Doug Ford made several promises on housing. Critics say he ‘ripped up’ rules with few results

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It was a lofty promise: Speaking to one of his “Ford Fest” barbecues in Kitchener, Ont., in September, 2023, Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford said his government would offer young people across the province starter homes for $500,000 or less.

“We’re going to offer a 1,600-square-foot home, with a basement that’s finished that you can rent out or have family there. You’re going to have a backyard with a fence. You’re going to have a paved driveway,” Mr. Ford said.

More details about the idea, which was supposed to involve modular homes on government land, did not materialize. And this pledge of houses for less than half the current average price in the Greater Toronto Area – now just over $1-million – has gone virtually unmentioned as Mr. Ford leads his party toward Ontario’s Feb. 27 election.

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Some of his critics say both that flashy promise and his aborted move to allow developers to build housing on parts of the protected Greenbelt – which is still under investigation by the RCMP – are emblematic of his failures on the housing file. A hard-to-follow flurry of radical policy rewrites, they say, has produced but few results – and little chance Ontario can hit its stated goal of getting 1.5 million new homes built by 2031.

His government scrapped rules on curbing urban sprawl on farmland, slashed the power of local conservation authorities, gave big municipalities aggressive housing-start targets, put up $3-billion for sewer and water infrastructure and attempted to reduce the development charges local governments levy on new housing.

The housing crisis, despite being a top-of-mind issue for years, hasn’t been prominent in Ontario’s snap election, as Mr. Ford focuses on U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats. However, both Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie and NDP Leader Marit Stiles have released housing plans: Ms. Crombie says she would slash municipal fees for homebuilders; Ms. Stiles has pledged a new public agency to build affordable rentals.

Despite Mr. Ford’s efforts, over the course his nearly seven years in office, house prices and rents are higher than when he took power, and the number of homeless people has increased. Plus, Ontario is building fewer homes per capita worse than some other provinces, including B.C.

The PC Leader defended his record at Friday’s leaders’ debate in North Bay, and went after Ms. Crombie, saying that when she was mayor of Mississauga, her city had shrunk in population and failed to build enough housing.

“We’ve done more for housing than any government. We’ve cut the red tape, we’ve cut regulations,” Mr. Ford said.

In 2024, according to figures from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., Ontario registered 74,326 housing starts – almost 5,000 fewer than in 2017, the last full year of the previous Liberal government. That’s about half the 150,000 starts a year Ontario needs to hit its target.

Former Region of Waterloo director of community planning Kevin Eby says the recent federal immigration restrictions may further cool both the market and Ontario’s frenzy for housing policy changes. But he said local planning departments need a breather after the “chaos” of the PC government’s many revisions.

“It’s crazy,” said Mr. Eby, who resigned from the government’s Greenbelt Council in 2020 over its reduction of conservation authority powers. “It’s sucking up an enormous amount of resources, and accomplishing very little.”

The development industry has welcomed the disruption.

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David Wilkes, president and chief executive officer of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) – which represents the Greater Toronto’s Area developers – praised the government for its infrastructure spending and for prodding municipalities to speed up approvals.

And while the government backed off a key policy to slow the growth of the skyrocketing development charges municipalities levy on new housing, Mr. Wilkes said it deserves credit for making progress on the issue in the face of “significant pushback.”

“The direction and the leadership shown by the provincial government was what we think we need in order to build more homes,” Mr. Wilkes said, noting that the GTA’s Vaughan and Burlington had recently cut development charges on their own.

Housing starts in Ontario have declined over the past three years, a slump blamed on the spike interest rates that is now receding, which made it more expensive for builders – and buyers – to borrow money.

This dip obscures a rise in starts that peaked in 2021, when Ontario saw construction on 99,566 new homes begin, according to Statistics Canada figures – a level not seen since the late 1980s.

But this looks less impressive when Ontario’s much larger current population is taken into account. A study commissioned by BILD last year said Ontario was building fewer homes for each new resident than at any time since 1972, when record keeping began.

Ontario also performed worse than other provinces when accounting for population differences. B.C., which has liberalized zoning rules, had 8.07 housing starts per 1,000 residents last year compared to Ontario’s 4.63. (The Globe and Mail calculated the figures based on CMHC’s annual housing starts)

Ontario’s PC government insists it is still on track to hit its 1.5 million new-homes goal by 2031. But it has moved the goalposts, counting new long-term care beds in its own custom housing-start numbers. It said in November that it had achieved 99 per cent of its 2023-24 target of 110,000 housing starts.

The government’s plan involves ramping up starts each year from there, with this year’s target set at 125,000 new homes, in order to hit its goal. But Ontario’s own projections in its most recent fiscal update show it missing next year’s target and falling well short of the pace needed to achieve its 10-year goal.

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Since Mr. Ford took office in 2018, rents across the province are up about 40 per cent, now averaging $1,540 for a one-bedroom unit, according to CMHC.

And Ontario’s typical home price, after soaring past $1-million during the pandemic and cooling off since, is still up by more than 40 per cent over Mr. Ford’s time in office, a much steeper rise than in either Alberta or B.C. The Canadian Real Estate Association’s benchmark home price index for Ontario is now at about $850,000.

Since 2019, the PC government has unveiled a series of housing bills it said would cut the red-tape bogging down new construction. But many of the moves were aimed at upending planning and environmental rules meant to curb suburban sprawl and preserve farmland.

The PCs ripped up the province’s Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which directed more growth into built-up areas and required new communities built on farmland to be more dense, replacing it with much looser guidelines.

In September, 2023, after scathing reports from the Auditor-General and Integrity Commissioner, Mr. Ford walked back his incursion to allow housing on 3,000 hectares of the protected Greenbelt – land he had repeatedly promised never to touch.

His government has also made other moves to designate thousands more hectares of farmland outside the Greenbelt for housing, and remove environmental regulations. Environmentalists and some planning experts say the additional land is unnecessary and that a higher proportion of growth should instead be directed to built-up areas.

Allowing so much new farmland to be earmarked for housing has only enriched land speculators while producing few new homes, says Victor Doyle, the former senior government planner who oversaw the creation of the Growth Plan and the Greenbelt.

“They ripped up everything, basically, and gave developers all this additional land,” Mr. Doyle said. “And guess what? There’s virtually no housing being built out there in suburbia and exurbia, because people can’t afford it.”

As it tore up density rules for the outskirts, the PC government was also trying to increase density development on top of transit stations in Toronto and its suburbs. It overruled local municipalities and lifted limits on building heights to create what it calls “transit-oriented communities.”

Both opposition parties have tried to make housing a focus for the campaign. The NDP and the Liberals both say they would enact policies meant to allow fourplexes in cities across the province, a recommendation from the government’s own housing task force that Mr. Ford has disavowed.

The NDP’s Ms. Stiles says a public building agency could create or acquire 300,000 units of permanent affordable rental housing, but she has not provided a cost estimate. She has also pledged strict rent controls.

The Liberals’ Ms. Crombie says her housing plan would cost $3.6-billion. It includes cutting the provincial land-transfer tax for first-time buyers and seniors and eliminating development charges on many housing units under 3,000 square feet – while funding more municipal infrastructure directly.

Ms. Crombie has also pledged “phased-in” rent control, which would still allow landlords to raise rents between tenants.