Poilievre is looking to keep his advantage and control of the housing narrative by updating his diagnosis of the problem to reflect the “next Liberal housing crisis.” 

Key Points:

  • Housing is a key concern for Poilievre’s new coalition. His path to the PMO involves keeping this coalition together, and continuing to dominate the debate on housing.
  • The condo crash in Toronto and broader housing start slowdown will kill investment, jobs and reduce home building, creating new housing "losers," including distressed investors and unemployed construction workers.
  • Poilievre’s solutions have largely stayed the same, focused on “getting government out of the way,” but in response to a newly updated diagnosis of the problem.

This time last year, you were probably thinking about the possibility of Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre. One of the big reasons for this was Poilievre’s relentless focus on Canada’s housing crisis. 

A lot can change in a year, but Poilievre’s focus on housing still helped him build a new coalition of voters that got him the highest share of the vote of any Conservative leader since Brian Mulroney. The Conservatives did extremely well with millennials, for whom housing costs are a top concern. Poilievre’s path to the Prime Minister’s Office requires him holding this new coalition together, which will mean continuing to drive the narrative on issues like housing.

But pay close attention to what the Conservatives are saying about housing now, and you’ll notice some important messaging shifts from pre-election. In short, while the solutions Conservatives are offering aren’t dramatically different, the diagnosis of the problem is.

“The Next Liberal Housing Crisis”  

Last month, Poilievre did a messaging event with the title “The NEXT Liberal Housing Crisis.” What is this crisis? It’s “a construction crash that is costing jobs and strangling supply.” And what does this mean? In Poilievre’s own words, “For years, buyers could not afford to buy. That’s nothing new. What has changed is that now builders can’t afford to build and sellers can’t sell…Projects are stalled, construction companies are laying off workers and young families are still frozen out.” 

The facts back this up. Housing starts have collapsed in the City of Toronto (down 65%) and the GTA (down 45%). The prices and sales of condos in Toronto have crashed, builders have cancelled some planned projects, and investment is drying up. According to RBC, “the Greater Toronto Area’s new condominium development sector has entered a deep freeze with pre-construction sales plummeting to levels not seen since the global financial crisis.” The Southern Ontario housing market is also showing worrying signs, where starts are down 40% across 34 municipalities. 

Housing starts are already projected to decline between now and 2027, and this slump will chase away even more investment. Fewer housing starts also means fewer construction jobs, and the slowdown may kill as many as 100,000 jobs. 

This is a new period of the housing crisis, and it’s going to change housing politics for the next few years.

The Expanding “Loser” Coalition 

The way to understand housing politics is to think about it in zero-sum terms of winners and losers. We may want to pretend that there are lots of positive-sum outcomes on housing, but the reality is that any shift in the housing market, and the politics that our housing crisis generates, creates winners and losers. 

In the years in which prices were going up, the winners were existing asset owners and investors capitalizing on a market in which prices seemed destined to keep going up. The losers were those locked out of the housing market. But the story has started to change, and put bluntly the “losers” from Canada’s broken housing market are growing and changing. It isn’t just about young Canadians locked out of the housing market now. Add to this coalition distressed investors and unemployed workers and you’re growing the pool of people whose anger over the housing market may drive them to vote.

For a party that seeks to speak to the frustrations and anxieties of the “losers” of Canada’s housing crisis, this new crisis requires a new message, and that’s exactly what the Conservatives are trying to do. They aren’t just speaking to frustrated young home buyers now, they are speaking to these other people who have lost out because of Canada’s broken housing market. 

“Builders Can’t Build. Buyers Can’t Buy. Sellers Can’t Sell” captures this well. 

“Get government out of the way”

Conservative solutions to the housing crisis remain largely the same as they did before and during the campaign. They can be collectively summed up as “get government out of the way,” a message Poilievre has been repeating on different issue sets recently. 

Housing messaging from the Conservatives consistently argues that government red tape, regulations, taxes and charges lead to higher costs, lengthy delays, and slow construction times. And Conservative solutions continue to address this, calling primarily for tax cuts (on sales taxes, building taxes and capital gains taxes) and tying infrastructure dollars to homebuilding. 

Don’t expect this to change. As investment in homebuilding dries up in the coming years, a key intellectual battle between Carney and Poilievre, and in the housing discourse more broadly, is going to be over how to deal with this countercyclical turn in homebuilding. How do you keep investment and starts up if private development and capital dries up? Carney’s answer will be public investment to plug the gap, as exemplified in Build Canada Homes. Poilievre has been sharply critical of this, dismissing it as yet more bureaucracy, and will continue to make the case for supply-side cuts that lower costs for developers. 

Two other subtle but important evolutions in Conservative housing messaging to watch out for: 

  • As part of a broader emphasis on immigration as a major issue, expect Conservatives to be aggressive in linking rapid population growth (through immigration) to housing costs. This is not entirely new, but expect them to be less sheepish in saying this now. 
  • And just as the Conservatives will reject the BCH approach as a solution, expect Conservatives to be sceptical of modular and pre-fab homes as a solution. 

Housing isn’t going anywhere as a major political issue, and don’t expect Conservatives to go quiet on it either. But as the housing crisis has evolved, so has the Conservative message. This may, over time, allow Poilieve to both maintain a lead on this issue, keep his coalition together (and expand it), and help keep the issue top of mind for many voters. 

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