Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is proposing to eliminate the federal sales tax from the purchase of new homes costing up to $1.3 million.
He says it will save homebuyers up to $65,000 on a home’s purchase and $3,000 in annual mortgage payments.
He sees the move as helping with the construction of more homes.
“That will spark 360,000 extra homes every single year, boost our GDP by $2.5 billion, create tens of thousands of jobs for our builders…., and also for our forestry workers who will get back out into our forest harvesting our wonderful lumbers, turning towering timbers into two by fours that will uphold these wonderful homes,” says Poilievre while campaigning in Vaughn, Ontario.
Poilievre also plans to accelerate construction with incentives to municipalities to free up land, speed up permits and cut development charges.
He also proposes selling off 15% of federal buildings and land to build homes.
Poilievre also disputed claims that he would end Liberal government programs such as childcare.
He says he wants to improve them.
“While honouring the agreements on childcare with the provinces, we’re going to give more freedom and flexibility to parents, providers and provinces to support the childcare of all the kids,” says Poilievre.
NDP Jagmeet Singh used a visit to Toronto to draw attention to Liberal leader Mark Carney’s role in a property management firm that is accused of jacking up rents after purchasing apartment complexes.
Singh heard from a resident of one of the complexes owned by Brookfield Asset Management, which Carney served as chair.
“I think it is very troubling that that is a person who claims to want to have solutions to the problems that people like Erin are going through,” says Singh.
“I think people need to know that that is not the guy. I’m really worried about someone like that making decisions in our country that are going to favour the companies that he worked for and are going to hurt people like Aaron.”
Singh also faced questions about his party’s showing in recent polling.
He is not letting it hinder his campaign.
“I’m going to take my job really seriously in this campaign. I’m going to campaign really, really aggressively to let people know the choice,” says Singh.
Liberal leader Mark Carney continued his East Coast swing with a stop in Halifax.
He says Canada is ready to respond to the U.S. trade tariffs if implemented on April 2nd.
“We’ve taken a number of precautionary measures so that we can react quickly there,” says Carney.
“We also have in place a schedule of goods that we for which we can add retaliatory tariffs on April 2nd, depending on what the Americans do.”
Carney also defended his decision not to attend a second French-language debate on TVA.
The federal election takes place on Monday, April 28th.
