New Brunswick not properly maintaining public housing stock, says auditor

FREDERICTON — New Brunswick’s auditor general has found “significant deficiencies” in the operations of the province’s public housing agency, saying the stock of subsidized homes managed by the Crown corporation is not well maintained.

Paul Martin’s office investigated 4,630 public housing units between April 1, 2023, and Dec. 31, 2024, and found that 85 per cent of homes did not meet inspection requirements. Work orders for such things as repairs to smoke alarms, appliances, and flooring were not completed on a timely basis, and the agency did not create a budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, leaving officials unable to properly plan operations, his report said.

“There’s a real deficiency that needs to be addressed,” Martin told reporters Tuesday after releasing his report on the New Brunswick Housing Corp.

The auditor general said he chose to look at public housing because of the increased demand for safe, affordable homes in the province.

What surprised him most, he told reporters, was that during the period of his investigation a fire destroyed a 10-unit housing complex in Edmundston, located by the border with Maine.

And while the fire marshal’s office said the cause of the fire was undetermined, “hypotheses considered were noted as being electrical in nature,” the report said. But despite the fire, the housing agency continued to omit annual electrical inspections, required by the corporation’s policies, in Edmundston and in three other regions.

The Crown corporation is supposed to inspect the overall condition of public housing units every year, and when a unit is vacated. But in numerous regions, “no inspections are being done,” Martin said.

It took the housing agency an average of 140 days to prepare a unit for a new tenant, instead of the one-month limit required by the Crown corporation’s policy, leaving a wait-list of 13,129 people hoping to get one of the houses, the report said.

Martin’s report found that 71 per cent of repairs that should have been completed within 24 hours of being reported were not done on time. It also noted that 36 per cent of all repair work wasn’t completed within the targeted time period.

Meanwhile, the New Brunswick Housing Corp. did not create a budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, an omission the report said “increases the risk of the organization being significantly over or under budget.”

During the audit period, the report said there were 3,045 requests related to pest issues such as bed bugs, mice, rats and roaches, and 53 per cent of the complaints were not resolved within the agency’s targets. About 41 per cent of the pest complaints came from the Saint John region.

“The time to address these issues ranged from less than a day to 1,068 days,” it said.

David Hickey, minister responsible for the New Brunswick Housing Corp., said the government wants to bring about “fundamental change” and ensure public housing is maintained better.

“Public housing has been chronically underfunded in this province over many decades since it was built,” he said. “We’ve not built public housing in this province for 30-plus years, and we’ve done a really poor job of maintaining it during those years.”

The province let “degradation” of public housing happen over time, creating the current situation, which he called “entirely unacceptable.”

Hickey said the message from the auditor general’s report was clear: there is a need for safe, secure and affordable housing.

“We will do better,” he said. “We need to do better because it’s treated for so many getting into public housing is the opportunity that folks need … that safety and security of having a reliable, affordable place to call home, so that they can have that base, they can have that foundation in their lives.”

Opposition Leader Glen Savoie said the problems outlined in Martin’s report were systemic.

“Governments come and governments go,” said the Progressive Conservative. “But the departments are there at all times. So this is something that is happening within the department over a period of years.”

Green Party Leader David Coon said the gap between what is needed what is being done to maintain public housing “is the size of the Grand Canyon. And that has huge implications for people’s safety, for their security and their health.”

“It’s really quite a scandal. We’ve got to think about it from the perspective of the tenants. These are their homes, the government is their landlord, and it’s been behaving as a slumlord, as far as I can see.”

But the report offers no insight into why public housing seems broken, Coon said.

“Is that a cultural problem in the organization responsible for maintenance? Is it a structural problem? …. We don’t know that.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 10, 2025.

Hina Alam, The Canadian Press