OTTAWA—It's not clear that the Liberal government's multibillion dollar housing plan will actually reduce housing needs, according to an assessment by Canada’s parliamentary budget officer, who says the new strategy actually reduces targeted funding for households in need of financial support.

The Liberals unveiled a national housing strategy in 2017, saying the goal of the new investments was to remove 530,000 households from “housing need.”

But in a report released Tuesday, parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux questioned whether the government’s housing strategy will achieve that goal.

The assessment concluded that the strategy “largely maintains current funding levels for current activities and slightly reduces targeted funding for households in core housing need.

“It is not clear that National Housing Strategy will reduce the prevalence of housing need relative to 2017 levels,” the report states.

Over the last decade, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a Crown agency, spent $2.3 billion a year on programs to improve access to affordable housing for Canadians. Over the next decade, that spending will decline 14 per cent to $2 billion a year, the report states.

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That decrease is ostensibly offset by an increase in spending in two other areas that provide financing for housing, but they do not require low-income households to be targeted.

“Some of the programs that were targeted to lower income households will see their funding diminished so there is a reduced emphasis on programs geared toward lower income individuals,” Giroux said in an interview.

“If you want to have a national housing strategy and you are targeting people who are not experiencing difficulty finding affordable and suitable housing, what’s the purpose of such a strategy?” he said. “It is a middle-class strategy.”

The report flags some other potential shortfalls in the housing strategy.

For example, funding for federal community housing will decline “substantially” over the next decade, putting at risk housing earmarked for low-income households, the report found.

As well, planned funding for federally administered community housing for Indigenous households that are not on reserves is less than half the funding provided over the previous 10 years. “Total spending on Indigenous housing is expected to be substantially lower,” the report said.

And because, 92 per cent of the funding is earmarked for 2020-2021 and beyond — past the next election — future governments could choose to roll back the promised investments.

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At the time it was unveiled, the strategy was billed as a $40-billion federal investment. However, the strategy only committed $16.1 billion in new spending; the rest was spending that had already been planned and cost-sharing by the provincial territorial governments.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh challenged on the report’s findings in the Commons, the Liberals are not producing the housing results people need.

“This Prime Minister is very good with symbolic gestures, but he is not there for people when it counts. Canada is in a housing crisis, affecting all regions of the country,” Singh said.

Responding for the government, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the government has made “unprecedented” investments in housing.

“The national housing strategy ensures that we will continue to be a full and active partner in Canada's housing sector for the decade to come,” Goodale said during question period.

Still, the key findings in the PBO report were not a surprise to David Hulchanski, a professor of housing and community development at the University of Toronto, but confirmation that the numbers put forth by the federal government did not add up.

“Those of us who follow closely knew the numbers didn’t add up, but we didn’t have access to the year-by-year numbers that make a distinction between budget expenditures and loans that are repaid,” Hulchanski said. “That was how they were able to inflate their various claims and hide behind it.”

In this case, Hulchanksi had early access to the documents to back up his suspicions. After the PBO posted the copy of the letter outlining the materials it was seeking from the federal government, Hulchanski filed an Access to Information and Privacy request for the same materials.

While he is still comparing his analysis to the full report, he had high praise for the work the PBO has done “untangling” some of the major claims in the housing file.

A key promise of the strategy has been the promise that 500,000 Canadians would be lifted out of core housing need.

“It is just logically impossible given the small amount of funding they are actually spending,” Hulchanski said.