Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Guilbeault's a "radical" who seems intent on banning federal funds from road projects.
Conservative MP Mark Strahl, the party's transport critic, said Guilbeault's talk about no more new funding for "large" roads is "outrageous" and an affront to the people who rely on cars to get to and from work.
"This isn't something many Canadians do without. To simply say we're not going to allow any federal money to go into that is extreme, it's divisive and it's right in line with what this government does," Strahl said.
[…]
Guilbeault's comments put into question the future of Ford's promised Highway 413 project, a new highway in the northwest part of the Greater Toronto Area that will connect two major arteries in the area and ease travel between booming areas like Vaughan and Brampton.
Ontario has argued that the project should be fast-tracked because the population growth in these Toronto suburbs demands more infrastructure to ease congestion.
Environmentalists and some local groups have vigorously opposed the 60-kilometre highway because it will cut through farmland and waterways and pave over parts of the province's protected greenbelt.
[…]
As for the government's push to ban single-use plastics by deeming them "toxic," the Federal Court ruled last year that the policy is "unreasonable and unconstitutional."
In CBC News
"Housing affordability is a significant problem in Canada but not one that can be fixed by raising or lowering interest rates," Macklem said during a speech in Montreal on Tuesday.
Macklem said the real issue is that housing supply has fallen short of housing demand for years.
"There are many reasons why: zoning restrictions, delays and uncertainties in the approval processes and shortages of skilled workers. None of these are things monetary policy can address," he said in his address to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations.
Macklem admits the emergency low interest rates during the COVID-19 pandemic helped fuel the run-up in home prices during that time. And the central bank's own research shows that "shelter inflation" continues to drive inflation.
The success of the program has other Canadian cities looking to emulate it and generated international attention for its boldness.
But without taking anything away from the grand ambitions of the Calgary plan, or the initial success it's seen (it isn't easy to convert one empty office block into apartments, let alone six million square feet worth), there are a few questions that need to be asked on behalf of the future residents of the 2,300-plus new homes about to be built. For example: What are they going to do there?
[…]
Paul Fairie, the principal co-ordinator of the Downtown Core Neighbourhood Association, also thinks something needs to be done about the big, empty east-west avenues, particularly on the weekends.
"You wind up walking one or two blocks in a row with literally nothing. You're just walking in this ambiguous, empty space," Fairie said.
But as a downtown resident for 14 years, he says the items at the top of his wish list are what he calls "the boring things."
Things like grocery stores, inexpensive restaurants and coffee shops that stay open after 6 p.m.
"A big misconception is, they think, you live downtown, you're living this sort of glamorous, exotic, party-oriented lifestyle. No. I'm just living in an apartment. It's a relatively normal life and the more we can do to facilitate that, I think, the better," he said.
As the number of homeless people rises, there are mounting calls for empty buildings around Halifax to be repurposed for affordable housing.
The Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia added its voice this week, with a statement calling Halifax Regional Municipality "negligent" for leaving the old Halifax Memorial Library on Spring Garden Road empty for nearly a decade.
[…]
An untold number of other Nova Scotians are also looking at empty buildings as potential housing.
For the past two years, people have been dropping virtual pins on a provincial map to create a crowdsourced database called This Should Be Housing. Each pin represents an empty building or piece of land that the contributor thinks should be housing.
Most of the pins are in Halifax. Some of the properties are publicly owned and some are owned privately.
Deanna Steele says she has never seen as many condo and vacation homes for sale in Kelowna, B.C. as she has this month.
The founder of Keys to Kelowna Properties Inc., a luxury vacation rental management agency, said the lake-front city's real estate market is "saturated'' by properties zoned for short-term rental use. Some of the sellers are people who bought not that long ago and are already trying to get out.
"They thought they were going to make a mint because they saw what was happening in the gold rush. And now they're realizing, 'Oh, big mistake,'" said Steele.
That gold rush — investing in short-term rentals in Kelowna and many other Canadian cities — could potentially slow to a trickle in the wake of new legislation to regulate short-term rentals introduced by the B.C. government in mid-October.