OTTAWA—The Liberals’ pointman on housing admits Justin Trudeau’s claim the government has helped 1 million Canadians find an affordable place to live stems from figures that were inflated “to rhetorical advantage.”

Adam Vaughan, a Liberal MP from Toronto who serves as parliamentary secretary to the social development minister, said Tuesday that $5.7 billion spent on affordable housing since 2016 has actually impacted less than 1 million specific addresses — not individuals — and that some units were counted more than once to reach that tally.

“Our funding program has reached 1 million housing units, with a combination of construction dollars, repair dollars and rent subsidies,” Vaughan said.

“I mean, obviously we’ve double counted to rhetorical advantage, but that’s how much money is in the system. That’s why it’s $5.7 billion. We’ve done a hell of a lot of stuff.”

Vaughan was explaining statements the prime minister made in the House of Commons this week, in response to criticism from the NDP that the Liberal government’s housing plan doesn’t build new units fast enough.

On Monday during question period, Trudeau said in French that federal spending has “helped more than 1 million Canadians find affordable housing.” He repeated the claim Tuesday, when he said: “we have already helped more than almost one million Canadians access homes.”

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Those statements sparked criticism from NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who accused the prime minister of misleading Canadians by exaggerating the impact of his government’s housing spending. In an interview with the Star, Singh said Trudeau’s statements imply affordable housing has been given to 1 million additional Canadians, when government-issued figures from the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation (CMHC) paint a different picture.

“What (Trudeau) claimed is just so far from the truth it’s not even in the realm of what’s actually happening,” said Singh.

“His numbers are just not real. They’re wrong.”

The CMHC figures were published in November to outline the impact of $5.7 billion in federal housing spending since the Liberals’ first budget in 2016. They say less than 15,000 new affordable housing units have been or will be built with that money, while 156,526 units were slated for repairs.

The CMHC also states “776,233 families or individuals benefited from a more affordable place to live”— a reference to people who receive subsidies to help pay for their housing, Vaughan explained.

However, Vaughan said the government doesn’t actually know how many individuals are affected by this spending, because it doesn’t have statistics for how many people live in each unit constructed, repaired, or targeted with a subsidy.

Instead, the CMHC says “almost 1 million Canadian families” have received housing support — a claim Vaughan said is based on specific “addresses” receiving money. But he said the tally includes some addresses more than once if they receive money for repairs and also for a rent subsidy, Vaughan said.

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“It constitutes support to a million different households, though some of them are double-counted,” he said.

A government official said on background Tuesday night that a small minority of units—roughly 22,000 of almost 1 million—were counted more than once.

Housing policy experts, meanwhile, have reacted to the CMHC’s statistics with confusion. David Hulchanski, a professor at the University of Toronto, called the figures “opaque and confusing” and said by email that it’s still not clear how many more Canadians are receiving help for housing than before the Liberal government came to power.

Asked for a more accurate tally of units affected by the federal spending since 2016, a spokesperson for Minister of Families, Children and Social Development Jean-Yves Duclos repeated the CMHC figure that “982,099 families or well over a million Canadians have a place to call home.”

Jeff Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Associaiton, said much of the government spending since 2016 is from the renewal of so-called “operating agreements” to maintain subsidized housing that has been available for years. The Liberal government’s signature National Housing Strategy — a plan to reduce homelessness and expand affordable housing through a combination of federal and provincial spending that amounts to $40 billion over 10 years — only started last year, Morrison said, and hasn’t yet led to a significant number of new units.

“Most of this is just stuff they were already doing,” he said.

Vaughan acknowledged this, but said it’s important to maintain subsidies and spending for repairs, and that money available for affordable housing would have plummeted if the Liberals did not renew this spending.

“We have restored those operating agreements and, in doing so, protected affordability for a huge swath of Canadians,” he said.

Singh, however, accused the Liberals of neglecting the immediate needs of people who can’t afford to buy a home or have trouble paying the rent. In recent weeks, Singh has repeatedly underscored the “crisis” in affordable housing, while New Democrats have attacked the Liberal housing plan in the House of Commons.

The party also contends it is a prime concern in Burnaby South, where Singh is competing for his first-ever federal seat in a byelection set for Feb. 25. Earlier this month, Singh pledged an NDP government would build 500,000 new affordable housing units built over the next decade. This would be done by removing federal sales tax on new buildings that include affordable units, send subsidies to people who spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing, and double the existing tax credit for first-time homebuyers to $1,500.

The party says the tax credit boost would cost $120 million per year, while the sales tax incentive could cost roughly $125 million, depending on pickup in the private sector.

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