Pierre Poilievre brings housing pitch to Ron Butler’s Angry Mortgage Podcast

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre brought his housing message to the mortgage industry this week, joining broker Ron Butler for a nearly hour-long episode of the Angry Mortgage Podcast.

The interview, released Tuesday, covered housing affordability, development costs and homeownership, along with trade, economic policy and the pair’s shared Alberta roots.

The primary focus, however, was affordability, with both men arguing that taxes, development charges, permitting delays and other government-imposed costs are constraining supply and homeownership.

“We have a government right now that doesn’t actually even believe in home ownership,” Poilievre said. “They want everybody to be renters that pay the mortgage for Brookfield or some other multinational corporation, or in government housing, which ultimately prevent us from ever having a property-owning democracy in the future.”

“You cannot pretend there isn’t a fundamental suppression of homeownership going on in Canada the last few years,” Butler added.

Rather than reducing the bureaucracy he believes stifles housing development at scale, Poilievre accused Prime Minister Carney of adding more layers of red tape since taking office last year.

“He’s now created 14 new government agencies,” Poilievre said. “Every time Mark Carney discovers a problem that comes from excess bureaucracy, his solution is to create even more bureaucracy.”

Build Canada Homes comes under fire

For example, Poilievre took aim at Build Canada Homes, a federal housing development agency launched last September, arguing that its investments in rental housing do little to advance homeownership.

“The head of the Build Canada Homes, Evan Siddall, has said that the dream of home ownership is a canard, and we have to let go of it,” Poilievre said. “That is obviously Mr. Carney’s agenda; He doesn’t believe in home ownership, and that’s a fundamental disagreement that he and I have.”

Siddall made the comments while leading CMHC in 2019, when he argued that the “glorification of home ownership” should be reconsidered.

Build Canada Homes was launched with $13 billion in initial funding over five years, including $1.5 billion for the Canada Rental Protection Fund and $1 billion for transitional and supportive housing.

“It’s not that I’m against the rental construction, it’s just that we should be building far more ownership housing at the very same time,” Poilievre said. “The share of construction going to ownership has been halved in a decade, and that’s not an accident. The Carney Liberals do not believe in home ownership.”

Both Poilievre and Butler noted that Canada’s housing affordability crisis has hit young Canadians and first-time homebuyers particularly hard.

“When I first got into politics, I would knock on doors and would regularly meet 24- to 25-year-olds who owned their house,” Poilievre said. “Now, you never meet anyone under 33, 34, 35 who owns a house.”

Butler noted that the average age of first-time buyers has increased significantly over the past generation, particularly in Canada’s major cities. A 2025 analysis by UAE-based developer Bloom Holding, for example, estimated that prospective first-time buyers could reach homeownership at roughly age 46 in Vancouver, 40 in Toronto and 39 in Montreal, based on local incomes and the time required to save a down payment.

“Not only have we got a group of people who now have to be the average age of 40 just to take a shot at buying, but the priorities of the government have switched entirely to building rental properties,” Butler said. “Nothing is as tragic in my mind as the experience that we get when we talk to young people who have a general inquiry about a mortgage, and when they learn that it’s functionally impossible for them to ever buy a home — because they find out the math does not support them in any way — they talk about leaving Canada.”

Poilievre, for his part, argued that the rising cost of homeownership in Canada is largely the result of higher costs for developers in the form of taxes, development charges and other government-imposed costs.

For example, he said development charges have increased 1,000% in some markets, and argued that fees originally imposed to fund housing-related infrastructure are too often used for “slush funds for municipal politicians to spend on other things in the future.”

“The consequence is builders can’t build, buyers can’t buy, sellers can’t sell, and it’s an all-around hell storm — but we know what we have to do,” he said. “We have to get the bureaucracy out of the way, speed up permits, free up land, cut development charges.”

Poilievre also proposed offering a capital gains tax holiday to those who reinvest their earnings into housing construction, and requiring municipalities to reduce development charges as a condition of receiving infrastructure funding.

“Get rid of the GST and the HST on all home building in Canada for properties under $1.3 million, not convoluted short-term rebates that apply in one province and not in others,” he said. “If you do that, we will have a building boom like we’ve never seen before, and I believe within a short time period, people will be able to get back into houses in their 20s. That’s my mission.”

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Last modified: September 15, 2026