As he continues to make his case for being the next Prime Minister of Canada, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is pledging to remove the goods and services tax or harmonized sales tax — the GST — on new homes sold for less than $1 million.
Poilievre announced the plan on Monday in a press conference in Ottawa, in a “axe the sales tax” YouTube video posted to his channel, and over a slew of posts on social media urging Canadians to support the Conservatives’ “common sense plan.”
The Conservatives said on Monday that dropping the federal sales tax on those new homes would bring down the cost of an $800,000 home by $40,000.
When asked by one reporter if he could confirm that scrapping the GST on new homes over $1 million will save the feds some $8 billion, Poilievre did, without hesitation, and pointed to the fact that the Conservatives would, concurrently, get rid of the Housing Accelerator Fund as well as the Housing Infrastructure Fund, calling them ineffective and purely bureaucratic.
“So that [saves] a total of $8 billion over several years,” he said. “Then we expect that we will collect about $2 billion more as a result of the 30,000 additional homes that will be built year after year because of this highly stimulative tax cut — it's going to spark more home building, which means more workers and businesses will be making money building homes, and therefore, at the existing rates, they'll be paying more into the system.”
Monday’s announcement from the conservatives is being applauded by organizations like the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) and the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON).
In particular, RESCON’s Present Richard Lyall said in a statement released Monday afternoon that he commends the Conservatives for putting forth such a plan, and that he urges provinces to do the same. “The tax burden is preventing many people from buying a new home and many are leaving our cities,” said Lyall. “The plan put forward by the Conservatives is forward-thinking and should help restore balance to the market.”
