Ontario has been sitting on housing start data for months, internal docs suggest

Global News

3 days ago

A final tally of which Ontario municipalities hit their housing targets and how many fell short last year has been finished since mid-February, according to government documents obtained by Global News, despite the province refusing to release the data for months.
For the past two years, the Ford government has set targets for new homes in towns and cities around Ontario, promising them extra cash if they meet those goals.
The numbers Ontario uses to assess whether or not cities have hit their goals are made up of new homes, long-term care beds and additional units like basements or garden suites.
The government set up a website to show which cities had hit their goals, which were on track and which had failed.
Around October 2024, however, with housing starts across the province stuttering, the government stopped updating the tracker. By the spring, the tracker had been removed altogether, with the web page telling users to 'try again later.'
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The information was first posted by the government to show how close Ontario was to its self-imposed target of 1.5 million homes and the annual goals that came with it.
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While the tracker has appeared abandoned for close to half a year, the government has had 'finalized' data for months.
A briefing document prepared for Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Rob Flack in March states the information has been ready since Feb. 15, waiting for his direction on when and how to release it.
'This decision point includes official allocation notice letters to municipalities and data by municipality to publish on the Ontario.ca housing tracker,' one line from the document, obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws, states.
At a recent news conference, Flack conceded the number of incentive cheques he will hand out to municipalities will be lower this year as housing numbers drop. He promised to release the data soon.
'I can tell you, housing starts are down, we know that,' Flack said at a news conference in Toronto. 'We're going to hand out some nice building faster cheques — not as many and not for as much this year as we did last year,' Flack said.
Elsewhere in the same briefing document, civil servants said overall Ontario housing starts in 2024 were down 17 per cent year over year.
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The government indicated it was still validating parts of the housing start data, which the internal documents state is ready.
'As of February 15, 2025, all housing data has been received and finalized by MMAH staff,' the internal document said. 'Municipalities and AMO are waiting to hear whether they qualify for BFF funding, and if so, how much.'
The extra calculations are necessary because, in order to help hit its own housing targets, the Ford government elected to add long-term care beds, basement units and other secondary suites to its housing starts.
At the time, Premier Doug Ford and his cabinet passionately defended the idea that a long-term care bed counted as home and said the change wasn't just to boost their starts.
Ontario NDP MPP Catherine McKenney urged the government to release the data as soon as possible — and said the government had not made housing a 'priority.'
'If there is data, make it available,' they said. 'Let's not worry about pass or fail, let's worry about moving forward and doing what we need to build the housing we need, for the people who need it and where they need it.'