By Tom Parkin
The Mark Carney Liberals campaigned with a pledge to “double the pace” of housing construction, but its much-vaunted flagship Build Canada Homes program, announced in the 2025 Budget, comes nowhere close, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Office.
The PBO also found that despite grandiose claims, Ottawa’s actual investment in housing construction will be cut rapidly over the next five years and the number of housing units built by Build Canada Homes (BCH) will be few.
And while half of what BCH will build will be “affordable,” the numbers are insufficient and the program definitions mean affordable units could actually rent for above market rates.
Funds for housing construction faces 56% cut
The 2025 budget creates BCH with $7.3 billion in new funding over five years. Yearly funding ranges from $920 million and $1.9 billion.
But the budget also severely cuts several existing housing programs. Funding for CMHC’s programs will drop from $6.2 billion next year to $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2029/30. Indigenous Services Canada’s housing investment is cut from $1.5 billion in 2026/27 to $240 million in 2029/30.
The net effect is a decline in total housing investment from $9.8 billion in 2025/26 to $4.1 billion in 2029/30, a 56 per cent drop.
BCH will add just 2.5% more housing, not double
And BCH will come nowhere close to delivering the housing impact the Mark x Carney promised.
Far from doubling the pace of construction, BHC will construct just 26,000 additional housing units from 2026/27 to 2029/30. The PBO did not calculate the number of units that won’t be built due to funding cuts to existing housing programs.
And 26,000 units over five years is just 433 additional units constructed in an average month. CMHC’s November data showed an average of 17,500 housing units were started in the past twelve months. Adding another 433 units would be a 2.5 per cent increase, closer to a rounding error on zero than a 100 per cent increase.
When “affordable” doesn’t mean affordable
Of the 26,000 units to be constructed by BCH, only 13,000 are defined as affordable for low income households, nowhere close to addressing even the most extreme tip of the housing crisis.
There are 80,000 homeless people just in Ontario, according to a 2025 report by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. Even if all the BCH resources were focused on just Ontario homelessness, it would only address only a sixth of the problem.
And the BCH definition of affordable doesn’t even mean the new units would be below the average rent of the area.
On average in Canada, monthly rent on a two-bedroom apartment would be considered “affordable” at $2,168 or less, the PBO found. But the national median rent on two-bedroom housing is $1,100 per month, says the PBO. The average asking rent for two bedroom housing in November was $2,179, according to Rentals.ca.
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