“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

If there’s one thing Canadians can reliably expect from our housing market as we approach the spring, it’s plenty of drama.

No matter which group the market ends up favouring – those in search of a home or those looking to offload one – the high costs and high stakes of Canadian real estate are guaranteed to stir up the kind of suspense typical of a bingeworthy TV show. By its very nature, our market-based housing system is adversarial. It pits buyers against sellers and renters against landlords in a battle for fairness and fortune. That our system produces winners and losers has become a perverse but accepted norm in our society; it’s just the way it works.

By virtually any other measure, however, it doesn’t work very well at all.

Building houses is still affordable; it’s the layers of government that make buying a house prohibitively expensive.

I was driving last week in Toronto, Canada, with the radio on, half-listening to the usual talk‑show chatter, when a guest said something that made me turn up the volume. The host on CFRB 1010 in Toronto was interviewing Richard Lyall, the longtime president of the Residential Construction Council of Ontario. Lyall is not a politician, not an activist, not a partisan warrior. He’s a construction‑industry veteran who has spent more than three decades studying the cost of building homes in Canada. And what he said was stunning in its simplicity.

Ontario’s home-building industry is in crisis, but there’s reason to hope that Premier Doug Ford will come to the rescue.

New home sales numbers in the GTA have never been worse than they were in 2025 and vacant inventory is stockpiling to the point where building more homes doesn’t make financial sense.

More than 30,000 people using Ontario income assistance programs are finding themselves homeless anyway – a number that has dramatically increased since before the pandemic, according to a new report from a Toronto-based human rights organization.

And those surging homelessness rates are linked to stagnant income assistance as even the cheapest apartments tend to cost more than the entire monthly cheques from one major program, researchers from Maytree found.

In the small, northeastern New Brunswick city of Bathurst, homelessness was not even on the radar a few years ago. Today the city of 15,000 is working on opening a 40-bed homeless shelter.

The quaint southwestern Saskatchewan city of Yorkton recently expanded its new emergency shelter to meet growing demand.

And in the remote British Columbia community of 100 Mile House, the town council just bought a specialized firefighting bush truck, to mitigate the risk of out-of-control blazes from homeless people increasingly setting up camp in the surrounding forest.

U.S. President Donald Trump says he wants Congress to codify his plan to ban institutional investors like Blackrock from purchasing single-family homes as part of a push to restore affordability to the housing market.

Canada’s housing market is generally more expensive than the U.S. and ranks as one of the least affordable in the G7 when comparing income-to-price ratios.

Would a similar ban in Canada make sense?

You will own nothing and you will be happy … said some guy with a Nazi dad.