Prime Minister Mark Carney is standing by his promise to double home construction to 500,000 units a year, even as federal data shows the target is far beyond the country’s current building capacity.
Blacklock’s Reporter says Carney offered no explanation for how his government plans to overcome the well-documented obstacles.
Suppose the Prime Minister and his government are serious about making life more affordable for Canadians. In that case, there’s a simple, practical move that would offer direct relief: Allow homeowners to deduct mortgage interest from their income taxes.
Jeffrey Dowell and Barbara Poushinsky’s home in the rural community of Rideau Ferry, Ont., about an hour outside Ottawa, has a barn-style gable roof and chipper red siding. Inside, the high ceiling, large windows and open-concept layout in the kitchen-living room give the home a modern feel, while wooden pillars throughout the space add a rustic touch.
The 1,200-square-foot house is chic and homey, and kitted out with features that will help the retired couple age in place. You’d never know much of it was built in a factory and delivered to their property on the back of a truck.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” — Anatole France, from The Red Lily.
In 2014, Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I wrote a weeklong series of stories identifying the government social welfare programs — and their cost to taxpayers — in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
The numbers were staggering …
Along a busy street on the west end of downtown, another new rental building is going up — but instead of being built from scratch, prefabricated units are being craned into place, piece by piece.
Each box being stacked contains two studio apartments, already filled with appliances like fridges, stoves, washers and dryers.
Altogether, the pieces will make up 84 studio apartments across six storeys.
In Toronto today it’s deemed entirely acceptable to build a mammoth residential/retail/commercial/hotel tower reaching 80, 90 or 100-and-more storeys into an increasingly obliterated sky, and be celebrated for your vision, ambition and architectural brashness. But just try to get permission for a modest structure able to house six families and see how far you get.
In a very civil tone, the mayor of Windsor, Ont., is asking the fresh faces in the Mark Carney-led Liberal government to butt out of city planning. Mayor Drew Dilkens especially wants to see an end to Trudeau-era affordable housing mandates from Ottawa that don’t serve his community.
“They were just hell-bent on putting forward this really left-principled version of what housing should be,” Drew says of the conditions imposed on cities under the $4-billion housing accelerator fund launched in 2023 by then federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser.
Ottawa is quietly working on launching a new entity it hopes will be key to housing affordability
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has been quiet since the federal election about the housing crisis, the same issue that contributed to the Liberals’ fading popularity under their previous leader.
Behind the scenes, however, housing stakeholders are fielding a flurry of calls from government officials seeking their advice on the creation of Build Canada Homes, a new federal entity that Mr. Carney has said will get the government back in the business of homebuilding.
Realtor Barry Lebow specializes in helping seniors downsize — moving out of the family homes they’ve lived in for decades to a smaller place that’s a better fit for their aging lifestyle.
From the outside, that might look like the natural progression: feeding a healthy bit of turnover into the housing supply as move-up buyers seek their own family home.
But the reality is a bit different when it comes time to sell, Lebow, who works in the Greater Toronto Area, said in an interview.
Douglas Todd: To understand why Mark Carney’s goal of building 500,000 houses a year won’t happen, look to New Zealand and the harsh realities right now of making a profit in real estate.
The unspoken maxim within Canadian political circles, I’m told, is that elected officials just can’t win when it comes to either public health care or housing affordability.
No matter what politicians do, voters will continue to complain about poor access to medical care or feel aggravated about super-expensive housing prices.
That’s often why, when it comes to the massive files of health and housing, elected officials go out of their way to at least look like they’re doing something. And to look like they’re being bold.
According to new data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., home building in Ontario plummeted in the first half of 2025 compared with prior years, making Premier Doug Ford’s target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031 look increasingly far-fetched.
While building more homes remains a challenge across much of Canada, the particularly sharp decline in Ontario undermines national progress. In the first half of 2025, housing starts in Ontario fell by 25 per cent compared with last year. Meanwhile, the rest of Canada saw a 17-per-cent increase in starts during the same period.
Doug Ford may finally get to be Toronto’s “mayor” after all.
When investigators found “mismanagement” at four Ontario school boards, the premier’s education minister, Paul Calandra, did the courageous thing and stood up for students and parents. A bunch of us applauded the appointment of new, all-powerful “supervisors,” the gates of hell didn’t open and voters promptly returned to enjoying the warm summer breezes.
Given Toronto’s turbo-charged housing crisis, how much more rope will Ford give city council before appointing his own team of pilots to help pull Canada’s largest city out of its current nosedive? It’s goofy to build $100 billion in transit infrastructure if developers can’t launch new projects to take advantage of this generational investment.
About 100 households awaiting an eviction decision over a two-year rent strike say they rejected their landlord’s final settlement offer because it would “silence” them if future issues were to arise.
The tenants at 71, 75 and 79 Thorncliffe Park Dr. stopped paying landlord Starlight Investments in 2023, claiming the landlord purposely left their apartments in disrepair and gave them unfair, unaffordable above-guideline rent increases (AGIs). The landlord said the AGIs were necessary to cover improvements to the building.
When settlement talks ordered by the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) broke down at the end of March, the landlord continued pursuing eviction, with hearings taking place over four days in June. A decision could come within weeks or months.
This is the heart of Mosqueteria land. It will be interesting to see how the Board rules.
The Thorncliff Park neighborhood in Toronto, ON, Canada has the most densely populated Muslim community in North America. Entire condo units have been converted into small mosques!
TT/asimafsar_ pic.twitter.com/EbLRe6lso0
— sammy 2.0 (@Sammy_canada2) July 18, 2025
Canada started building only slightly more homes in June than it did in May, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) said on Wednesday.
Compared to May, the annual rate of housing starts was largely flat with a 0.4 per cent increase, but it rose 14 per cent compared to this time last year.
The national numbers mask stark regional disparities, however.
Immigrants arriving in Canada led to a rise in housing prices, accounting for 11 percent of the price increase in smaller towns and 21 percent in cities of more than 100,000 people, according to the Immigration Department.
According to the report “Immigration and Housing Prices Across Municipalities in Canada,” municipal data across Canada from 2006 to 2021 suggest that over the study period, “the rise in the influx of new immigrants, who arrived in Canada within the past five years, on average, accounted for 11 percent of the rise in median house values and in median rents across municipalities with a population of at least 1,000.”
The report, first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter, said this association was “notably more pronounced” in larger municipalities.
