That’s wild, the article just handwaves away the what, 35 billion the Liberals have pledged at new homes in a radically new way because previously a few billion, in one particular mechanism, raised home starts by 2 percent within a year or so?
That’s uhhhh, interesting.
The price of homes is mostly land value due to sprawled zoning and tax. They also are still doing 450k a year immigration, 200k over 2015.
The Canadian Housing crisis has two sources.
1. Extreme population growth
In 2024, the Canadian population increased by 3%.
This population growth rate means the population of Canada is growing 2 to 3 times faster than the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Colombia, Turkey, Vietnam, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Mexico or Brazil. In fact, Canada is now growing faster than many countries in Africa.
2. Terrible city zoning rules.
Several Canadian cities have rules banning multi-storey housing from being built. Multi-storey housing is significantly more affordable than individual homes. But cities ban it. They simply don’t want it. When they do accept multi-storey housing, most Canadian cities often require developers to build parking spots. “You want to build a condo tower without parking spots ? Sorry, we can not accept that”. By forcing developers to build parking spots for each condo unit, they artificially drive up the cost of each unit. They basically force condo buyers to subsidize car ownership. It’s insane.
The Federal Government needs to reduce the immigration rate. Look, Justin Trudeau did a lot of good things, but his immigration policy was one of his biggest failures. The current immigration rate is simply unsustainable. Canada needs to aim for 1.5% population growth instead of 3%.
But cities shouldn’t be left of the hook. They are responsible for half the problem.
I mean, just look at the zoning fight happening at the Ottawa City Council :
I agree with most of this but as someone who has to deal with streets filled with cars from small buildings with no dedicated parking, the parking spots makes absolute sense. You cannot just stick a dozen units on a single property and just expect people to find places to park. Parking must be provided.
removed by mod
Housing will never be truly fixed by either party because that would mean less profits for the wealthy corporate elites.
can we not speak like we have a two party system
Well, I’m not sure who has the worst plan for housing between PP which wants to cut sales taxes [1] and Blanchet which doesn’t seem to understand you don’t get more supply by simply letting people pay more [2].
Sorry, but I mostly remember those infuriating quotes from the french debate. They appeared a bit more careful the next day.
- [1] https://www.debates-debats.ca/fr/debats2025/transcription-fra.pdf 18:31:49:25
- [2] https://www.debates-debats.ca/fr/debats2025/transcription-fra.pdf 18:39:16:01
Really none of them have good plans.
Don’t let fucking corpos buy up houses. Fucking duh. Secondly set a cap rate on house value dependent on labor and materials that were used to build it. Thirdly don’t let individuals own more than so many houses without paying exorbitant taxes on extra houses. There’s always obvious shit like this that these plans never address because politicians are paid off specifically to ignore this so corpos can keep lining their pockets.
