{"id":203832,"date":"2025-10-05T20:01:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T20:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/203832\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T20:01:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T20:01:11","slug":"what-will-really-help-with-canadas-housing-crisis-and-what-wont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/203832\/","title":{"rendered":"What will really help with Canada\u2019s housing crisis, and what won\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

An employee works on a modular home component at NRB Modular Solutions in Calgary, April, 2024. Canadian Home Builders\u2019 Association CEO Kevin Lee says there’s ‘no silver bullet’ to fix the housing crisis.Jeff McIntosh\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

But everyone knows that\u2019s not really what housing means. Home is safety and privacy; it\u2019s comfort and warmth; it\u2019s aspiration and class. It\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

Our homes tell us, individually and all together, whether we\u2019re doing okay. <\/p>\n

And so, this fall we\u2019ve seen both Prime Minister Mark Carney<\/a> and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre<\/a> diagnosing what\u2019s made housing<\/a> an unreachable dream for too many people in this country and outlining how they\u2019ll supposedly fix that.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

First: \u201cIt\u2019s just too hard to build,\u201d he said. \u201cLoans are expensive. Developers face years-long delays in permitting and land development. Charges and taxes can make up half the project cost.\u201d <\/p>\n

So, Mr. Carney announced that his new housing agency will offer a bucket of financing tools and streamlined approvals. Obviously, the word \u201ccatalyze\u201d was used here, so go ahead and stamp your free square on the Mark Carney bingo card.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/real-estate\/article-prefabricated-modular-housing-policy-build-canada-homes\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The third problem, Mr. Carney said, is Canada exporting raw materials then \u201cpaying other countries to convert what we already have into what we really need,\u201d when we should make it all at home and buy from ourselves.<\/p>\n

Mr. Poilievre had a big housing announcement this fall, too, and in his telling, the crisis has basically one underlying cause. I\u2019ll give you three guesses what it is, and the first two don\u2019t count.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been talking for years about the Liberal housing crisis,\u201d said Mr. Poilievre.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve never seen such \u201ccarnage.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cMr. 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,\u201d Mr. Poilievre said. \u201cHow can all those things be true? How is it that it\u2019s too high to buy, but too low to build?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Decibel podcast: Mark Carney\u2019s plan for affordable housing<\/a><\/p>\n

That does seem odd. \u201cGovernment\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Mr. Poilievre\u2019s 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; \u201cincentivize\u201d municipalities to build faster and cheaper; and get immigration under control so Canada isn\u2019t adding people faster than it can add homes. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou know the great thing about homebuilding, it\u2019s Trump-proof,\u201d Mr. Poilievre said. \u201cYou can\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

This last argument is so economically illiterate that you sort of want to give him a hug. <\/p>\n

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\u2019 Association (CHBA), what are the biggest obstacles to getting houses built faster in this country, and which solutions would move the needle.<\/p>\n

First, he said, housing starts<\/a> follow the economic roller coaster, and that\u2019s normally very regional. But now, thanks to the apricot-hued tariff<\/a> fetishist in the White House (my words, not Mr. Lee\u2019s), people across the country are spooked and hunkering down, rather than buying and building. <\/p>\n

\u201cCertainly in 2025, the biggest reason for the contraction is the trade war and that consumer-confidence piece,\u201d Mr. Lee said, adding, \u201c2025 should have been a recovery year for our residential construction industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lot of building supplies go back and forth across the border because that\u2019s 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\u2019s there in a couple of hours. <\/p>\n

\u201cBecause we had free trade with the United States for so long, everybody just gets their materials from wherever it makes the most sense,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Given that the whole point of tariffs is to protect domestic industry, Mr. Lee said even products that don\u2019t cross the border have gotten more expensive because of reduced competition. Nothing is Trump-proof.<\/p>\n

But those are just the new problems that stomped on top of the existing ones.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we were in a better market \u2013 interest rates are settling out now, so that\u2019s good, and if we didn\u2019t have the tariffs \u2013 then the impact that municipalities have through their charges and through their process is huge,\u201d Mr. Lee said. \u201cIt would be the number one issue that we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

His explanation is this: over time, cities \u2013 especially larger ones \u2013 have ended up on the hook for more and more infrastructure and amenities, and they don\u2019t 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 \u2013 DCs in building-industry lingo \u2013 to cover costs, Mr. Lee said.<\/p>\n

DCs are an invisible tax, because they hide inside \u201cWow, the cost of housing is through the roof!\u201d he said, or people think it\u2019s only fair that the arrivistes in that new suburb over there should pay to bring city services to their new builds. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> found; in Markham, it\u2019s $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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Then over the summer, the federal government announced it would axe the GST on new homes for first-time buyers. But because it hasn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

Still, before the trade war <\/a>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 \u201cscreaming about\u201d for a decade feels like a win. <\/p>\n

But the CHBA\u2019s wish list \u2013 the perspective of just one set of stakeholders \u2013 is much longer than I have space to unpack here, because we didn\u2019t get to this point through a few easy plot twists. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no silver bullet,\u201d Mr. Lee said. \u201cIf we could do one thing, we\u2019d still have all the other problems, because one thing isn\u2019t going to fix this.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, nothing glib or simple offered from behind a shiny press-conference lectern is going to make this better. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: An employee works on a modular home component at NRB Modular Solutions in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[8854,192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-203832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-dei","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}