Construction in Chilliwack, B.C., on April 15.ALANA PATERSON/The New York Times News Service
It was going to be all about housing. A few months ago, most political observers agreed that a looming federal election would focus on the high rents and high home prices that have many Canadians concerned for their future or the first of next month.
In the end, Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff threats dominated the campaign. The housing crisis has not gone away, however, and Canada’s three major political parties agree on one major thing: The country needs to build millions more homes. But the parties are split on how to do this.
Mark Carney’s Liberals and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP both promise a new federal home-building agency. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives argue that private industry alone, encouraged by tax cuts to stimulate buyers’ spending, will do the job.
Experts say each of these offerings would be difficult to implement, and in each case the promised price tag would be inadequate to address the scale of the problem.
Alex Hemingway, senior economist and public finance policy analyst with BC Society for Policy Solutions, notes that the three parties all recognize that Canada does not have enough homes and is not building enough of them.
“There is a growing consensus on needing to deal with the housing supply shortage,” he says. This represents a “necessary shift,” he says, from five years ago when that was still being debated. However, “none of the platforms match the scale of the housing crisis we have.”
Right now, there are about 250,000 housing starts each year in Canada. The Liberals’ housing plan would double that number, over a 10-year period, to 500,000 homes a year. The Conservatives plan to “build” 2.3 million homes over the next five years, almost entirely through the private sector. The NDP, for their part, promise three million homes by 2030.
How will they get there? Mr. Carney’s Liberals promise a new government agency, Build Canada Homes, to build “affordable housing,” provide financing to not-for-profit home builders, and support new building technologies. Their plan is “by far the most detailed,” says Carolyn Whitzman, adjunct professor and senior housing researcher at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. “ … But it’s not clear to what extent it is a change from the Liberal policies of the past 10 years.”
The NDP’s main promise is to deliver more than 100,000 publicly funded new homes, with rent control in place, by 2035. They also pledge to provide $16-billion annually to cities to fund housing-related infrastructure; require other governments to enforce rent control for tenants; provide a targeted benefit to help 50,000 people in critical housing need; and attack what they call “predatory financial landlords.”
The Conservatives’ headline promise is to cut the GST on new home purchases under $1.3-million. Their pledge to “build” huge numbers of homes relies almost entirely on private industry. A Conservative government would sell federally owned land to builders; the party claims this would generate 288,000 new homes built within five years. To get the remaining one million homes built, a Poilievre government would push cities to change their planning regulations and hold back federal funding if they don’t comply.
Along with these punitive measures, they promise a funding boost to cities that increase housing approvals by 15 per cent; conversely, they would reduce infrastructure funding proportionally for those that miss their targets.
Would these measures work? Mr. Hemingway notes that cutting infrastructure grants by a few percentage points is not a strong tool. “That number would not actually mean much to cities,” he says, “and there is always strong political pressure not to change zoning rules.”
Indeed, he says, large-scale housing construction will require “very large, very visible change to our cities, particularly Vancouver and Toronto.”
He added: “If you’re building millions of new homes by 2030, it cannot be the case that apartment buildings are banned” – by planning regulations – “on 80 per cent of the land in big cities.” None of the major party platforms address that issue in a significant way, “and that is a major disconnect,” he said.
Dr. Whitzman takes exception to the Conservatives’ plan to sell public land. “They want to sell the seed corn,” she says. “In countries where government helps deliver affordability,” including Germany, “public ownership of land is absolutely crucial.”
The “most interesting” proposals, Mr. Hemingway says, come from the Liberals. They promise to “catalyze the housing industry” by offering funding to builders of prefabricated homes – in other words, homes whose components are partially assembled in a factory and then transported to a building site. They argue this can cut costs by up to 20 per cent while reducing build times and carbon emissions.
Mr. Hemingway argues that this makes sense “in what is likely to be a down economic cycle of the next few years. It’s a positive to have a federal government that would be willing to backstop home demand and get a prefabricated home industry off the ground.”
Such technology already exists in various forms. With “modular” building, a room-sized element is built in a factory and then trucked to site and assembled. Several Canadian jurisdictions have employed this, including Toronto with its modular supportive-housing program.
Recently, specialist companies have begun using panelized systems to deliver housing in a more precise manner. These include Assembly, based in Toronto, and Intelligent City, based in Vancouver. The latter uses automation and “mass timber,” or engineered wood products, to create components such as floor and wall panels with high levels of precision. The company is now working on a nine-storey, 58-unit apartment building in Toronto. Mr. Carney visited Intelligent City for a campaign event, praising the company as “the future of housing construction in this country.”
Intelligent City president OD Krieg argues that such technology is ideal for buildings between eight and 15 storeys in big cities, “bringing density into neighbourhoods where amenities and transit already exist.” He says building codes and municipal planning rules should be changed to allow buildings that have simple, rectangular slabs. “Our approach to built form and building code needs to change,” he said; with that, large-scale construction is possible.
Mike Moffatt, an economist and director of the Missing Middle Institute at the University of Ottawa, cautions that dreams of massive increases in housing construction are impractical given the country’s labour and capital reserves. To achieve the promised increases “would cost probably 10 times as much as what is on offer” in these platforms, he says.
In any case, Dr. Whitzman says, there is no magic solution in these platforms or anywhere else. “The solution will have to be pressing a lot of levers at once, and it’s not going to happen overnight.”