The Liberal government on Friday launched what it is calling “the most comprehensive and ambitious housing plan ever seen in Canada” with plans to build 3.9 million new homes by 2031.Flanked by finance minister Chrystia Freeland and housing minister Sean Fraser in Vaughan, ON, Trudeau said his government wanted to make sure no Canadian puts more than 30% of their income towards housing through an approach centred on massively ramping up construction while making it easier to rent or own and help those who can’t afford a home..As part of the plan, the capital cost allowance rate for apartments will be increased from 4% to 10%, meaning builders can write off more from their taxes. The GST exemption on constructing rentals will be extended to student residences built by public universities, school authorities and colleges.Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars have been set aside to address homelessness.Trudeau also hinted at more dollars in the upcoming budget for skilled trades and apprenticeship opportunities to generate the masses of new workers needed to build them all.“The construction industry will need reinforcements to get all this work done,” Trudeau said. “Canada is working hard under our government to pass legislation that is about workers and about supporting the kinds of good clean jobs that the future is going to bring.”.The government is also considering opening public lands for leasing."Where the public interest demands maintaining ownership of public land, the federal government will maintain ownership but make land available through long-term leases to ensure that land can be used for housing," said Housing Minister Sean Fraser. Details will be unveiled in Budget 2024 on April 16..“Canada faces an historic gap between population growth and the number of homes built—and Canadians are paying the price,”Fraser Institute.Speaking in Calgary last week, Trudeau called it one of the largest “industrial” undertakings in Canadian history.It’s a tall order; according to Statistics Canada, there were only an average of 205,000 units built between 2018-2022 compared to average population growth of 553,568 in the same period.The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) estimated in 2023 that 5.8 million new homes would need to be built by 2030 — almost a million per year — to restore broad affordability in the housing market.According to the Fraser Institute, in 2022 the population grew by 4.7 people for every unit completed the prior year, the biggest discrepancy in Canadian history.Meanwhile, housing completions have stabilized or declined. Nationally, Canada has yet to build more homes annually than it did during the 1970s. This is also the case in 9 of 10 provinces.“Canada faces an historic gap between population growth and the number of homes built—and Canadians are paying the price,” said senior fellow Josef Filipowicz..According to the institute, the issue has numerous consequences for individuals and families’ economic, physical and mental well-being, and risks jeopardizing Canada’s place as a prosperous, upwardly mobile society. “Without closing the wide, growing gap between housing demand (population growth) and housing supply (housing completions), Canadians’ current struggles with high housing costs are likely to persist, if not worsen.”According to a Fraser study, Alberta had the highest average annual ratio (2.4) of population growth to housing completions of any province between 1973 and 2022, driven in part by Alberta’s consistently robust population growth throughout most of the period. Indeed, faced with higher population growth (in absolute terms) than Quebec, on average, Alberta was one of only two provinces able to subsequently reach levels of homebuilding comparable to, albeit slightly lower than, its rate achieved in the 1970s.
