Federal housing minister clarifies postponement of Surrey, Burnaby housing announcement

Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser is setting the record straight as to why he postponed an announcement of housing funding for Surrey and Burnaby earlier this week.

Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke and Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley were both in Ottawa for the expected announcement of money from the Housing Accelerator Fund, which was abruptly postponed on Tuesday.

Fraser said his ministry needed to study the impacts of proposed increases to development cost charges (DCC) from the Metro Vancouver Regional District as the reason for the delay.

Read More: Federal government’s Surrey, Burnaby housing funding announcement postponed

The housing minister said Thursday the increase to charges being mulled is a “surprising proposal that had a serious proposed increase to development charges which could have the impact of reducing the appetite for home builders to build homes.

“If we’re going to be advancing significant amounts of funds to different cities across Canada, we want to make sure that the result will be additional homes that wouldn’t have been built otherwise,” Fraser told reporters.

The minister clarified that the postponement of the announcement wasn’t meant to send a message to Surrey and Burnaby.

“My goal is to get to a good place where we can use the Housing Accelerator Fund to support the good work they have been doing and will do, but we have to make sure that the result will be new additional homes and make sure that the landscape works to get those homes built,” he said.

The proposed increases to DCC would see developers incrementally cover more infrastructure costs associated with new builds over a four-year period.

When the announcement was cancelled on Tuesday, Hurley expressed concern that the cities may not receive any money from the federal fund.

“It’ll be very disappointing if we can’t have the funding that we applied for and went through all the right channels to apply for and thought we were going to receive the funding today. And for whatever reason, the minister has chosen at this point to put it on hold,” he told CityNews at the time, while also defending the regional district’s proposed DCC increases.

Fraser assures that he and the federal government will continue working with the two Metro Vancouver cities to figure out how to assist in the construction of new housing.

“We are going to be engaging directly with the cities, their staff, their mayors. I have full faith that they want the same thing that we do,” he said.

“We just have to be sure that if we’re going to put public money into their ambitious housing projects, that we’re going to get the results that we believed we were going to get as recently as last week.”

With files from Cormac Mac Sweeney