We’re sticking close to the headlines for this week’s podcast episode. Dr. Mike Moffatt is one of the country’s leading experts on housing policy. You’ve read about him in the Financial Post, the Globe or maybe The Hub talking about the huge upward pressure on housing prices in recent years in Canada. He even addressed the Trudeau government on housing at their Charlottetown cabinet retreat last year. (As he always points out, he’ll talk to any government or political party that wants to hear from him.) He runs the PLACE Centre, a think tank about livable communities. And his Twitter account is one-stop shopping for smart insights into housing.
In this week’s episode, Moffatt talks about the roots of the housing problem, the work the Trudeau government has put in since he met them last summer, the merits and problems with Pierre Poilievre’s own housing policy, and the strange system-wide breakdown in governments’ ability to plan and communicate on complex policy files.
All in all, a good conversation and, I think, a useful one.
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button at the top of this post. You can download any episode to listen to it later, via the same “Listen On” button. If you listen on a podcast platform, smash those “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word. You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button right over the photo at the top of this page.
I am grateful to be the journalist fellow-in-residence at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
How did housing become a federal battleground?