Nova Scotia NDP leader Claudia Chender took swipes at the governing PC Party during her address to delegates at the NDP’s biennial policy convention in Halifax Saturday while announcing new party initiatives that would help deal with the housing crisis.“Part of the answer is to expedite the building of the unprecedented number of homes required for our growing province, and we need to ensure that every Nova Scotian can afford to buy or rent those homes.
“We can begin to address so many of the housing problems by dealing with the crisis head on,” she said.support the non-market housing sector to leverage federal funding by prioritizing the use of prefabricated or modular construction and enable the rapid expansion of non-profit and co-op housing projects in the province
establish rent control and create a renters’ tax credit for low and middle-income households to help offset the rising costs of rent.With only a little over a year until the next provincial election, Chender said the party will be focusing on the affordability crisis, but also health care and climate change.
“We have put forward a number of housing proposals , all of which we keep fighting for,” she said. “But the ones we put forward today are really designed to ensure that we are building the number of homes needed by our growing population… So far what we have seen are tax breaks for developers and zoning changes. Those are probably needed, but as a result we’re building a lot of homes and a lot of people still can’t afford them.