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Global News
4 days ago
- Business
- Global News
Fewer Ontario cities will hit housing targets amidst ‘major crisis': minister
Ontario's housing minister is conceding that the number of new homes in the province is stuttering and his government won't be able to hand out incentive rewards to many cities for hitting their targets, but says he hopes new legislation will help. On Friday, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Rob Flack accepted that the number of new homes in Ontario was lagging far behind the targets the province set itself, calling the situation 'a major crisis' across Canada. 'I can tell you, housing starts are down, we know that,' Flack said at a news conference in Toronto. The Ford government has set itself a target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031, winning a large majority in the 2022 provincial election under the promise. To meet that target, Ontario needed to see an average of 150,000 new housing starts every year for the decade. Story continues below advertisement The province has yet to get close to that number — and created a funding pot and targets for cities to try and reach the goal. A chunk of $1.2 billion was set aside over three years to be handed out to cities, ranked by their success in building new homes. Get daily National news Get the day's top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day. Sign up for daily National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy Last year, Premier Doug Ford and his then-housing minister toured the province, presenting giant cheques to cities that had achieved their 2023 housing goals. That year, Ontario achieved its lower goal of 110,000 homes by adding 10,000 long-term care beds and 10,000 basement or backyard units to the statistics. Flack indicated that this year, even with beds and basements thrown in, the province wouldn't hit its goal. '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. 'That's why we came up with Bill 17 to build the conditions to build more homes, faster.' Data from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation shows housing starts are currently down roughly 35 per cent year-over-year. Bill 17 is Flack's first major piece of housing legislation since becoming the minister in March. Among other changes, it takes aim at development charges, looking to standardize the fees homebuilders pay to municipalities and delay when they have to be handed over, in some cases. Story continues below advertisement Major parts of the legislation were agreed to by a major municipal association and a group representing homebuilders. Flack said he believed the legislation could begin to move the needle. He has said the goal of 1.5 million homes remains his target. 'We know the numbers are down, but if we don't make the changes like we did in Bill 17, we're never going to hit our targets,' he said. The minister also promised to release months-delayed housing data, which will show which cities have hit their targets and how many long-term care beds have been added to boost the headline figure.
Canada Standard
02-06-2025
- Business
- Canada Standard
Why Canada should apply labour protections to the rental housing sector
Gregor Robertson, Canada's new housing minister, was likely tapped for the job on the basis of his decade as Vancouver's mayor, where he introduced zoning changes, incentives for rental construction and the country's first empty-homes tax. Those moves nudged supply but fell short: housing designed specifically for renting trickled in slowly and the city's homeless count hit a 13-year high of 2,181 in 2018. Robertson once blamed the housing shortfall on tight-fisted provincial and federal budgets. Now that he controls part of that money, he can test his claim. He can plug a hole his municipal toolkit never could by being, as he vowed in 2018, "more abrasive and more vocal", and by coupling fresh federal dollars with legal protections that empower tenants to bargain collectively. The urgency is clear: one-third of Canadians rent, yet tenant unions, though legal to form, have no right to negotiate. This absence of statutory protection for tenants is often treated as a policy oversight. By withholding legal recognition, lawmakers preserve a model that allows landlords to negotiate from a position of structural dominance as tenants confront systemic harms - rent hikes, unsafe conditions and evictions - all on their own. Soaring rents and evictions have been described as a temporary "housing crisis." But researchers at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives counter that the market is not broken; it works exactly as designed. Calling it a crisis justifies "extraordinary" fixes - most often lower interest rates that lure first time home-buyers to take on debt larger than they should, according to Canadian policy scholar Ricardo Tranjan in his book The Tenant Class . The results are structural, not temporary: median national rent for a one-bedroom dwelling now tops $2,000, vacancy rates sit below two per cent and 33.1 per cent of renters spend more than 30 per cent of income on shelter. That's the rent-burden line - the threshold used to determine if a household is struggling to afford housing - of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation's (CMHC). Since the 1990s, the CMHC has replaced public construction with mortgage-insurance programs that flood markets with credit, kicking the can down the road. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney's choice of Robertson as housing minister has advanced a familiar credit-led package: GST rebates for first-time buyers. When asked whether housing prices should fall, Robertson said "no," arguing that wages will eventually catch up - an adjustment economists project would take roughly 20 years even if prices stopped rising today. Expanding credit under these conditions is more likely to swell asset values than improve affordability, trading a housing emergency for an indebtedness emergency. Ontario's Residential Tenancies Act (RTA) typifies Canada's token approach to renter power. It affirms tenants' right to form associations but, in the very next clause, excuses landlords from any obligation to meet or negotiate with them. The result is performative legality: tenants can speak but landlords are free to ignore them. The chilling effect resembles pre-industrial labour markets, where organizing invited dismissal. Recent history confirms the weakness. In 2023, the tenants of 33 King Street in northwest Toronto mounted a five-month rent strike and won partial rollbacks, but the tribunal still refused to recognize their union; every renter had to sign a separate settlement. By settling disputes that way, the system drains collective power and drags cases through attritional timelines that encourage capitulation. Canada confronted a parallel power imbalance during industrialization. Early 20th-century governments criminalized picketing and blacklisted organizers. The upheavals of the Great Depression forced Ottawa to adopt the Wartime Labour Relations Regulations (1944) and the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act (1948). Those statutes codified three enduring principles: Legislators acted not from moral awakening, but to temper exploitation and preserve social stability. Housing now mirrors that earlier asymmetry: corporate landlords command capital, legal expertise and mobility, while tenants have none of that power. Extending labour-style protections to tenant unions would simply apply a proven regulatory formula to rental housing. Landlord associations often voice four main objections to statutory tenant-union rights: the anticipated administrative burden, the spectre of disinvestment, purported constitutional limits and a moral claim that responsible owners don't need to be legally compelled to act in good faith. Labour history suggests these concerns are overstated. As Tranjan recalls, reputable employers already paid decent wages and offered sick leave before such standards were legislated. Regulation merely imposed a baseline on those profiting from exploitation. In housing, conscientious landlords who maintain units, honour rent control and eschew predatory fees wouldn't require mandatory bargaining or anti-retaliation clauses. But those enriching themselves through vacancy decontrol, renovictions or steep rent hikes would. Their resistance to tenant protections underscores their necessity. Empirical evidence further weakens objections. First, administrative overload is improbable: collective bargaining consolidates individual grievances into a single agreement, dramatically reducing repeat hearings, and the system would work the same in landlord-tenant tribunals. Second, claims that stronger tenant rights deter investment clash with comparative experience. In Vienna, where nearly half of all dwellings fall under tenant councils wielding union-like powers and stringent rent regulation, construction activity remains robust and affordability stable; Third, constitutional concerns are overstated. Although landlord-tenant law is chiefly provincial, the federal government already shapes rental markets through CMHC insurance, targeted tax expenditures and the National Housing Strategy Act, which recognizes adequate housing as a human right. Ottawa could condition financing on tenant-union recognition or incentivize provinces to harmonize standards, echoing its mid-20th century push for uniform labour legislation. Historical precedent and evidence across the country make clear that formalizing tenant-union protections is constitutional, would streamline dispute resolution and sustain construction - substantially benefiting the one-third of Canadians who rent without destabilizing the housing market. Read more: How corporate landlords are eroding affordable housing - and prioritizing profits over human rights To make housing genuinely affordable, Robertson must see Canada's rental sector not as a malfunctioning "crisis" but as a lucrative system of organized inequality. Legislators once recognized that individual workers could not bargain fairly with industrial adversaries and created the collective-bargaining framework that undergirds labour relations today. Housing demands the same logic. Tenant unions already operate in neighbourhoods such as Toronto's Thorncliffe Park, Vancouver's Mount Pleasant and Montreal's Rosemont. But without legal status, landlords can simply ignore them. Federal legislation could correct this imbalance. Automatic certification would follow when a simple majority of tenants in a building sign membership cards, triggering a duty for landlords to bargain in good faith over rent increases, maintenance schedules, security of tenure and essential services. Read more: Financial firms are driving up rent in Toronto - and targeting the most vulnerable tenants Anti-retaliation clauses would bar eviction or harassment of organizing tenants, with remedies mirroring labour law: reinstatement, damages and arbitration to deter stalling. Negotiated standards could be applied across neighbourhoods while still allowing investors reasonable but socially responsible returns. Granting labour-style protections to tenant unions is hardly radical; it simply extends a principle Canada embraced nearly a century ago: collective problems require collective rights. Renters cannot wait for market forces to self-correct. Recognizing and regulating tenant unions is the most direct route to balancing power, safeguarding homes and treating housing as a human right rather than an asset class.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Canadian housing starts jump 30% in April, CMHC says
TORONTO (Reuters) -Canadian housing starts rose 30% in April compared with the previous month, a far bigger increase than was expected, data from the national housing agency showed on Thursday. The seasonally-adjusted annualized rate of housing starts climbed to 278,606 units from a revised 214,205 units in March, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said. Economists had expected starts to rise to 227,500. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Reuters
15-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Canadian housing starts jump 30% in April, CMHC says
TORONTO, May 15 (Reuters) - Canadian housing starts rose 30% in April compared with the previous month, a far bigger increase than was expected, data from the national housing agency showed on Thursday. The seasonally-adjusted annualized rate of housing starts climbed to 278,606 units from a revised 214,205 units in March, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said. Economists had expected starts to rise to 227,500.
Calgary Herald
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Calgary Herald
Canada's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade. The numbers prove it
Article content The recruitment crisis is so acute that up to half of the ships, aircraft and vehicles in Canadian military fleets cannot be used because there is no one around to fix them. As one example, as of last count, only 45.7 per cent of the Royal Canadian Navy fleet was considered 'serviceable to meet training and readiness requirements in support of concurrent operations.' Article content Immigration intake has been wildly high Article content When the Liberals took power, the population of Canada was about 35.8 million. As of this writing, it's 41.6 million. That's 5.8 million new people over the course of 10 years, or 580,000 new Canadians per year. Article content For context, the population of all four Atlantic provinces is just 2.6 million. The population of Alberta is five million. The population of the entire Halifax metropolitan area is 530,000, not even a year's worth of new immigrants. Article content Canada has been a high-immigration country throughout its history, but the rate of sustained population growth seen under the Liberals is unlike anything witnessed in the last 100 years. Article content Article content It also helps to explain why shortages of everything from housing to doctors have become so acute, so quickly. In that same 10-year period, the number of housing starts recorded by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation was just 2.3 million, with more than half of that being taken up by apartment units. Article content Going all the way back to the 19 th century, Canada has typically had a population that is about 10 per cent of the United States' — a ratio that has stayed constant, given that both countries have maintained similar growth rates. Article content The birthrate has cratered Article content Canada now has one of the lowest birthrates on the planet. As of 2023, it had dropped to 1.26 children per woman, a rate matched only by four other 'lowest low' countries: South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan. Article content When the Liberals came to power in 2015, the birthrate was unsustainably low at 1.6 children per woman, but not catastrophically so. Article content Article content Life expectancy has gone down Article content These last figures may be the most stark — we are dying sooner. Article content When the Liberals took power, Canadian life expectancy at birth was 81.9 years. As of last count, in 2023, it was 81.5 Article content That's not a huge decline, but it's basically the first time anything like this has happened. For at least the last 100 years, Canadian lifespans have been getting longer with each passing calendar year (except for the COVID pandemic years). Article content As to why the trend has ground to a halt during the last 10 years, one explanation is that tens of thousands of Canadians are dying from drug overdoses. Article content
