In its recent fiscal update, the Carney government should have shown Canadians whether or not one of its key housing initiatives, the Build Canada Homes (BCH) agency, is delivering results. Instead, the update merely repeated headline claims about the many homes BCH has “supported” without providing the information Canadians need to judge whether the agency is providing good value for its five-year $13 billion budget.
The BCH approach has been deeply flawed from its inception. Ottawa created the agency not only to build and finance “affordable” housing, but also to promote politically-favoured building materials, sustainability targets and factory-built construction methods. These goals are in obvious tension. If certain materials or construction methods are already cost-effective and aligned with what homebuyers and renters want, builders have every reason to use them. But when Ottawa uses taxpayer dollars to push builders toward choices they would not otherwise make, it risks adding needless costs and producing homes Canadian families would not otherwise choose.
Simply put, the federal government cannot credibly promise cost-effective “affordable” housing while steering builders toward its own preferences, primarily because federal bureaucrats at BCH do not know better than private builders and investors which housing projects, materials and technologies can deliver the affordable homes Canadians actually want. What BCH will have, however, is an enormous budget—enough to bid workers, materials and construction equipment away from private homebuilders, even if the housing projects it backs ultimately provide worse value for money.
Just as troubling, BCH has never been tied to a clear public accountability framework. The agency has announced plenty of numbers (e.g. that it will “build 4,000 factory-built homes” on an unspecified timeline). But such figures are not meaningful absent some coherent standard by which Canadians could judge whether BCH is delivering additional affordable housing at a reasonable cost to taxpayers.
The Carney government’s fiscal recent update continued this bad habit, telling Canadians that BCH has “committed to supporting thousands of new housing units” in partnership with provincial and municipal governments. Yet neither the update nor any publicly available reporting commits BCH to clear targets for how many homes BCH “support” will unlock, or on what timeline. Canadians are also left in the dark about just how “affordable” BCH-supported homes will be and how much they’ll cost to construct. Nor is it clear how Canadians will know whether BCH support was actually necessary for a chosen project to proceed.
Instead, the Carney government seems content to continue announcing housing numbers that cast BCH as a success, without explaining clearly what the agency is expected to deliver with its budget or what it has achieved so far. These are not minor reporting gaps. They go to the heart of whether BCH is a serious affordability initiative or merely an expensive vehicle for Ottawa to claim progress on housing while spending billions of taxpayer dollars.
Carney’s fiscal update should have helped answer these questions. Instead, it repeated headline numbers with little substance. For a government claiming to take housing affordability seriously, that’s not good enough.
Austin Thompson and Jake Fuss are analysts at the Fraser Institute.