How to address Canada's housing crisis

Drive down the costs of home building, double down on our commitment to community housing, end homelessness, and treat housing as a home first and an investment second.

I’ve been busy making transit and housing related announcements across Ontario these last few weeks, and we’re set to travel across the country going forward. As a result, I’m a little behind on writing and sharing ideas.

Of course, the US-Canada relationship and the real threat of tariffs have been, and will continue to be, the government’s primary focus. For example, at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Big City Mayors caucus this past week, we spoke about how to best prepare for the worst on tariffs, including supply chain disruptions and pricing uncertainty, and potential stimulus for capital projects.

I also shared my core priorities on the housing file with the big city mayors, which I laid out in this explainer video in greater detail.

We’ll be doing deeper dives on these specific priorities in the coming weeks:

• Driving down the costs of home building: How can we best reduce taxes (including development charges), cut red tape and end exclusionary zoning, and drive innovation and economies of scale in home building?

• Re-investing in social and community housing: How can we double the amount of nonmarket housing over the next decade? We used to build much more community housing in this country and other countries build much more today.

• Ending homelessness: I did this deeper dive on a Housing First approach, the increased commitment from the feds to address homelessness through rapid housing and operational supports, and the growing challenges despite that substantial federal contribution.

• Treating housing as a home first and investment second: We should incentivize new investment in building homes across the housing continuum. But in a competition for existing homes, investment dollars shouldn’t displace affordability. We should look at all available rules to prioritize people who are buying houses as a place to call home.

• Canada-US relations and home construction: I didn’t touch on this in the above video, but about a month ago I did this explainer on tariffs, the trade deficit, border concerns, and why the Canada-US relationship should be built upon, not undermined. I’ll be doing an update given where we seem to be headed, potential impacts to my portfolio, and why we should continue to choose Canada.

If you’ve got other questions, we’ll work to answer those too by way of short video explainers or posts here. Just send us an email or post in the comments.

Thanks for following otherwise. And let’s stay strong, free, and united in the face of this serious threat to our economic and national interests from our long-standing ally.