craigmcn

Every politician with a microphone has decided Canada’s housing crisis is a construction problem. Build more, build faster, build anywhere. That’s the pitch. It has the advantage of sounding like a plan while leaving untouched every structural issue that actually drives unaffordability. Zoning reform moves at a glacial pace when it moves at all, speculation is taxed lightly if at all, and foreign ownership restrictions arrived years late, riddled with exemptions and largely unenforced. Framing this as a supply crisis is politically convenient because building more housing is something governments can announce without making anyone powerful uncomfortable.

The gap between what politicians say and what they’re willing to legislate is where the actual story lives. “Housing first” started as a genuine policy framework: get people housed unconditionally, then deal with everything else. It was evidence-based and, in limited applications, it worked. Mainstream politics absorbed the phrase and hollowed it out, turning it into a slogan that means roughly nothing. The same thing is happening with housing affordability broadly. The language of crisis is everywhere. The political will to confront landlord associations, real estate boards and municipal councillors protecting their property values is essentially nowhere.

What actual political will would look like isn’t mysterious. It looks like vacancy taxes with teeth. It looks like ending the capital gains treatment that makes housing a preferred investment vehicle. It looks like provincial governments overriding exclusionary municipal zoning rather than asking nicely. It looks like data collection on beneficial ownership so we can see who actually holds what. Some of these things have been gestured at. Almost none have been implemented at the scale the problem demands. The federal housing accelerator fund is a real program with real money attached, and still insufficient by an order of magnitude.

I’ve watched this conversation long enough to recognise the cycle. Crisis coverage intensifies, a task force reports, announcements are made, the housing numbers don’t move, and the discourse resets to supply. It’s not that more housing supply is irrelevant, but supply-side solutions take a decade to show up in affordability data, which is convenient if your goal is to appear to be doing something while the underlying incentive structures stay intact. Canada doesn’t have a housing shortage so much as a political class that has decided homeowners who vote are a more important constituency than renters who also vote but apparently don’t realise it yet.