What will it take to finally end Canada’s housing crisis?

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Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to communications@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Mary Rowe [00:00:02] Welcome to City Talk, the show about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next for the places we live. I’m Mary Rowe, and I lead the Canadian Urban Institute. 

Murtaza Haider [00:00:12] We want to provide the future generations of Canadians and Ontarians and others to be able to live, afford a life, and build a future that is prosperous for all of us. That would require a lot of affordable housing, a lot infrastructure, so I believe the Karni government is on the right track, but they have to be more aggressive and take these fights head on. 

Mary Rowe [00:00:35] It’s no secret that Canada is in a housing crisis. Over the past 20 years, the ratio of house prices to income has risen over 70%. In other words, a growing chunk of people’s paychecks are going towards housing. Renters are paying more, too. And some people are actually being driven to the streets. A recent report from Ontario’s municipalities found that homelessness rose a staggering 25% just over the last two years. Governments at all orders and across the political spectrum talking about the urgency of the issue. But not everyone agrees on the root cause. Is it just about reducing red tape and letting builders build? Or does the government need to intervene more in a market that has failed to address the scope and scale of the problem? To talk about this, I’m joined by Carolyn Weitzman and Murtaza Haider. Carolyn is the author of the book, Home Truths, Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. And she’s also a senior researcher and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto School of Cities. Murtaza is a professor and the Radhika Krishna Gupta Executive Chair in Cities and Communities and the Executive Director of the newly formed Cities Institute at the University of Alberta. Carolyn and Martaza, let’s start by testing the premise of the conversation. Would you both say that Canada is in a housing crisis, and if so, why would you say that? Carolyn, you first. 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:01:58] So I think that you’re absolutely right, Mary, with some of the both statistics you were giving earlier about the growing gulf between housing costs, whether you’re a homeowner or renter, or whether you don’t have a home and your income. And I think also there was an article written a few years ago called The Housing Theory of Everything, and it does have implications for certainly dinner table conversation, but more importantly, healthcare, education, economic productivity, our future as a country, all of those are affected by the housing crisis. And again, to break it down a little bit more, about a third of households are straightforward owners of their home, about a 3rd of households own houses with the help of a mortgage, though they owe a bank and a lot of them. Are increasingly anxious about how house prices are going to do in relation to their large mortgages. And then about a third of households are renters, and definitely renters are in a lot of anxiety right now around tenure security as well as affordability. 

Mary Rowe [00:03:11] So it’s pervasive in that way, wherever you participate in the market. Murtaza, what is your view? Are we in a housing crisis? 

Murtaza Haider [00:03:20] Yes, we are in a housing crisis, but I would say there are a couple of things that we have to remember. A, it’s not new. If you look at McLean’s front page story in 1969, May of 1969, it said that if you do not already own a home by now, forget about your dream of ever owning a home. That’s 1969. The average price in Toronto was, what, $30,000. So when people say we are a housing crises now, that’s a gross over misrepresentation of the fact that we have been in the housing crisis. And the reason we have been in a housing crisis for the past five decades is because we have not built enough housing. Secondly, we’re not alone. I’m working on a large project with one of the researcher donor agencies, and we have studied housing supply in 10 economies in Western Europe. And guess what? From America to New Zealand to Australia to Austria to England to everybody, everyone is in a house in crisis, and they are in a houses in crisis because they have not been building enough housing, housing supply. Is the big challenge. There are other factors, small factors, but housing supply is a big challenge because we did not build. I’ll give you one number that should stay with people’s understanding. In 1970s, we were building 12,000 new homes for every four million Canadians. 12,00 new homes a year, four million Canadian. That went down to 6,000 homes per million Canadian by mid 1990s. They’ve been a little bit of uptick, but we have never built more than three million homes in any decade since the 1970s. That has been our challenge. It’s a self-inflicted wound, if you ask me. We could build a lot more. We have the expertise, we have the know-how, but somehow we fail to collectively deliver on building housing. 

Mary Rowe [00:04:58] If this has been a challenge for 50 years. What is the impediment to us actually addressing it? Carolyn, you- 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:05:06] It wasn’t one decision. It was a whole bunch of decisions. And some of those decisions might have made sense at the time, but no longer make sense. So one of the decisions that happened, and we’re gonna be focusing a lot on the year 1972, it was a really important year for a number of reasons, capital gains tax was brought in. It’s a wealth tax. It means that the federal government is availing itself of the principal property was exempted, that is, the house that you live in was exempt. And that made sense when we had pension plans that weren’t as great. We were just starting to have a Canada pension plan. It made sense because a man’s average life expectancy at the time was about 70 and a woman’s average expectancy was around 75. Well, now life expectancies are 80 and 85 respectively. And the notion that the home should be the principal mechanism for retirement investment doesn’t really work as well anymore. And the principal property exemption to the capital gains tax, it’s one of the many reasons why land prices started going up and that housing began. Being seen by policymakers as an investment rather than a place to live in your entire life. Again, you know, it was a different world then. Many people had jobs for life, but we live in a different world now and a world where we have to diversify our retirement investments. 

Mary Rowe [00:06:53] The fact that we did not have a capital gains assessment against our principal residents, why is that a disincentive to creating more housing? 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:07:03] It wasn’t a disincentive to create more housing. There were a lot of other things that came in and made housing supply more difficult and absolutely supply is a determinant of the price. But one of the other determinants of costs going up is the huge increase in land prices. 

Mary Rowe [00:07:23] It’s land price. That’s the line you’re drawing. You’re saying, as soon as we turn that asset and we treat it that way, then there’s all sorts of forces that conspire to make it scarcer so that it has more value. As soon as you … 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:07:38] Treat it as a preferred stock. It’s going to be a stock that a lot of people are investing in and flipping and trying to make as much money as possible in order to have as comfortable retirement as possible. 

Mary Rowe [00:07:53] So we commodified it. Wow, Murtaza, how did we get into this mess? 

Murtaza Haider [00:07:57] Well, let me just say that because of housing, immigrants get a chance to level the playing field. You take this out, immigrants will never catch up to the native-born Canadians. And I’m not just stating an opinion. In fact, Statistics Canada did a study and said how long it took and how it was able for identical cohorts tracked over 30 years. And it turned out the immigrants who actually got into housing were able to have as much wealth. As their native-born cohorts, if they were followed over a 30-year period, and why were they able to do so? Because of housing. So when people say that it adversely affects immigrants, it actually is quite the contrary. The housing markets have helped immigrants catch up to the native-bonds, or otherwise they will never be able to. They will always be behind them in wealth generation, only 30 years ago. I’m not stating an opinion. It’s Statistics Canada’s detailed study. I wrote about it in the National Post because A lot of it was technical, so I had to translate it, but it’s well documented. The other thing is capital gains, and I liked what Caroline mentioned. The capital gains tax affected the construction of purpose-built rental in Canada. The Carter Commission was put in place by the conservatives at that time, and the Carter Commission came out and said, we should have a capital gains text. Basically, they were photocopying what they saw in England at that, England did it about five, 10 years earlier. So they came in. And they established this capital gains tax. The problem with capital gains taxes was they did not index it to inflation. And at that time, when inflation was 10%, 15%, now you are the owner, landlord, you bought a purpose-built rental, 10 years later, it’s doubled in price. Now you’re paying taxes on the increase in value, and you’re pay taxes on inflation. And that was the dumbest thing to do. 50 years have passed, and no one is able to get this fixed. I don’t know why. There’s not much math in it that you should not ask people to pay taxes on inflation. And at that time, it was meaningful. Why? Because the inflation wasn’t 2%. At that time the inflation was 10% or higher. So what was the result? The construction of purpose-built rental went down to zero all the way up to mid-90s. There was pretty much no purpose-build rental construction anywhere. That affected the most vulnerable of the Canadians and those most vulnerable of the canadians are those who who are renters, and renters have significantly lower incomes than homeowners. So we were not able to protect them because we did not build enough. And in the beginning of your introduction, you mentioned the security of tenure. Well, if they go and rent from the condos, if the rent openly, where this is not a purpose-built rental unit, then they don’t have the security of tenure, even if it’s affordable, there’s no security of tenure. So we made a mistake. We failed to correct it. It was in the conservatives’ platform, I think, a few years ago that if you sell a purpose-built rental building but invest that money into another purpose-build rental, then you don’t have to pay capital gains on it. So that was a good thing. But then again, it hasn’t been implemented. But your question wasn’t that. The question was why we haven’t built. I’ll tell you why we have built. We went crazy with regulation. We have overregulated this industry. Do you know that we have more workers now? With the number of workers who built 2.7 million homes. In the 70s that was about 250,000 or less. Now we have 650,000 workers working in residential construction now in Canada and we’re still building 250, 000 homes a year. So we have over-regulated, over-burdened, our zoning regulations are completely out of whack at some point in time and that’s just in the past couple of years. It was taking at times three years just to get the zoning approvals for a high-rise construction in Toronto. Now how do you go to up to three years? So by the time 36 months have passed, your cost benefit analysis, your performer analysis, is no longer valid. We did it to ourselves, nobody else did it. 

Mary Rowe [00:11:53] Listen, you two are so smart, I’m going to just keep trying to drill down on some really basic things to understand. First of all, in Canada… Houses and housing. 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:12:06] There has always been a mix of big developers and small developers, and you’re going to hear a lot of areas of agreement between Mirtaza and I. One of the impacts of adding a tremendous amount of complication and regulation and differences between cities and differences within cities is ironically all of that differentiation would mean a lot of small developers. No, it’s made it really, really easy to have tall and sprawl and big developers and it’s make it incredibly difficult for new ideas, new developers, homeowner developers to build. So again, I don’t wanna be a nostalgicist, but a lot homes in Canada 100 years ago were self-built. You could buy home kits. So 

Mary Rowe [00:13:00] Yeah, I remember John Van Nostrand has said this, that he’s got a statistic about what percentage of homes in Toronto were self-built in the 40s, at something like 60 percent. And as you say, there was the Sears catalog. You could buy a house. So somewhere in there, you just used that phrase, tall and sprawl. Can I just interpret what I’m hearing from both of you? Are you saying that the regulatory regime and zoning and all these layers of sophisticated rules and layers meant that we’ve had to concentrate. Housing development within a sector that had to have the resources to be able to navigate all that, and that would mean you got to go big, you got to go tall versus much more modest, smaller companies, smaller numbers of units. Is that what’s happening? 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:13:42] Well, you need a lot of money in order to hang fire for three years. So what Murtaza was saying is you need, it would be very difficult if you’re running on a marginal kind of return as any non-market developer, for instance, would be doing to hang on for three year and face off NIMBY and end up with dueling lawsuits, especially you know, planning court and… And all of that if you don’t have a lot of resources. 

Murtaza Haider [00:14:16] Mary, here’s a shout out to my good friend Mike Vazelli. He’s a professor at Western University. We both were doing PhD together. We were probably the only two people who decided to do PhD thesis on builders and development because everything else is demand focused in Canada. Mike, can I- 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:14:30] I went and did our PhD together at Mac, that’s amazing, what a small world! 

Murtaza Haider [00:14:35] There you go. So guess what? From Mike Bozzali’s work till now, nothing has changed. And what he found was very interesting, and that is that we have a house building industry in Canada that has only a small number, very small number of large builders. And the bulk are small builders, so much so that Statistics Canada last year released a report, maybe it was this year, that most of the builders have fewer than five employees. That tells you what the problem is. The problem is on the industry side, that there has to be a lot of amalgamation that has to happen. Because if you are a builder with five employees, you do not have the agency to negotiate the kind of bargains you need for material, supplies, and zoning approvals. It’s only the big developers who can do this. And Canada has a very small number of big developers, and they realize the problem. So if you’re a small builder, you’re building five, 10, 15 homes, maybe even 50 homes. You do not have the warehouses, the technology, the capacity to do this. And the future for us, it has to be modular and prefab construction. And guess what? Most of these guys would resist that. Why? Because they don’t have the ability to go prefab. It’s only the likes of Mattamy Homes that you remember. Gilgen family announced that they are going with a new factory for prefabbed construction. They would like to build about 3,000 units. So guess, the industry is not structured in Canada to build the kind of homes at the pace, at the scale that we need. And the reason is they are atomized. And guess, is it a case today? No, this is a case for the last 30 years, at least going back to Buzelli’s doctoral dissertation that this has been the case in Ontario and most likely in other cities and provinces as well. 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:16:13] And I just want to square that circle. So there are a lot of big, big firms. I mean, I don’t think you need to look very far to look at Daniels and, and a lot big, big firms, there aren’t a lot of big big builders. So there’s big firms they build housing. That is there are a lot of developers who build large subdivisions, et cetera. But then the actual builders are small. Am I wrong, Ritaza? 

Murtaza Haider [00:16:42] No, no, actually, you’re absolutely right. But big builders are, in fact, umbrella groups. And they still have like 5, 10, 50, or 100 employees. But they are umbrella groups, all they’re doing is scheduling the trades. So the trades are the ones who are building it. But because no big builder owns the plumbing, the roofing, the concreting, and everything else. They are just schedulers with trades. And at the end of it, it is our trades that we’re going to build these things. So, it wouldn’t really help. If you have five builders who have the same set of trades. And why it’s important? Because when the under-construction units start to increase, the same amount of workforce is involved, so you can’t start new projects. So you would see that when under-completion units go up, our starts go down. Why? Because at a certain point in time, whoever could hold the hammer is already employed. 

Mary Rowe [00:17:34] Yeah, people need to get that. I think that this is a cyclical industry that everybody is witness to at every scale, whether you’re in a small community or a big community, and as you just suggested, if you see projects moving forward, you know that pretty well anyone with a skill is probably engaged in some aspect of that site. And we have the same issue with infrastructure builds. When you start to see enormous investments in public infrastructure, that’s where the trades are going. And so you can imagine it’s very hard to supply. New housing construction, and oh yes, we’re building new transit lines and redoing the sewer lines. 

Murtaza Haider [00:18:09] Let’s talk for a minute. Mary, can I get one point? One point. Yeah. One point when we were doing the construction of the underground subway extension from Toronto into Vaughan, that was a very big project. It was very difficult to find a licensed, experienced electrician. Electrician, sure. All of them were underground working there, right? So the cost of housing goes up. Let’s talked about that. Because what do we do? 

Mary Rowe [00:18:33] Do about that? You’ve got a federal government that is very ambitious about Build Baby Build, and are we going to be, so let me just ask you each that. You saw the housing platform, you know what the Carney government’s priorities are, and they have a priority around nation-build, you just referred to it, Murtaza, nation-building projects, large infrastructure, and also housing. So of the options that are available to us, where do you think our emphasis needs to be Carolyn, you first, then Murtaza. 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:19:04] Housing is infrastructure. Yes. I don’t have an easy or simple answer to you, for you, Mary. I mean, I think that the general, what government’s been talking about is great. What they’ve been doing is not so great. So what governments have been talking about at all levels since the 1990s is that we need more housing near, let’s say, rapid transit in cities, and we need more rapid transit near housing in cities. One of them is easier than the other and that is housing your already existing infrastructure such as rapid transit and sewers and the community centers and schools and all of that other infrastructure, health centers, parks. So we definitely need the kind of action on up-zoning, on simplifying building code regulations in order to get a lot more housing. 

Mary Rowe [00:20:04] What else do we need to do? Murtaza, you take one. What do we to do. 

Murtaza Haider [00:20:07] Well, first of all, you have to realize where the opposition comes from. There are three entities which you have to fight. One are NIMBYs, not in my backyard crowd. The other one are bananas, absolutely crazy bananas. These are build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. Build absolutely nothing. 

Mary Rowe [00:20:24] We’ve got NIMBYs, which are not in my backyard. Then we’ve got people that are built absolutely nothing. 

Murtaza Haider [00:20:30] These are the anywhere yes anywhere near anything right so the and there are many of those some of them masquerade as environmentalists so they are saying don’t do anything no daycare in my neighborhood because our kids are grown up but the other thing and there’s another one that’s called Nymtoz 

Mary Rowe [00:20:45] Who are nymphs? 

Murtaza Haider [00:20:46] Oh, NMTOs are amazing. You find them in any city council, not in my term of office. So the NMTs are, I like the idea, it’s amazing, we should do it, but if I were to say yes to it, I won’t be able to be reelected, so not in the term of my office. I will champion this as soon as I leave municipal politics or whatever politics they are in. And that’s it, NBs, NmTs and bananas are up against creating tons of problems for us in terms of creating. Up-zoning is densifying. Is one way of capitalizing on the infrastructure you have already put in place. Then there’s this private good and there’s public good. Then look at the, there’s a concept called eminent domain. Eminent domain means that whenever the state feels that something has to be done in public interest. And that could be building the new building for the New York Times. That was built, made possible because of eminent domain in New York because one of the owners wasn’t selling. So basically, you look at the collective benefit, you look the future generations. We want to provide the future generation of Canadians and Ontarians and others to be able to live, afford a life and build a future that is prosperous for all of us. That would require a lot of affordable housing, lot of infrastructure. So I believe the Karni government is on the right track, but they have to be more aggressive and take these fights head on. I mean- How did- 

Mary Rowe [00:22:04] How does the federal government take on – these are local fights. NIMBY, bananas, and NIMTOs are all manifesting in local councilor wards. And I’m just wondering, how do we actually break that logjam to build the supply? Because the prime minister can say all these things, but he doesn’t actually have line of sight into things around the corner. 

Murtaza Haider [00:22:25] Oh, they absolutely do. I mean, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came in and he said, I will respect local democracy and I will build consensus. You never build consensus, this never happens. That was, again, another self-inflicted wound of promising something that would actually damage your own agenda. So he said yes, I would respect local democracies. Guess what? Nothing got built to the extent that we needed. So Carney has to be different. Prime Minister Carney has said, we will do whatever it takes. Municipalities are creatures of provinces under the continued constitution. Provinces are parents and municipalities are children. If we really want to do something, provinces can, given the Canadian constitution and the control they have, can step in and prevent municipalities from blocking all the construction that they have been blocking. Look at what happened in California. California had this California Environmental Quality Act for the last 50 years. It has been used to prevent any type of development in the, not just in green, pristine areas, more resistance, and more applications were filed for up against up-zoning than in Greenfield development. Guess what the governor did? He signed two laws, two bills, and gone. Now there are going to be exemptions. People want to build housing? You can. Actually the house 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:23:38] using accelerator fund was pretty effective, and it was pretty effective partly because I think it gave some cover to some of these NMTOs that Ritaza was talking about, in other words, some of these municipal elected officials who were unwilling to make the kinds of zoning changes that were necessary to use existing infrastructure effectively. So I saw that happen in real time. I mean, it’s a long story how I saw it happen in real time, but I saw happen in real time in Calgary, where Calgary council said, ah, we’re not too sure. And then some folks got to them that day and said, you realize how much infrastructure funding through the housing accelerator fund you’re threatening by making this decision, which may make your constituents happy, but not having infrastructure. Would make them very unhappy. And by the end of the day, they decided to revisit that council decision. So I have seen the Housing Accelerator Fund work in real time. And now it’s time, I’d argue, and certainly the new governments argued, for a new generation of Housing Accelerators Fund agreements. So the federal government can and should be acting for the keel. Politics that have been dominating zoning, I would argue that the federal government also needs to have a stern discussion with provinces and territories who, for instance, have been allowing tremendous increases in evictions, who have not been very good on tenant rights, have not be very good social assistance payments, which haven’t gone up with inflation since, again, the 1990s. Are a leading contributor to homelessness, because homelessness is about the gap between income and rent. And I’d argue that the provinces and territories have been the leading level of government in contributing to homelessness. So I think the federal government has to be the bully in this situation, and the way it can be the bullying. Is by having the greatest powers and the greatest revenues, which it does, and tying infrastructure funding to some basic pro-housing work, which includes both supply and protecting people’s housing. 

Murtaza Haider [00:26:08] Actually, I’m in agreement with you, Caroline, that the Housing Accelerator Fund did a lot of good, especially on the purpose-built rental side. If you see the recent, in the last five years, there has been a significant increase in the construction of purpose-build rental, and I think a lot of it has to do with Housing Accelerators Fund. And I think the idea of building infrastructure, there’s already the programs out there. There’s, I think, a $30 billion infrastructure program. Especially focusing on public transit, that has an affordable housing component attached to it. There’s lots of good stuff. This is all scattered all over the place. What is needed is to do it fast and do it aggressively. We spend too much time building consensus and then 10 years are over and then a new government comes in and we end up in a different direction. So right now is the time, let’s just do it. 

Mary Rowe [00:26:57] You know, I hear you both sort of calling, perhaps I’m putting a qualifier on this that’s more on Carolyn’s side of the equation, for a beneficent bully, but the idea that we would just get down to it. The Housing Accelerator Fund, the CUI is very familiar with this because we were engaged in the early stages. And what, just for our listeners to benefit from the understanding this, what it had is it was a carrot, in essence. It had what is called conditionality to it, the federal government will invest if you do the following. And it took a lot of effort to kind of hammer out what that consensus would be. And often municipal staff are much more willing to be ambitious about what they believe is the right thing to do as professional staff, versus their bosses who are the NMTOS who can’t deal with the political fallout of what would happen to do the right. And I think this is where so much of city building is caught between a rock and a hard place. Because politicians want to get re-elected and they are accountable and our democratic system is dependent on them to be accountable, but often the folks in the trenches doing the actual work are the ones who will say, well, actually the right thing to do is X. And often the right things is a kind of prescription that lots of folks have a lot of trouble with. I just want a last word from each of you. If you were the minister, and you were trying to move. As we’ve said, a decades old challenge. Where would you put the government’s resources right now? Last comment to each of you, Carolyn and then Murtaza. 

Carolyn Whitzman [00:28:36] Yeah, I’d be resourcing a whole bunch of choices, affordable choices, and I’d be doing everything I could to make sure that those affordable choices aren’t being strangled by regulation. 

Mary Rowe [00:28:51] Okay, there you go. Martaza, what would you do? 

Murtaza Haider [00:28:53] I will be squarely focused on having the public sector focused on building social housing and increase the public-sector housing stock, which in most Canadian cities is around five percent or so, even less in some cities. I believe the most vulnerable in our society are those who are priced out of the cheapest rent. And if the federal government wants to improve, it should improve the welfare of those who most wonderful. And public sector housing or social housing is the responsibility of the government. Previous governments have made the mistake of taking it off their shoulders and putting it on private developers and landlords. That’s not their responsibility. If I’m the Prime Minister of Canada, I would focus on increasing the supply of social housing to protect the dignity and living standards of those who are the most disadvantaged in our society. 

Mary Rowe [00:29:45] I think the two of you just agree. Amen to that. No, absolutely. It’s a bit of a miracle. Listen, thanks, gang. Honestly, we could have, the three of us could have had, well, I could have just listened carefully to the two you and occasionally chimed in with a dumb question, but we could have stayed on for several hours. It’s such a complex set of situations, but I appreciate the call to action that you’re making that nobody can be sitting, you know, in their chair slumping over this. Everybody has to be. Heads on, starting to figure out how we’re each going to contribute. And I want to thank both Carolyn and Mirtaza for joining us on City Talk to talk about what’s maybe one of the most demanding challenges we’ve got in this moment in time. Thank you, Mary. Always a pleasure. 

Speaker 4 [00:30:24] Thank you indeed. It was indeed great to join you and Caroline. It’s really grateful. Thank you. 

Mary Rowe [00:30:33] City Talk is a podcast from the Canadian Urban Institute produced by Antica Productions. Our producer is Kevin Sexton and our executive producers are Laura Regehr and Stuart Cox. If you’re enjoying this show, please give us a rating and review it in your podcast app. You can also follow CUI, the Urban Institute on YouTube and find a video version of this show and other content like it. I’m Mary Rowe, I happen to be the CEO of CUI. We’ll be back in two weeks for another episode of City Talk. What’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be next for the places we live in. 

5 Key
Takeaways

1. Canada Is in a Deep and Multifaceted Housing Crisis

The episode opened with sobering data about surging home prices, rents, and a rapidly escalating homelessness crisis—homelessness rose 25% in Ontario municipalities in just two years. Panellists stressed that the issue’s tentacles now reach all types of households: owners, renters, and those without homes altogether. As Carolyn Whitzman pointed out, the housing crisis is not just about affordability; it impacts health, education, and economic productivity, making it a pressing national challenge that “affects our future as a country.” The breadth and depth of the crisis call for urgent, sustained intervention on multiple fronts.

2. Persistent Undersupply Is the Root Cause

Murtaza Haider contends that the housing crisis is not new, but has persisted for at least five decades, largely due to chronic underbuilding. He highlighted historical trends: while Canada once built 12,000 new homes per million people per year in the 1970s, that figure has since halved. Haider argues, “Housing supply is the big challenge… because we did not build,” and stresses that this shortfall has been self-inflicted. He also noted that housing shortages are not unique to Canada, but affect affluent countries worldwide. Addressing the supply gap head-on is crucial for tackling affordability and making homeownership attainable.

3. Policy Decisions Have Turned Housing Into a Commodity

Carolyn Whitzman emphasized the cumulative effect of decades of policy choices, especially since the 1970s, that have turned homes into investment vehicles rather than places to live. Drawing a line from the 1972 principal residence capital gains exemption to surging land prices, she argued that such incentives have shifted the perception of housing from shelter to asset class. Whitzman observed, “Policymakers [began] seeing housing as an investment rather than a place to live,” which, combined with changing retirement and employment norms, contributed to the affordability crisis. Rethinking these policies is key to restoring housing’s social function.

4. Housing Crisis Is a Global Phenomenon, Not Only a Canadian Problem

The discussion acknowledged that Canada’s housing woes reflect a broader trend among affluent Western nations. As Haider shared from his research on housing markets in ten Western economies, countries from the United States and Australia to Austria and England face similar pressures from underbuilding. Supply-side constraints, paired with rising demand, have led to affordability challenges in urban centres around the world. This global context suggests the need for bold, systemic reforms and cross-learning between jurisdictions facing parallel crises.

5. Modern Solutions Demand Breaking from Outdated Approaches

Both panellists concurred that many of the policy frameworks and expectations underpinning Canada’s housing system were designed for a bygone era—one with shorter life expectancies, stable lifelong employment, and less urbanization. As circumstances have changed, so too must the solutions. Policymakers now face the challenge of updating regulations, taxation, and pension strategies to fit a Canada of greater longevity, diversity, and economic uncertainty. The panellists called for “more aggressive” and innovative government action, with Whitzman stressing the need to “diversify our retirement investments” and de-commodify housing to halt the cycle of escalating costs and growing insecurity.