees of people paying no more than seven per cent on the first $70,000 of their mortgages, and getting $7,000 grants.
Those curious why the 1990s NDP didn't have money to build infrastructure might consider the debt that was run up in the 1980s with stupid ideas like this. (Alas, the NDP's 1986 campaign housing promise was even stupider and would have been even more costly. But I digress.)
About the only kind thing one can say about Wall's Devine-era thinking displayed Monday is that it's on a smaller, arguably more manageable scale, allegedly costing taxpayers only $900,000 in 2016-17, $1.8 million in 2017-18, $2.7 million in 2018-19 and $3.6 million in 2019-20.
But how does this policy fit anyone's political narrative — other than Cam Broten's notion that while some chosen friends of the Sask. Party benefited from the boom, most have not?
And how can a Sask. Party government — which hiked public debt by $2 billion in 2015-16 (to Grant-Devine levels of $13 billion) and refused to present a pre-election budget — dare do anything that will unnecessarily increase debt?
This policy is mind-boggling.
Mandryk is the political columnist for Regina Leader-Post.