The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Canadian Housing Policy

MBP Intelligence examines the state of the Canadian housing policy landscape, and asks what’s working and what’s missing right now. 

Today, MBP Intelligence examines the contemporary housing policy landscape in Canada. All our contributors agree and acknowledge the scale and seriousness of our housing crisis, but offer different perspectives on what the problem is and how to fix it. 

Tyler Meredith suggests that critics misunderstand what the federal government is currently doing on housing and that the government is taking the time needed to calibrate its housing policy correctly, but that there are still some major pieces missing from the government’s approach. 

Ken Boessenkool writes that there is no “national” housing crisis. Instead, it’s a series of regional crises, with the real challenges in Vancouver and Toronto. If we are going to address housing, we should therefore divide the problem into four buckets: Vancouver, Toronto, Canada’s other large cities, and the rest. And in Vancouver and Toronto, that means having all levels of government working together. 

Shannon Phillips makes the case that housing impacts different demographics very differently, and there are still big political opportunities for parties that offer serious policy to address this. The solutions will require a willingness to fight different stakeholders and interests standing in the way, but for the voters who care about housing this is exactly the approach they want. 

Ben Woodfinden focuses on the cost of homebuilding, and municipal development charges more specifically. In order to fix this, we need to consider why these charges have gotten so high, and instead of just using transfers from other levels of government to reduce charges, we need to think creatively about giving municipalities other revenue raising tools to pay for infrastructure building and maintenance. 

• MEREDITH: Getting everything right will take time, but there are still things missing from the government’s approach to housing 
• BOESSENKOOL: We don’t have a single housing crisis, we have a series of regional and local crises that need to be fixed 
• PHILLIPS: Housing and Affordability in Canada - Who cares and how to make better policy more political 
• WOODFINDEN: We need to get creative to fix housing, which means thinking about problems and solutions differently