Is the government only consulting the housing development industry?

Where is social housing in the government’s rhetoric that seems to only focus on housing supply? Despite evidence that building social housing is more cost-efficient over time than shelters or housing subsidies, the government refuses to build at scale this kind of housing that is in under supply. As a result, Canada’s total stock of non-market housing currently sits at a shamefully low 3.5% compared to most other similar countries, where the OECD average of non-market housing stock is 6.9%.

The most devastating flaw in the federal government’s current strategy is that the loss of affordable housing far outpaces new construction. Between 2016 and 2021, Canada lost 230,000 affordable rental units on the private market. This means that while the government hyper-focuses on building new market-based housing units, Canadians lose 46,000 genuinely affordable rentals annually.