The failure to provide plentiful, quality and affordable housing is a damning indictment of the political class.
In Britain today, trust between the people and those who rule us is now on life support. The social contract – an implicit agreement between citizens and state, where the former obeys the laws of the latter in return for the provision of certain, basic needs – lies in tatters. Nothing illustrates the severity of this breakdown as clearly as the housing crisis.
“Restoring affordability to levels last seen two decades ago isn’t realistic, especially after the post-pandemic price surge,” CMHC said. The change in forecast “highlights how widespread the housing affordability challenge has become across Canada.”
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says up to 4.8 million new homes will need to be built over the next decade to restore affordability levels last seen in 2019 based on projected demand.
The national housing agency released its latest supply gaps estimate report today, which says between 430,000 and 480,000 new housing units are needed per year across the ownership and rental markets by 2035.
That would represent around double the current pace of home construction in Canada, with 90,760 housing starts recorded so far this year through May.
Canada can’t build that many homes.
The City of Montreal has hired private security guards to patrol parts of Ville-Marie, Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and the Sud-Ouest starting this summer in an effort to improve safety and cohabitation in targeted public areas.
The move comes during a time of rising tensions between residents and people who are unhoused.
But several organizations that work directly with homeless people question the lack of consultation about the patrols and would have preferred the money be distributed to groups that already do outreach and interventions.
Homeless police. Did not see that coming.
A group of Toronto advocates marched alongside a giant fake cockroach during a protest Saturday as they called on the city to provide more affordable housing and spoke out against corporate landlord practices.
Several people held large cockroach props with speech bubbles containing the names of some major corporate landlords in the city as they marched toward those companies’ offices in the Financial District.
I empathize with the tenants but they will find no succor under a the combined Carney-Chow regimes.
The LPC’s Mass-immigration policy for profit scam has exhausted affordable housing and will continue unabated while the communist Chow will assist in maintaining the housing shortage to stay in power. Manufacturing poverty is her business because it’s her vote bloc.
Canadian non-profit groups are seeing an increase in the number of older individuals seeking assistance at shelters, and they say it’s changing the way their organizations respond to the rising homeless population.
The Mustard Seed senior director of shelter operations Samantha Lowe says her organization experienced a “consistent” rise in the number of individuals aged 55 and older seeking shelter between 2023 and 2024.
More than half of Toronto residents say they are not confident they will be able to live a comfortable life in the city over the long-term, according to a recent survey.
The survey was conducted by Ipsos for the Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT). It sought responses from 1,000 residents in Hamilton and Toronto between May 9 and 22.
Douglas Todd: Canada’s distorted housing market calls for more than ‘cranes on the skyline,’ given that investors now own one in three homes. There are other ways.
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.
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.
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.
Canadian policymakers are helicoptering money to stimulate building, but it doesn’t appear to be working. Statistics Canada (Stat Can) data shows the total value of building permits fell sharply in April, dropping to the lowest monthly volume in nearly a year. The annual decline was so large it was amongst the largest since 2020.
Wednesday morning at the corner of Sacramento and Cherry. The three of us—me, the bus driver, and an elderly woman—peer into a parked bus with muted awe. Inside, an enormous man is shouting at a crumpled blanket. “Hey, HEY! Wake up! Get up!”
As it turns out, under the blanket lies a man wearing ripped clothing; he staggers to his feet at the third admonishment, limps out the door, and vomits. He has no idea where we are. “Are we in Sacramento?” he asks. “No,” says the enormous man, a Street Crisis Response Team “peer specialist” dispatched to respond to a report of an unresponsive adult male on the 33 bus. “We’re on Sacramento and Cherry. Presidio Heights. San Francisco. West Side.”
A new global index suggests Toronto is among the world’s worst cities when it comes to housing affordability — as experts blame decades of policy missteps, development delays, and overwhelming population demand for the problem.
The 2025 Global Cities Index from Oxford Economics finds that as a result of Toronto’s expensive real estate market, residents “spend more of their income on housing than residents of nearly every other city in the world.”
While the federal government recently promised to eliminate the GST on first-time home purchases under $1 million, critics argue that restrictive housing policies, costly development charges and sluggish approvals have created a market that’s out of reach for most buyers.
Prime Minster Mark Carney’s solution to the ‘housing crisis’ is the same as was that of former Prime Minster Justin Trudeau’s: throw money at it. Most of Carney’s government people are former Trudeau government people, so it shouldn’t be a surprise their answer is to spend other peoples’ money.
The Carney Liberals’ plan is to build a new bureaucracy to build new homes, called Build Canada Homes, at a cost of $25 billion taxpayer bucks. While in office, Trudeau’s government spent $116 billion on the housing crisis, so Carney has a long way to go to match Trudeau’s pilfering of Canadians’ tax money but of course, he’s just getting started.
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.
VANCOUVER — Seventy-one-year-old Roger Oake sat on a bench outside the Union Gospel Mission shelter in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after breakfast.
He had been sleeping at the shelter for about a month “this time” and said that after several years of homelessness, walking “the beat” during the day when the shelter isn’t open has become harder as he gets older.
“I really don’t know where to even begin. There’s so many things that could or should change, but I really don’t know,” he said on Wednesday.
Two law firms and a legal clinic have filed a proposal for a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit against the city on behalf of all refugee claimants who were denied access to shelter system beds between November 2022 and October 2023.
Acting on behalf of Wasiu Adekanmbi, a 40 year-old Nigerian refugee claimant, in a statement of claim filed last Friday, Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC), Lewis Litigation PC and Steiber Berlach LLP argue that the city preventing refugee claimants from accessing municipal shelter beds constituted a violation of Charter rights and freedoms, the Ontario Human Rights Code and amounts to “systemic negligence.”
Send them home.
