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Canada’s population has more than doubled since 1960 to more than 40 million, but housing starts haven’t kept pace.
New home construction in northwest London is seen here in September 2024. (Derek Ruttan/London Free Press)
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If you want to understand the story of Canada, you have to think in terms of national character. Nations, like people, go through phases. They have moments of boldness and moments of retreat.
Our housing predicament tells the tale of the latter. All political parties committed to it in this last election, but they’re frightfully late to the cause.
Canada’s population has more than doubled since 1960 to more than 40 million. But housing starts haven’t kept pace. In 2024, 245,000 housing starts took place. Most analysts suggest this country needs at least 500,000 to 700,000 a year just to meet demand. And that shortfall is cumulative. It’s been going on for decades and will take years to fix.
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If you’re searching for the most fundamental cause of homelessness in Canada, this is it. There are numerous other factors, but without homes, nothing else can really work.
We once had a moral ethos, a set of shared assumptions: that large public projects were good, that growth should be managed for the public interest, that government could be a steward of national development. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) was created in 1946 to ensure Canadians could afford homes. Government took an active role in making sure there was something to finance: subdivisions, town centres, utility grids, schools, hospitals, and much more.
Urban planning became a form of civic patriotism. Building wasn’t just about economics, it was about shaping the nation and communities. This was also the golden age of public confidence in experts. Technocrats, engineers, and planners held considerable sway. You could plan decades ahead. You could think in generations. Canada could not only keep up with the world, it could lead it.
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But sometime around the late 1980s, that ethos faded. And for the past 40 years, Canada slowly has been retreating from its identity as a building nation. It didn’t collapse, but it quietly stalled.
Faith in government as a competent builder eroded. The mood turned inward. Across the Western world, neoliberalism gained traction. In Canada, that meant free trade, deregulation, and a pullback from big public works.
The 1990s were a particularly pivotal decade. The federal government, under intense pressure to tame deficits, downloaded responsibilities to the provinces, which in turn offloaded them to municipalities. Public works became synonymous with red tape rather than progress.
Canada has approximately 426 housing units per 1,000 people. In 2015, the ratio was 431 units per 1,000 people, indicating that housing construction has not kept pace with population growth.
This ratio places Canada at the bottom among G7 countries in terms of housing units per capita. To match the G7 average, Canada would need to build an additional 1.8 million housing units. If we aren’t a building nation anymore, how will it be accomplished?
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Meanwhile, public housing construction has slowed to a crawl. CMHC, the agency that helped birth Canada’s suburbs, now plays a more passive financial role. Many municipalities rely heavily on private developers to address housing needs, but that approach hasn’t kept pace with the need. The result is cities growing not according to a plan, but according to a market logic that leaves people out.
And perhaps most importantly, the narrative has changed. In the 1950s and ’60s, infrastructure was part of the national story. Today, it’s a niche policy file. But these are not just questions of policy alone; they are questions of national identity.
The good news is the capacity still exists. Canada has engineers. It has builders and planners. It has capital. What it needs is to recover that old confidence, not in a nostalgic sense, but in a pragmatic one. We require a renewed and urgent partnership between the public and private sectors to build the accommodations we need, in a spirit of intention and coordination.
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The postwar generation knew this. They believed building was not just a means to economic growth, it was a moral project, a declaration of what kind of country they wanted to inhabit, with homes for everyone. That belief built the Canada we live in today.
Are we on the verge of correcting a decades-long oversight and ushering in a new age of building? If so, our future can be recovered.
Glen Pearson is co-director of the London Food Bank and a former Liberal MP for London North Centre. glen@glenpearson.ca
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