Mediaplanet sat down with Minister Sean Fraser to discuss infrastructure and housing, prioritizing sustainable growth, and community well-being.
What is your long-term vision for infrastructure, housing, and community development?
Canada’s cities and towns are growing. While this can come with challenges, it also offers a great opportunity to tackle infrastructure and housing needs in new and bold ways. We are helping communities across Canada thrive with historic investments in transit, water, and community infrastructure, while simultaneously taking a leadership role in encouraging innovative long-term planning across the country.
Folks deserve to live in communities with access to services that they can rely on. Whether that’s clean drinking water, recreation spaces, or reliable transit, these types of services are what make a housing development a community.
We have an opportunity to help communities grow by adopting policies to get more homes built, all while making sure that communities have the infrastructure that they need to accommodate these new homes. A program that really underscores this complementary infrastructure and housing development is the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund (CHIF). It’s a fund designed to provide critical infrastructure funding to help Canadian communities build the foundational infrastructure needed to allow for more housing supply. This includes drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure, all of which are key to alleviating growth pressures that can affect communities.
CHIF is a $6-billion program. $1 billion will be made directly available to municipalities to support their urgent infrastructure needs. The other $5 billion will be made available to provinces and territories who commit to key actions to grow housing supply, like zoning for “missing middle” homes and freezing development charges to avoid excessive increases that raise the cost of building homes. By incentivizing these changes while offering billions for critical housing infrastructure, we’re making sure that federal dollars go towards complete, connected, and affordable communities that are well prepared to meet growing housing demands. It’s practical policy that allows us to team up with willing partners who also appreciate that communities need to grow, but that they need to do so sustainably.
We’re also developing Canada’s first National Infrastructure Assessment (NIA). The idea is that this assessment will provide data on current infrastructure, future needs, and associated challenges in order to help guide decision-makers on infrastructure investments and prevent future reactive “band-aid” solutions. With a country as big as Canada and needs that vary from region to region, it’s going to help us get aligned with all levels of government on how best to support communities as they grow and change into the future.
