Analysis: Carney's housing minister has rocky record on the housing file
During Gregor Robertson's decade as Vancouver mayor, luxury condo developers boomed and homelessness spread.
The most-recent corporate job for the May 13 sworn-in federal housing minister was at a Vancouver modular building products company that went bankrupt.
Gregor Robertson, the Vancouver mayor from 2008 to 2018, was Prime Minister Mark Carney’s star Liberal candidate in the April 28 election in Vancouver Fraserview-South Burnaby. During the campaign, Carney recycled Justin Trudeau’s 2024 modular housing plan, promised to build 500,000 homes a year and open a new bureaucracy called Build Canada Homes.
Last June 28, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Stephens approved the sale of Nexii Building Solutions Inc. (NBSI) to B.C.-incorporated Nexiican Holdings Inc. and Delaware-incorporated Nexii Inc. Nexiican director Blake Beckham and Nexii president Russ Lambert are both Dallas lawyers.
From 2019 to 2023, Robertson was executive vice-president of NBSI, which has a factory in Squamish. NBSI purported to be worth $1 billion in 2021, but sold for $500,000 plus more than $22 million in assumed liabilities.
Wealthy got housed, poor did not
The NDP/Liberal coalition Vision Vancouver became Canada’s richest, most-powerful civic political party after leader Robertson was elected in 2008 on a promise to end street homelessness by 2015.
Power was centralized in the Office of the Mayor, where Mike Magee was chief of staff. The B.C. NDP insider was in the audience at Rideau Hall on May 13.
Former organic juice company owner and NDP MLA Robertson was re-elected twice in 2011 and 2014, but did not run for a fourth term. Voters became grumpy after homelessness increased, a drug epidemic raged and real estate prices skyrocketed.
There were no limits to the source and size of political donations until the NDP government’s amendments banned corporate and union donations and capped individual donations at $1,200.
Robertson cultivated close ties with China while in office and left his wife in 2014 for a singer whose mother was a government official in China. Years earlier, in 2010, Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Richard Fadden sounded the alarm about foreign interference on the West Coast.
In 2011, Robertson skipped Bank of Canada governor Carney’s luncheon speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade, where Carney warned of a clash between greed-fuelled speculators and investors and fearful citizens in search of affordable housing.
During a two-and-a-half-year span, Robertson sent only two letters to senior federal and B.C. politicians seeking action on property flipping and tax evasion in the Vancouver real estate market.
None of the letters or replies mentioned money laundering, nor did they cite Chinese foreign investment as the biggest market influencer.
Gregor the green
Robertson’s pet project was the environment. He flew around the world to promote his Greenest City 2020 initiative. Many conferences involved former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who became Robertson’s post-2018 patron at the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.
Expense reports analyzed by theBreaker from 2009 (Robertson’s first full year in office) through 2017 (his last full year in office) show he spent 331 days traveling and visiting other cities, for a cost to taxpayers of $126,534.23.
Vancouver voters thought they were done with Robertson in fall 2018.
With only one candidate elected in the October election (Allan Wong to school board) and Robertson passing the chain of office to Kennedy Stewart on Nov. 5, hundreds of Vision Vancouver members gathered at the Seaforth Armoury on Burrard Street.
A bittersweet soiree for a party whose legacy is evident in the city’s modern, luxury condo skyscrapers and in Canada’s worst ghetto, the Downtown Eastside.
A Canadian voter could be considered a skeptical thinker and surprised analyzer of Carney’s unstated Goal for a major priority of this term in office:
Perpetuation of Homelessness in Canada.
Why else would Carney have believed his advisors (possibly Bloomberg) who recommended Robertson become his “star candidate” in the election? Why did he not consult with people in Vancouver who know the housing file like City Hall reporter for CBC, Justin McElroy or SFU’s Andy Yan? As mayor of Vancouver for 10 years, Robertson had the power to request and demand help from Ottawa. He did little and at the same time developers did much. Nothing says Carney does NOT want to change the housing dilemma, to put the housing crisis on a “wartime urgency” footing more than the Gregor Robertson choice to lead the change needed. Taleeb Noormohammed, expert house flipper, could become part of the housing team to truly guarantee nothing will change.