What’s Behind Canada’s Housing Crisis

For years, federal ministers have offered Canadians a consoling explanation for why they cannot afford homes: housing has become unaffordable everywhere, a global phenomenon driven by pandemic disruptions, interest rates, and population growth spurred in large part by federal immigration targets.

The 2026 Demographia International Housing Affordability report, co-published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, has now been released and features 96 data points across eight countries. The numbers do not support that story.

Demographia measures affordability using the median multiple, the ratio of median house price to median household income. The benchmark is simple: a ratio of 3.0 or below is affordable. That is not an arbitrary standard. As recently as 1990, virtually every market now covered by the survey, including those in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, posted national ratios not far from 3.0. That was what housing markets looked like when land supply was competitive, and planning systems did not artificially restrict where cities could grow.

Edmonton’s median multiple today is 3.6. Vancouver’s is 10.8. Both cities are in Canada. Both operate under the same Bank of Canada interest rate, the same federal immigration intake, and the same national mortgage rules. Provincial and municipal planning regimes chose to restrict land supply. That choice explains the gap. When federal ministers point to global forces, they are sidestepping the forces that created this problem.

Toronto provides the timeline that should embarrass every politician who reaches for the global-problem alibi. Demographia’s data show no deterioration in Toronto’s housing affordability from 1971 to 2004, more than three decades of stability. Then, as Ontario’s growth management apparatus tightened through the mid-2000s, the median multiple began its climb to a current 7.6. The crisis did not arrive with the pandemic, nor with interest rates, nor with immigration. It arrived with decisions made at Queen’s Park and Toronto City Hall. Ottawa’s contribution has been to call it a global problem and write cheques.

The contagion spread predictably. Smaller Ontario markets such as Kitchener, Brantford, and Guelph, absorbed households priced out of Toronto, and their affordability collapsed in turn. From 2015 to 2023, those secondary markets deteriorated by the equivalent of 3.3 years of median household income, worse than the 2.6-year loss in Toronto itself. Urban containment does not solve affordability by concentrating unaffordability in the core city. It exports it.

The Canadian Home Builders’ Association’s 2024 Municipal Benchmarking Study, which scores 23 cities on permitting speed, development fees, and planning features, makes the pattern hard to ignore. Edmonton ranked first overall for the second consecutive study. Halifax jumped to second from eighth, recording the largest improvement in approval timelines of any city measured. Calgary ranked fifth. The study’s top three overall were Edmonton, Halifax, and London, Ont.—the lone Ontario municipality to crack the top 10, and the exception that proves the rule: seven of the bottom 10 municipalities were in Ontario, and two were British Columbia’s largest cities. Vancouver ranked 17th. Toronto ranked 21st.

The construction numbers follow the same logic. Alberta, with under 12 percent of Canada’s population, accounted for nearly a quarter of the country’s housing starts in 2025. The province recorded close to 54,900 housing starts, a 14 percent increase over the prior year and the highest total on record going back at least 70 years, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation data. Edmonton’s updated zoning bylaw produced a 30 percent increase in approved dwelling units in its first full year. Row housing completions rose from an annual average of 146 units in the preceding five years to 1,216 units in 2024. Calgary and Edmonton both set records for annual housing starts among Canada’s six largest metropolitan areas in 2025.

Ontario and British Columbia, which operate the most restrictive land use regimes among the provinces covered by the Demographia data, are building the least and are the most expensive. CMHC data show Toronto’s housing starts fell 31 percent in 2025, reaching the lowest per-capita level among Canada’s seven largest metropolitan areas. Ontario, with nearly 40 percent of the national population, now builds less housing per capita than Alberta.

Vancouver combines the country’s worst affordability with a new legal complication. The August 2025 British Columbia Supreme Court ruling in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada declared Aboriginal title over privately held urban land in Richmond, the first ruling of its kind in Canada. A developer has already lost project financing due to unresolved title uncertainty.

The ruling is under appeal, but its chilling effect on housing supply in the country’s least affordable metropolitan area is real and immediate.

Federal housing strategy has largely responded to this crisis with the wrong tools. The Housing Accelerator Fund, the Rapid Housing Initiative, and the Affordable Housing Fund collectively represent tens of billions of dollars directed at the symptoms of a supply constraint without removing the constraint itself. They are, at best, inefficient. At worst, they provide political cover for the provincial and municipal governments that built and maintain the regulatory barriers responsible for the problem.

The international comparison most instructive for Canada is New Zealand. Auckland remains severely unaffordable, with a median multiple of 7.7, but that is an improvement from 8.6 in 2019. As the Demographia report documents, the National-led coalition government’s Going for Housing Growth program requires local governments to maintain competitive land markets at the urban fringe, with price monitoring embedded in the framework. When the gap between urban and rural land values widens, it signals constrained supply and triggers mandatory corrective action.

Infrastructure for new greenfield development is financed through special-purpose vehicles, with repayment by beneficiaries over up to 50 years, removing the fiscal objection that Canadian municipalities routinely raise against suburban expansion. Canada has no equivalent reform at any level of government.

After making promises for years to address the housing crisis, Ottawa continues to attribute it to forces beyond its control. The data from Ottawa’s own housing agencies and international affordability surveys now point in the other direction. Edmonton is the third most affordable market among 96 surveyed across eight countries. Vancouver is the fifth worst. The difference is shaped far more by land-use policy than by global macroeconomics. Policy can be changed.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release “Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic,” co-authored with Barry Cooper.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.