In a recorded interview, Matan Hazanov shares his personal experience of entering the housing market at age 26 after living in a cramped basement to save for a down‑payment, and highlights the broader affordability crisis in Canada, noting that average home prices in Toronto and Vancouver exceed $1 million and that a typical mortgage now requires a household income of over $200,000 and a $200,000 down‑payment. MP Melissa Lantsman responds by describing homeownership as a fundamental, increasingly unattainable dream, linking it to family stability and personal freedom. She attributes the high cost of housing primarily to taxes, regulation, and development charges, and outlines Conservative‑leaning solutions: cutting development taxes, unlocking federally‑owned land for private‑sector development, and reducing government involvement in housing markets. The conversation frames the crisis as a matter of government policy rather than market forces, emphasizing the need for deregulation and better use of existing land, lumber, and labor resources.
Chapters
I was able to get into the housing market when I was 26. I worked very hard. Smart. I lived for a time in a basement, one single room in a basement with no windows, just to save enough money for a down payment. But most people I know can't afford a house. The average price of a home in Toronto and places like Vancouver is over $1 million. And to get a mortgage today, you have to have a household income of over $200,000 and a down payment of $200,000. Is there a realistic path to fixing that issue? And what would the Conservative Party do to solve it?
Yeah, look, homeownership is not a dream anymore. It's sort of a nightmare for a lot of people, and rightfully so. 'Cause, you know, without a home, like, you can't do the other things. Like, a home is more than just, like, four walls, and it is, like, the key to everything else. It's the key to family planning, it's the key to, like, you know, having a foothold in the world. And it's based on a very, very realistic dream that you can come here and work hard and get a house. Like, that's— my parents moved here in the late '70s, and they, like, they moved to this neighbourhood, like, in the early '80s already, buying a home for, like, a fraction of, obviously, the price of a downtown Toronto parking spot these days. But led them to be able to do everything else, and it led them to a certain kind of freedom freedom that you can't enjoy. It led them to be able to, you know, have kids and raise them and like, you know, hold functions. Like, it was more than just like the physical house. That's why the dream sort of exists for so many people. And again, like, it's not that complicated. The majority of a home, like a third of it, is taxes. It's regulation. It's, you know, development charges from our municipalities. Like, we have— fundamentally, the federal government has like a big, big tool, and it's like the biggest part of the public purse. And so we can reward those who who get out of the way of home building and punish those, frankly, with a bit of a stick approach of those who are in the way. Cut development taxes, open up our own free land. Like, the federal government sits on lots of their own land, lots of their own properties that aren't being used. Being able to, you know, get partners in the private sector to develop that land. Like, there's lots of things that the federal government does, but all of this is like, I don't know the scientific term, I'm gonna just use cuckoo bananas is how I look at it. Like, it is taxes, it is regulation, It is availability of land. And we've got land and we've got lumber and we've got labor. Like, we are rich with all of that. Putting it to good use by getting out of the way of it. There's a theme in all of this. It's like, get government out of the business of doing stuff that it doesn't need to do.
