This week, we're going to talk about the recent election here in Canada. What are the promises the Liberals made? More importantly, what does this mean for home prices in Canada?

The elections showcase some of the major issues that Canadians are concerned about. And real estate ended up being on the top of that list. Canadians show that they're concerned about the affordability of homes in our country.

I want to take you through the official liberal platform on housing. But first, I want to address some rumors that are circling, because that's what I'm getting the most questions about. Some of the rumors going around are that the Liberals plan to increase capital gains tax and also implement a tax on your principal residence. I wouldn't worry too much about this because not only would it negatively impact the retirement of millions of Canadians, but it would also most likely fuel the price increase even further. Now, you're probably wondering, why would I say this.

And that's because if people are being taxed on what they make on the principal residence, they're going to be motivated to actually keep the home and rent it out refinance it when purchasing the next home, as opposed to selling it to buy their next home. This will cause supply degree increase even further making the prices of homes go up even more. This could also potentially open the door for money laundering, where people will be more motivated to take cash from their homes to high profits to avoid the sales tax.

But the biggest question we have to ask ourselves is why have the prices gone up so much? And the simplest answer is supply and demand, do not have the supply needed for our demand. So with that in mind, the biggest policy to me is their plan to build, preserve or repair 1.4 million homes in the next four years. They plan to do this by putting 4 billion in a housing accelerator fund to support municipality's housing efforts. Increasing the fund to the National Housing co Investment Fund is 2.7 billion over four years, and introducing a multi-generational home renovation tax credit for families adding secondary units for relatives in order to make it easier for Canadians to save and buy their first home.

The Liberals also plan to give $1 billion dollars in rent to own projects double the homebuyer tax credit claim to 10,000, introduce a first home savings account where Canadians under 40 can save up to $40,000 on the first home purchase, where deposits and withdrawals are tax-free, and increase the value from maximum insured mortgages from $1 million to $1.25 million, you might be able to guess what you're making it easier to buy a home or increasing the value that you're able to purchase that you're going to see demand increase which ultimately we'll see prices rise.

Now a few of the policies that are actually meant to suppress the home and rental prices include creating an anti-flipping tax for the property sold within 12 months of being purchased having landlords report rent received before and after renovations and applying a surtax to excessive rents in order to stop renovations. Rent eviction is a term used when landlords will kick out tenants in order to renovate the property and receive a higher rent. They also plan to introduce a 1% tax on property owned by nonresident, non-Canadian, or vacant properties.

Now on to the one I get the most questions about being a realtor in this crazy real estate market. And that is the stopping of the blind bidding, they plan to introduce a homebuyer, Bill of Rights, where they plan to ban blind bidding, create a legal right to a home inspection and ban foreign buyers for the next two years. So I want to take a minute to talk about this topic alone because I know a lot of buyers are fed up with blind bidding. And they see this as a positive change. But I have a lot of issues with it.

So the first and major issue with this is that millions of homeowners in Canada have their whole retirement savings of their home. And the government wants to make it not only illegal but to criminalize the way that they choose to sell their home. So when talking about blind bidding, most people are thinking about the purchase price of the home. They're forgetting that there's a lot of other things that are confidential and offer. We have to talk about price, about deposit amount, about the closing date, about any conditions, that the client wants to put into their offer. But also remember that the average price of a home in Canada is around $716,000. Well, the average price of a home in Australia is A$955,000. So thinking that banning blind bidding is going to cause the prices to stop going up might be the wrong way of looking at it. Pinning a homeowner against a homebuyer is not going to solve anything and trying to dictate how a homeowner can sell their home isn't the answer either.

So for those of you who are wondering how do these policies actually affect Canadian home prices? I would say that when we're in an election, a lot of promises sound great and are made, we have to really focus on what is actually causing the home prices to go up in Canada. And that is that we do not have enough homes until we can figure out an answer that actually solves this problem, we're going to see things continue on the same.