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But at the same time, new luxury condos aren’t a bad thing. Many Toronto renters, for example, are right on the economic line between the condo and traditional rental markets. (Your correspondent is one of them.) When one moves up, a less fancy unit comes vacant.

If you give renters money, whatever else you might be doing, you’re driving up the market price of renting

The other two items in Singh’s proposal are more suspect. With all but the sketchiest details still to come, he proposes subsidizing people who are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. And he proposes doubling the first-time home buyers’ credit from $750 to $1,500.

If you’re spending 45 per cent of your income on housing and you have rent control, then Singh might have good news for you. But if you give renters money, whatever else you might be doing, you’re driving up the market price of renting. Same thing when you give first-time home buyers more money: You’re increasing everyone’s budget by $750 or $1,500 or whatever, all of which goes to the seller.

As UBC economist Kevin Milligan observed this week, Singh’s plan smacks of a “centre-right” approach. He suggested a more naturally NDP plan would eliminate the home buyer’s credit and the exemption from capital gains tax for the sale of personal residences, and pour the resulting nearly $7 billion into building housing. (Lee’s CCPA study recommended almost exactly that.) But the fixation on home ownership, as opposed to housing per se, pervades Canadian politics across the spectrum. And as we’re seeing, it leads policymakers to some weird places.