N.B. promises millions more for public housing, but it won’t end high demand
By: John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Source: The Daily Gleaner
New Brunswick’s Liberal government says it will spend far more on building and upgrading public housing in the upcoming year, even if it won’t come anywhere near to taking everyone off the waitlist for an affordable place to live.
The latest capital budget for the New Brunswick Housing Corporation is nearly $78 million, a nearly 70 per cent hike from this year.
It includes more than $50 million for public housing construction, up from $33 million in the previous estimate.
There’s also close to $10 million for public housing improvements, an increase from about $5 million in 2025, in the wake of criticisms from the auditor general that the province had let its repair schedule slide, leaving too many apartments vacant.
The figures were released during a legislative committee session on Friday.
David Hickey, the housing minister, said in the House that the investments would be transformational – a notion the small opposition Green Party rejected, arguing they were hardly enough.
There are 13,000 individuals and families on the wait list for government-subsidized housing in New Brunswick, with only about 200 new units under construction.
“It’s the largest capital investment in public housing in the history of New Brunswick,” Hickey said, before pointing across the aisle and goading his main political opponents.
“The Conservatives are smiling over this investment in public housing. It is transformational.”
The housing minister blamed the former Higgs Tory government for homelessness increasing by more than 200 per cent and rents going up by 46 per cent during its six years in power.
He neglected to mention that the Tories also revived the moribund New Brunswick Housing Corporation and began constructing new public housing for the first time in close to four decades.
Hickey reiterated the Liberal government’s goals of building 30,000 new homes, putting up 1,760 affordable housing units and reducing chronic homelessness by 40 per cent by the end of its fouryear mandate.
Megan Mitton wasn’t impressed. The housing critic for the Green Party said the amount of money being put into public housing could hardly be called transformational.
She believes there should be less emphasis on encouraging developers to build expensive apartment buildings and a sharper focus on building places people can afford.
“Over 13,000 waiting for affordable housing, and their goal is less than 2,000 affordable housing starts. It just simply doesn’t add up,” she told Brunswick News. “It’s inadequate.”
The Liberal government has imposed a rent cap of three per cent a year, but Mitton insisted it didn’t go far enough. She wants the cap applied to the apartment unit, so that if someone moves out, a landlord can’t jack the rent for the next tenant.
“It can go up by $300, $500. Who knows how much? I’ve heard examples like that.”
She also said the minister didn’t talk enough about complex care housing, the kind with wraparound social services to ensure someone who had been living rough didn’t return to the streets.
“It’s still too difficult to navigate for a lot of the nonprofits and the cooperatives, and the government needs to take the lead and move really quickly to build complex care housing.”
Speaking to reporters afterward, Hickey said it would take time to improve the situation.
“Look, the train’s been speeding in the opposite direction on housing for the last three decades. We’ve not made investments in public housing in a long time in this province, in my lifetime in this province, and it’s not as simple as turning the train around. We need to build a new set of tracks.”
