An employee works on a modular home component at NRB Modular Solutions in Calgary, April, 2024. Canadian Home Builders’ Association CEO Kevin Lee says there’s ‘no silver bullet’ to fix the housing crisis.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
How much it will cost your family to have a place to live, and what that burden does to the rest of your life and finances is, obviously, a dollars-and-cents thing.
But everyone knows that’s not really what housing means. Home is safety and privacy; it’s comfort and warmth; it’s aspiration and class. It’s also a powerful proxy for how a country at large is doing: Do its citizens have decent places to live that they can afford? And where is that headed for the next generation?
Our homes tell us, individually and all together, whether we’re doing okay.
And so, this fall we’ve seen both Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre diagnosing what’s made housing an unreachable dream for too many people in this country and outlining how they’ll supposedly fix that.
Mr. Carney loves himself a three-point list so much that it seems possible he sleeps with a stuffed one snuggled in his arms. When he unveiled Build Canada Homes last month, he walked through his version of the causes of this crisis accordingly.
First: “It’s just too hard to build,” he said. “Loans are expensive. Developers face years-long delays in permitting and land development. Charges and taxes can make up half the project cost.”
So, Mr. Carney announced that his new housing agency will offer a bucket of financing tools and streamlined approvals. Obviously, the word “catalyze” was used here, so go ahead and stamp your free square on the Mark Carney bingo card.
The second issue is that conventional construction is too slow to goose the supply Canada needs, the Prime Minister said. Here, he brandished factory-built and modular housing as a solution, permitting homes to be built in factories like giant Lego kits and assembled on site in a jiffy.
The third problem, Mr. Carney said, is Canada exporting raw materials then “paying other countries to convert what we already have into what we really need,” when we should make it all at home and buy from ourselves.
Mr. Poilievre had a big housing announcement this fall, too, and in his telling, the crisis has basically one underlying cause. I’ll give you three guesses what it is, and the first two don’t count.
“We’ve been talking for years about the Liberal housing crisis,” said Mr. Poilievre.
“They doubled the cost, they priced an entire generation out of homes. They did this through out-of-control money printing and immigration, which inflated demand, and funding local bureaucracies and high taxes that block construction and supply.”
And now, the next crisis has arrived, he said, with mass construction layoffs across the country as housing starts dry up. The Tory leader said people in the business 50 years have told him that they’ve never seen such “carnage.”
“Mr. Carney has accomplished the impossible. It is a triple crisis, with prices too high for buyers to buy, too low for sellers to sell, and inadequate for builders to build,” Mr. Poilievre said. “How can all those things be true? How is it that it’s too high to buy, but too low to build?”
The Decibel podcast: Mark Carney’s plan for affordable housing
That does seem odd. “Government” is how those things can be bad in the opposite direction at the same time, he said, because of how bureaucratic shakedowns like taxes, charges and delays swell the cost of a house.
Mr. Poilievre’s four-point plan is to eliminate the federal sales tax on all house purchases up to $1.3-million; remove capital-gains taxes on money reinvested in building; “incentivize” municipalities to build faster and cheaper; and get immigration under control so Canada isn’t adding people faster than it can add homes.
“You know the great thing about homebuilding, it’s Trump-proof,” Mr. Poilievre said. “You can’t claim that Donald Trump is to blame for housing that happens here, because he cannot put tariffs on housing that we keep in our own country. It is, by definition, a homegrown industry.”
This last argument is so economically illiterate that you sort of want to give him a hug.
In the face of tidy solutions from one politician and cynical blame games from another, I decided to ask Kevin Lee, CEO of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA), what are the biggest obstacles to getting houses built faster in this country, and which solutions would move the needle.
First, he said, housing starts follow the economic roller coaster, and that’s normally very regional. But now, thanks to the apricot-hued tariff fetishist in the White House (my words, not Mr. Lee’s), people across the country are spooked and hunkering down, rather than buying and building.
“Certainly in 2025, the biggest reason for the contraction is the trade war and that consumer-confidence piece,” Mr. Lee said, adding, “2025 should have been a recovery year for our residential construction industry.”
A lot of building supplies go back and forth across the border because that’s just what worked, Mr. Lee said. Drywall, for instance, is heavy to transport and factories are unevenly distributed, so the Western provinces tend to get their drywall from the U.S. because manufacturers can throw it on a train and it’s there in a couple of hours.
“Because we had free trade with the United States for so long, everybody just gets their materials from wherever it makes the most sense,” he said.
Given that the whole point of tariffs is to protect domestic industry, Mr. Lee said even products that don’t cross the border have gotten more expensive because of reduced competition. Nothing is Trump-proof.
But those are just the new problems that stomped on top of the existing ones.
“If we were in a better market – interest rates are settling out now, so that’s good, and if we didn’t have the tariffs – then the impact that municipalities have through their charges and through their process is huge,” Mr. Lee said. “It would be the number one issue that we have.”
His explanation is this: over time, cities – especially larger ones – have ended up on the hook for more and more infrastructure and amenities, and they don’t have many ways to raise revenue. No municipal politician in their right mind is going to run on hiking property taxes, so cities have come to rely on jacking up development charges – DCs in building-industry lingo – to cover costs, Mr. Lee said.
DCs are an invisible tax, because they hide inside “Wow, the cost of housing is through the roof!” he said, or people think it’s only fair that the arrivistes in that new suburb over there should pay to bring city services to their new builds.
The net result is that, according to Mr. Lee, DCs have gone up 700 per cent over the past 25 years. In Toronto, they amount to $138,000 of the cost of the average home, a CHBA report found; in Markham, it’s $160,013 and in Vancouver, $118,935. And because housing is all about comparison shopping, the ballooning cost of new builds pushes up the whole market.
To aid affordability, the CHBA was pleased when mortgage-insurance rules were changed in 2024 to allow 30-year amortization on new builds, but the positive effects were squashed by tariff damage.
Then over the summer, the federal government announced it would axe the GST on new homes for first-time buyers. But because it hasn’t passed the legislation yet, Mr. Lee said what had been very welcome news for his industry has caused buyers to hold off until they see if the policy becomes reality.
Still, before the trade war started, he said Canada was headed in the right direction on housing; just the fact that the politicians are now competing to address the shortage that his organization has been “screaming about” for a decade feels like a win.
But the CHBA’s wish list – the perspective of just one set of stakeholders – is much longer than I have space to unpack here, because we didn’t get to this point through a few easy plot twists.
“There’s no silver bullet,” Mr. Lee said. “If we could do one thing, we’d still have all the other problems, because one thing isn’t going to fix this.”
In other words, nothing glib or simple offered from behind a shiny press-conference lectern is going to make this better.
What will give more Canadians a chance at a decent, affordable home is unglamorous, thoughtful, incremental work applied by all levels of government to a hundred little broken bits hiding in the shadows.