Photo: Christine Muschi The Canadian Press First and foremost, the PQ leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, suggests helping first-time buyers financially by offering them a 3.5% discount on mortgage interest rates through negotiations with financial institutions and loan guarantees.
Pierre Saint-Arnaud – The Canadian Press
February 12, 2024
- Quebec
The Parti Québécois wants to open the door of property ownership wider to young people and invites the Legault government to stick its head in the doorway to see if it could find ideas there.< /p>
The PQ leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, presented Monday a series of measures aimed at countering what he considers to have become an unacceptable intergenerational inequity. “We can call this a breach of the social contract, because it is so inequitable between generations. »
The launch of this Home Ownership Plan as the next budget approaches is not a coincidence, he specifies. “We want to influence the government while there is time, because we are faced with an incomparable situation on a historical level where there is a whole generation to whom we say: “you will not have access to property”. »
First and foremost, the plan suggests helping first-time buyers financially by offering them a 3.5% discount on mortgage interest rates through negotiations with financial institutions and loan guarantees. For example, with a 7% interest rate reduced to 3.5% for a $525,000 home purchased with a 10% down payment, monthly payments would drop from $3,308 to $2,358, an annual savings of $11,400.
Facilitate construction
It would also double the tax credit for the purchase of a first home, from $1,500 to $3,000, as well as the maximum QST reimbursement on the cost of building a home new, which would be increased to $20,000.
On this subject, he criticized the CAQ government for having carried out “an increase in the tax credit, but so minimal that it has no impact on access to the property “. On Friday, the Quebec Liberal Party proposed an exemption from the QST on materials for new construction.
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If the proposal on interest rates is inspired by Robert Bourassa's My rate, my roof program, another proposal aimed at increasing supply by accelerating construction is inspired by the Corvée habitation program launched in 1982 by the government of René Lévesque. Québec solidaire also proposed a similar program during its caucus at the end of January.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon unreservedly welcomes the proposals of other opposition parties. “I expect each opposition party to provide solutions. What is unacceptable at the moment is the government's inaction or lack of interest, because the range of possible solutions is there. »
Just as the federal government did recently, the Parti Québécois suggests providing a catalog of pre-approved plans to facilitate and accelerate the erection of houses and apartment buildings. He also proposes converting or selling vacant government buildings to use as places of residence.
Reduction of immigration
Finally, one of the axes of the PQ plan is to reduce demand, which, according to its vision, involves reducing the thresholds for permanent immigration and the number of temporary immigrants, a thorny issue for which Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon did not have precise data to offer, relying on future analyzes.
“We are in the process of redoing these calculations,” he says. […] We will look at each category of temporary immigration to arrive at conclusions, calculations which are realistic and on the basis of active listening to each sector of the economy according to their situation. »
The PQ spokesperson for housing, the former member of Parliament for Gaspé Méganne Perry Mélançon, will take this plan on a tour of the regions in order to improve it with a view to a final improvement in anticipation of the National Council for Sovereignist Training, next April.
In a written statement sent to The Canadian Press, the office of the Minister of Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, affirms that “we are open to evaluating what we can do to improve access to property, in particular for first time buyers.”
“The key is to increase supply! We are already putting in place several things that the PQ is proposing, including measures to remove bureaucracy and the use of prefabricated materials to shorten construction times,” adds the minister's office.