Canada's housing crisis calls for more than ‘cranes on the skyline'

Ottawa Citizen

06-06-2025

This week three of four Canadians declared they have no confidence in Prime Minister Mark Carney's ideas for solving the country's housing affordability crisis.
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Like most premiers and mayors, Carney is promising to 'build, baby, build' to stimulate a record amount of housing construction. But Angus Reid Institute polling suggests the public is more than skeptical, perhaps in despair.
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While voters understandably get lost in the complexities of solving a house-price catastrophe that sees average prices at a ridiculous $1.2 million in Greater Vancouver and $1.1 million in Toronto, at least one veteran housing analyst is making a clear and devastating case that Canada's dilemma is being significantly fanned by a wave of investors.
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John Pasalis, author of a new report titled The Great Sell Off: How Our Homes Became Someone Else's Business, says politicians are abandoning people who want to live in their homes, and they're selling a generation of voters a 'fantasy' that their worn ideas will lead to affordability, he writes.
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'As long as politicians and housing economists insist that 'more supply' is the only solution — ignoring the financial dynamics driving demand from investors — we will continue to fall short. This is not just a supply problem. It's a financialization problem, and solving it requires more than cranes on the skyline,' writes Pasalis, president of Realosophy.
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'We are at a crossroads. For too long, we've operated under the assumption that today's housing market is simply a more expensive version of the one our parents knew. It isn't. We are living through a paradigm shift — one in which homes are no longer primarily bought by local families, but by global investors. Housing has become a financial asset unbound from local incomes, and policy has yet to catch up.'
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Last year 30 per cent of all homes in Canada were owned by investors —domestic and foreign — who buy properties they don't intend to occupy. That's a 50-per cent jump in 10 years.
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In B.C., an incredible half of all condos built in the past decade have been snapped up by investors. In Ontario, the proportion is 57 per cent. Pasalis says government policies are largely to blame.