It’s called corruption:
In a
contentious ethics committee, Conservative MP Aaron Gunn moved Tuesday to
summon Vancouver condo marketer Bob Rennie, federal Housing Minister Gregor
Robertson, and major developers connected to Rennie’s fundraiser for Mark
Carney as witnesses in an urgent parliamentary investigation of the Prime
Minister’s multibillion-dollar British Columbia condo bailout. A second
Conservative, Gabriel Hardy, then walked the committee through a timeline that
ended on the most pointed suggestion of the hearing.
Hardy asserted that Brookfield — the asset-management
giant Carney chaired before entering politics — became co-owner in a deal with
Concert Properties, a developer holding dozens of condo projects in the Burnaby
glut zone, fifteen days before the bailout was announced.
Gunn’s motion, put to the Standing Committee on Access
to Information, Privacy and Ethics, calls for no fewer than six meetings this
summer into what the governments have styled the Canada–British Columbia
partnership on condo conversion — the June 18 plan to buy more than 2,200
unsold Vancouver-region condominiums with public funds.
The witness list reaches from the political architects to
the industry’s commanding heights: former Vancouver mayor and now Carney
housing minister Gregor Robertson; British Columbia Housing Minister Christine
Boyle; Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim; Rennie, whom the motion identifies as the
figure “often called Vancouver’s Condo King”; Duncan Wlodarczak, chair of the
Liberal Party of Canada in British Columbia and chief of staff at Onni Group,
one of the province’s largest developers; the Urban Development Institute;
Concert Properties; and Brookfield Asset Management. The motion further
demands that both governments produce any agreement between them on the condo
program, and any agreement between either government and any developer or
lender, immediately upon finalization.
Gunn’s motion would put the bailout’s contracts — which
developers, which units, at what price — before Parliament as they are signed,
answering the questions the governments have so far declined to address.
It asserts that Carney’s plan would “bail out
developers, bankers, and investors by using taxpayer dollars,” that it “will
not make housing more affordable, but will prevent a price correction from
taking place, preserving high prices for developers rather than lowering them
for British Columbians trying to enter the housing market,” that “forcing home
buyers to compete with their own tax dollars while raising housing prices for
the benefit of developers is not in the interest of Canadians.”
The Liberals, he said, “never campaigned on spending
more than a billion dollars in taxpayer money to give a handout to their
wealthy developer friends.” The plan, he argued, means developers
“wouldn’t have to lower prices and God forbid sell at a loss,” and raises “some
pretty obvious ethical questions that I think deserve answers — such as, if the
Liberals didn’t campaign on this policy, why are they suddenly deciding to
pursue it now? Whose idea was it? Who lobbied for it? Is this being planned for
more Canadian cities? And maybe most importantly, which well-connected
developers, big banks and foreign investors stand to benefit the most?”
“I also have to point out how insane the generational
inequity of this policy truly is,” Gunn added. “Handing out huge sums of
money to developers who have made billions over the past 20 years, paid for
with tax dollars by those who are still trying to enter the housing market for
the very first time. It is yet another generational transfer of wealth that
creates no new units of housing while rewarding those who built and priced
condos that nobody could afford.”
Conservative member Gabriel Hardy followed, pressing the
case for urgency before the money moves.
The announcement came June 18, two days before Parliament
adjourned, for the purchase of 2,200 unsold condominiums at a per-unit cost
Hardy placed near $660,000.
Hardy then laid out the timeline, beginning with the
Rennie fundraiser The Bureau has reported on. “An evening with Carney,” he told
the committee. “It cost $1,750 to meet Mark Carney, the prime minister of
Canada, in his office. No journalists — that’s often what happens, no
journalists, behind closed doors. Don’t worry, our prime minister is full of
virtue. But 17 main developers were there. And they all have one thing in
common: thousands of condos unsold.” That was February 2026, Hardy said. In
March 2026, he continued, a BC Housing document speaks to a meeting involving
British Columbia’s housing minister. In May 2026, the Canada Mortgage and
Housing Corporation reported a 76 percent surge in unsold completed condos in
Metro Vancouver — concentrated, Hardy stressed, in Burnaby and Richmond.
“Remember that,” he said, “because it’s important.”
Then came June 3. “Brookfield becomes co-owner” in a
deal with Concert Properties involving eight industrial properties, Hardy told
the committee — and he was careful with the distinction: “Just to be clear, the
co-ownership is not for condos with Concert Properties.” But Concert, he noted,
“has projects in the region, including 50 in Burnaby. Fifty condo buildings in
Burnaby.” Fifteen days later came the bailout announcement. “For Brookfield, 15
days before the announcement, they are becoming co-owners with this condo
company with thousands of condos that haven’t been sold,” Hardy said. “And then
all of a sudden there’s announcements in cities and sectors that would interest
Brookfield and in which Brookfield has made investments. Should we investigate?
Yes.”
That, Hardy said, is why Concert Properties was named in
the motion. “Concert Properties, who created a partnership with Brookfield 15
days before the announcement, will be among the developers from whom the
government will be purchasing these condos in the fall. These are just facts.
They’re not presumptions. They’re not accusations.” The prime minister, he
noted, has said developers did not request the program from him directly.
Hardy then turned to the prime minister’s ethics screen —
the conflict-of-interest wall meant to separate Carney from decisions touching
Brookfield. The screen, Hardy told the committee, has been “activated 17 times.
So these are direct employees of the prime minister who trigger this screen. So
there are potential conflicts of interest.” The committee, he said, had shared
eight documents on potential conflicts involving the prime minister. “For a
year — and I’ve been here for a year — we’re seeing that things are shady with
the prime minister,” Hardy said. He offered a pattern he said kept recurring:
“The prime minister often finds a way to be involved in everything. And I’ll
give an example. In Mirabel, there was an announcement for planes. 28 days
earlier, Brookfield became co-owners of a business that needed planes
desperately in Mirabel. The committee hadn’t been able to ask questions on
that, because every time that we table a motion, we’re told that we’re
conspiracy theorists.”
That, he said, is why Brookfield Asset Management sits
on the witness list: “One might wonder — is it actually a coincidence that
Brookfield is always around? These questions are legitimate, and we need to
receive answers.” The government members, he said, “are doing everything that
they can so that we don’t move forward... We were able to work in a certain way
before they became a majority. And now, since they have the majority, they are
ensuring that these investigations don’t happen.”
“Make no mistake,” New Democrat Jenny Kwan, appearing at
the committee, added. “It is a bailout for developers, even though the prime
minister wants to pass it off as affordable housing. No one is buying it. The
prime minister admitted as much at the announcement. He said, quote,
‘Developers are stuck.’”
Kwan said she rarely agrees with her Conservative
colleagues, but backs the argument for an ethics probe in this case. Carney’s
framing of the plan, she said, “sounds like a board member from Brookfield
Asset Management, rather than the prime minister.”
The government side’s response, through the meeting’s
opening stretch, came as procedure rather than argument.
Before Gunn had finished reading his motion’s clauses,
Liberal member Bardish Chagger raised points of order over the French
translation of the motion and its distribution; further interventions
questioned the speaking order and the room’s audio, forcing Gunn to restart his
reading repeatedly. The chair, Conservative John Brassard, said “I know what
you’re doing here. I know what you’re doing to disrupt the meeting and that’s
fine. You can continue it because people are watching.”
One of the new Liberal members, Wade Chang — who
intervened early Tuesday on the speaking order — represents Burnaby Central,
part of the region where the unsold-condo glut is concentrated.
The government defense came from Chang, who told the
committee the Conservatives were distracting members from work in their ridings
with an unneeded investigation demand before the government had a chance to
provide details — and who spoke, he stressed, for constituents in one of the
highest-priced housing markets in Canada. “Average rents here sit at roughly
$2,300 a month, about 18 percent above the national average,” Chang said.
“Burnaby is consistently ranked among the top five most expensive cities to
rent in all Canada.”
The condo conversion partnership, Chang argued, would
move renters into “homes that are already built instead of waiting years for
new construction — and that’s exactly the kind of fast action a rental market
like Burnaby Central needs.” He cited the program’s development-charge stream —
nearly $1.6 billion in federal funding matched by British Columbia, up to $3.2
billion, cutting charges for multi-unit housing by up to 50 percent in priority
communities and saving up to $40,000 per unit. “Chair, at the end of the day,
this committee has a choice,” Chang said. “Spend more time debating speculation
instead of solutions, or find” — moving families into homes. “I know what my
constituents in Burnaby Central expect from me and this committee, and it is
not political theater.”
And the federal contribution to the condo purchases
through Build Canada Homes, he told the committee, "will be approximately
$150 million, not billions."
The witnesses Gunn seeks sit at the center of the
proximity pattern The Bureau has documented. Rennie hosted “An Evening with
Mark Carney” at his Vancouver offices in February — a fundraiser whose
Elections Canada filing lists 146 attendees paying up to $1,775 each, among
them at least 17 of the province’s leading developers and former premier Christy
Clark. A number of those developers hold unsold inventory in the Vancouver
region’s glut — the same distressed stock the program proposes to buy. British
Columbia government records show a briefing note headed “Rennie Meeting” was
opened for Premier David Eby’s office in the same month. On a Postmedia
panel in March 2025, Rennie said he was “working with Carney” on a plan to let
foreign buyers back into the condo market through a federally backstopped
rental pool.
**
Liberal members of the
House ethics committee shut down debate Tuesday over an Opposition motion to
investigate the Carney government’s controversial plan to purchase thousands of
unsold B.C. condos from developers.
An “emergency” meeting was called by the Conservatives
during the summer recess on Tuesday to launch an ethics probe into the program,
which would see Build Canada Homes and BC Housing partner to convert 2,200
unsold condo units in the province into affordable housing. The plan,
announced unexpectedly, has received significant criticism from housing
advocates and opposition parties, who have called it a “bail out” for
developers that made bad calls speculating on rising real estate prices.
However, a Liberal MP moved a motion to adjourn debate on
the issue, on the basis that summer is not the best time to tackle the issue,
and members of the committee should be in their constituencies.
The motion carried with the Liberal majority in
support.
Also:
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) handed
out more than $31 million in bonuses last year to 79 executives and more than
three-quarters of its total workforce, according to government information
reviewed by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF).
The data comes in response to a question asked in the
House of Commons in April by Andrew Scheer, Conservative Member of Parliament
for Regina–Qu’Appelle.
Scheer had asked for information on bonuses awarded at
each Crown corporation for the 2025-26 fiscal year, broken down by percentage
of officials both at and below the executive level who received bonuses, and
their amounts.
That and incompetence seem to be all that we are capable of
these days:
The
finance minister’s office is refusing to release data to back up recent claims
by Prime Minister Mark Carney that Canada will substantially accelerate its
defence spending.
“Our fiscal framework has already provisioned to achieve
four per cent of GDP in total defence spending by the end of this decade, ahead
of NATO’s timetable,” Carney told the CANSEC Defence conference in Ottawa in
May, a claim he later repeated at a press conference in June.
After those comments, Global News asked Finance Minister
Francois-Phillipe Champagne’s office for any data from Budget 2025 or the
Spring Economic Statement to support the prime minister’s statements, but the
office refused to do so.
A spokesperson for Champagne told Global News they were
“not in a position to scoop forthcoming announcements,” and they would not
provide any additional details beyond what the prime minister said.
Carney committed Canada to NATO’s new target of spending
five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035 at last year’s NATO Summit in the
Netherlands.
That spending is split into two categories: 3.5 per cent
on traditional or “core” defence spending and 1.5 per cent on critical defence
infrastructure, like ports and roads that have dual military use.
Carney claimed at the CANSEC Defence conference that
Canada was already meeting the 1.5 per cent infrastructure threshold, something
the finance minister’s office would also not provide data to support.
Former associate deputy finance minister Don Drummond,
now a public policy professor at Queen’s University, told Global News the lack
of transparency is the worst he has seen in his 49 years as an economist.
**
As we have seen time
and again, it is best to lean against any intermittent Canadian dollar
rallies — the loonie is in a fundamental bear market. It says a lot that the
CAD, in the face of what was a favourable “terms of trade” shock from the
wartime spike in oil prices, could never muster any sustainable rally at all.
Great news for domestic tourist operators and a fillip for exporters, not to
mention for bargain-hunting American travelers looking for a cheap
“European-style” vacation (check out Quebec City) without having to fly over
the Atlantic. But bad news for most Canadians, who will see their real
purchasing power erode as exporters buy their way back to recapturing lost
global market share via an ever-more “competitive” exchange rate.
This isn’t just opinion-based. There is also math
involved — primarily what it would take, barring fiscal action by the Canadian
federal government (which to this day has never responded to the Donald Trump
move in 2018 to drag the top marginal corporate income tax rate far below
Canadian levels), to equilibrate domestic unit labour costs in common currency
terms between the two countries. Here is the answer: The Canadian dollar faces
such a dire situation, as it relates to a relentless loss of relative domestic
productivity and cost competitiveness, that it is very likely to continue to
weaken to C$1.50 first, and then toward C$1.60 by the end of 2027.
That is the math: the currency level that acts as the
full antidote to Canada’s home-grown set of competitive challenges. A
competitive mismatch has led to unit labour costs in Canada rising by 3.2% over
the past year, whereas they have been roughly flat stateside. But the numbers
get even worse when you consider that in U.S. dollar terms, Canadian unit labor
costs (productivity adjusted wages) have ballooned by 8% over the past year,
near their all-time high. When unit labor costs in common currency terms were
as high as they are today, between 2011 and 2013, a Canadian dollar near parity
could be blamed. Not the case now — it is all about a prolonged period of
lagging productivity and a complete loss of domestic competitiveness.
The weak Canadian dollar, as a competitive crutch, is the
only reason unit labor costs in USD terms have not blown out even further.
Either something has to change that is fundamentally and structurally positive
via fiscal reforms, or the Canadian dollar will have no other option but to
descend and, in the process, make Canadian households that much poorer as the
competitive depreciation is essentially little more than cutting prices to buy
market share for domestic exporters.
The more Canadians are aware of the choice in front of
them, already occurring in real time, the better the odds that political
pressure will compel the government to take the action necessary to make Canada
tax competitive again. Our analysis assumes that nothing changes in Ottawa’s
approach to Canadian productivity trends and years of neglect when it comes to
the nation’s productive private sector capital stock — which has stagnated now
for over a decade. Our hopes for anything substantial were dashed with the
latest Federal budget, which merely nibbled around the edges and paid lip
service to the decay in structural economic growth.
Simply eliminating the tax rate gap with the U.S. would
help out a whole lot, but this is the Liberal Party of Canada we are talking
about, which, over the years, has moved further to the left and encroached on
policies that in the past were the domain of the Socialist NDP.
Just consider this: in the eight years since Ottawa
allowed the United States to reclaim income tax competitiveness, domestic
businesses have taken C$850 billion out of Canada in terms of net direct
investment outflow. Meanwhile, comparable foreign direct inflow of capital from
abroad has lagged more than -30% behind at just C$560 billion. The most
immediate and ongoing focus was the July 1 st USMCA renewal date. With the U.S.
choosing not to renew the agreement, the result will be years of annual trade negotiations
and elevated investment uncertainty.
However, another, more persistent challenge is Canada’s
continuously lagging productivity performance compared to the United States. In
fact, since 2008, there have been only two years in which Canada attracted more
real investment from abroad than what left the country. The fact that Mark
Carney never addresses this weight on the Canadian dollar and the economy,
considering he is an economist after all, is for him to answer to. Seriously —
it does say something that in volume terms, Canadian exports are no higher
today than they were seven years ago. Did you know that you have to go all the
way back to 2008 to find the last time that Canada registered a current account
surplus? There has been no growth in Canadian durable goods manufacturing for
nearly twenty years!
This alone speaks to this chronic loss of
competitiveness. To fully close that competitiveness gap right now, the
Canadian dollar would need to weaken towards C$1.50 (66.7 U.S. cents) — but if
the trend in that gap continues along its path, we would be talking about an
eventual weakening to C$1.60 or very nearly 60 cents.
**
Canada’s
relatively fine performance to date in FIFA 2026 is a cultural anomaly.
Historian Gerry Bowler, in an article for the Winnipeg Sun, deplores that our
Olympic motto has always been “Go For The Bronze.” Perhaps our distinctly
multicultural soccer team will give us something to cheer about as events
proceed. Yet even in sports competition, aside from our national game, hockey,
the results have almost inevitably been inferior. In most other respects, too,
lowering the bar has become a Canadian institution.
Consider education, a festival of low standards and
forgiveness for all except the meritorious: “A flight from standardized testing
in high schools has gone hand-in-hand with a rise in grade inflation and
numbers of students graduating with a distorted sense of their own
accomplishments,” writes Bowler. Screening tests in university are watered down
or suspended as inherently discriminatory; instead, presumably subordinate or
disempowered groups are given a pass—literally—and awarded special, favorable treatment.
The army is in shambles, with scarcely enough soldiers to
fill a football stadium. It gets even worse. “More training resources were
wasted on those who were going to fail,” says Bowler. “Allowing in those with
mental health issues required more support downstream. Many recruits lacked the
language skills needed to follow orders in either French or English. Some had
problems adjusting to Canadian cultural expectations.” We have heard of
brawling and infighting among mutually hostile immigrant individuals and units.
The political echelon is a reason for terminal despair. A
corrupt and socialist Liberal Party helmed by a popular prime minister who is
actually a bungling disaster is infallibly taking the country over the economic
precipice. Our national territory is gradually drifting via aboriginal title to
the Indians whose feather headdresses seem bought in costume outlets. The
social landscape is ravaged by indiscriminate immigration, including Iranian
mullahs, IRGC agents, and Hamas terrorists. Immigration is indeed rampant and
unmonitored, driving natural citizens out of jobs and, in many cases, out of
the country to seek employment elsewhere. The grass may not always be greener
in the next meadow, but there is more of it.
Canadian indifference to excellence and reason is built
into all our institutions. The criterion for many organizations across the
board, laments Bowler, is to “bar healthy, white, heterosexual males from even
applying,” reserving grants, chairs, posts and positions for “women, 2SLGBTQIA+
people, Indigenous peoples, racialized persons, and persons with disabilities.”
The best people for “the job” are all too often relegated to the sidelines. The
effect of this system of discrimination is that the labor pool grows
increasingly incompetent, political wisdom is inexorably contaminated, the
economy falters into bankruptcy, and social comity is replaced by resentment,
opportunism, and domestic friction.
“Historically, Canadians have been an easy-going people,
never demanding much of ourselves,” Bowler continues. Now we are demanding
less. We are neither ambitious, hard-working, nor well-educated. There is
scarcely an area of Canadian life that has not been debilitated.
Canadians need to start looking at reality and striving
to arrive at practicable solutions involving education, labor, social
monitoring and immigration while at the same time remaining aware of talent,
intelligence and productive personality traits among the workforce and
candidates for promotion. What is needed is a realistic assessment of the
culture’s relation to the morality of common decency, the commitment to social
reciprocity, the imperative of hard work, and the principles of competence and
meritocracy. It entails an administration that places the welfare of the
country over the seductions of ideology and the temptations of both power and
profiteering. We need what we do not have at present. That is where we are and
where, barring a miracle, we are likely to remain.
**
For
years, Canadians have been warned about their country’s declining labour
productivity. According to the Bank of Canada, it’s a “break the glass
emergency” that requires immediate attention. But what about our other
productivity crisis — the one of personal, rather than national, proportions?
Modern life has become full of tiny frustrations and
complications that steal our attention and creativity a few minutes at a time,
leaving us all less productive.
Consider online bill payment. Originally a simple and
time-saving process, it now can’t begin without a series of verification
hassles such as two-factor (soon to be multi-factor!) authentication, CAPTCHA
tests, and other mandatory online security procedures.
In the postal era, you sat down once a month with a stack
of bills, your cheque book and a roll of stamps and paid all your bills in one
sitting. No need to click on every square with a bicycle or race upstairs to
get your verification code before the time expires. Today, the process gets
longer and more complicated with each new security feature added.
The same holds true for other modern time-killers, such
as customer surveys, online alerts, useless chatbots and “customer service”
phone centres that never seem to answer their phones. Putting a price on these
micro-productivity losses may be more difficult than toting up Canada’s
national labour productivity crisis. But the lost time is every bit as
significant.
Traffic congestion is one place where data on personal
time costs is easier to come by.
In Montreal, for example, orange traffic cones have
become a satirical civic emblem, given their role in exacerbating traffic
congestion. A 2023 study discovered more than 500 of these cones in one small
section of the city. All were originally installed to warn drivers of road
work. Yet the study found nearly a quarter had simply been abandoned and were
no longer serving any purpose except obstructing drivers. A local newspaper
discovered one row of orange cones had been sitting beside a road tunnel for 16
years. …
It’s
a good thing that the Americans were on the case:
