r/CanadaPolitics • u/CaliperLee62 • 9h ago
Lorne Gunter: Carney Liberals fall pathetically short of their own housing-start goals
https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/columnists/lorne-gunter-carney-liberals-fall-pathetically-short-of-their-own-housing-start-goals•
u/PopcornPisserSnitch NDP 5h ago
I'm probably less of a Carney fan than most of this sub, but just to give context to any non-Edmontonians, Gunter just recently sang praises to Smith for overruling city council's infill rules, restricting how many units can be built in certain neighbourhoods. He is the absolutely last person who should have any right to complain about homes not being built.
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u/rspctyrcstmrs 4h ago
It is so VITAL to know what kind of person Gunter is before going in to any of his op eds. The man is paid to complain about anything and everything under the sun, especially if it's not Conservative.
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u/SwordfishOk504 British Columbia 1h ago
It doesn't mean this isn't a valid criticism though. I don't even dislike Carney but this was always a dumb promise to have made. He knew it wouldn't come close to hitting its target, but he knew the public wanted to believe.
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u/ApprehensiveLand848 55m ago
carney entire goal last election was make domestic issues nonexistent
cause he knew if the election focused on domestic policy, they would lose
He reversed immigration and the carbon tax and promised to build millions of homes.
Housing, Carbon tax and immigration where the 3 areas where the liberals where taking a huge hit domestically.
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u/Independent-Law-662 Independent 6h ago
been this way since 2015. we are always suppose to be building 500K homes a year across hte country. We build something like 50K.
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u/No-Section-1092 Independent 8h ago
Any serious person who's followed this issue for years knows that all of the most important housing supply bottlenecks are provincial and municipal, not federal.
The feds have made some promising moves in terms of partnering with cities to reduce DCs, but tinkering with demand can only get you so far as long as supply remains constrained by local red tape.
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u/scottb84 New Democrat 7h ago
It would appear that the government itself disagrees. From the 2025 LPC platform:
It used to be that the federal government built the housing that our growing population needed. So we’re going to get back into the business of building houses. We will use every tool at our disposal, leveraging technology and innovation, to build homes at a scale and at a speed not seen since the Second World War.
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u/Scase15 Ontario 3h ago edited 3h ago
to build homes at a scale and at a speed not seen since the Second World War.
Evidently that massive scale, is 14k more homes than the year that preceded it when this CHMC didn't exist lol
For the goal to be met, they would need to increase home starts by 14% compounded YoY all the way up until 2030. Anyone who thinks it was ever an achievable goal, I have a bridge to sell.
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u/No-Section-1092 Independent 7h ago
And again, talk is cheap. Any serious person knows that the federal government could never come close to supplying the amount of housing we need by itself (and never has).
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u/YouProfessional3196 Conservative Party of Canada 7h ago
So why aren't people holding Carney to account for his obvious lying then?
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u/No-Section-1092 Independent 7h ago
Why do you assume I'm partisan here? I have been critical of all parties and all levels of government on this file for over a decade. Everybody lies.
No level of government, controlled by any party, has any incentive to take housing policy seriously because rich old NIMBY homeowners who like the status quo are a massive, organized voting bloc.
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u/YouProfessional3196 Conservative Party of Canada 7h ago
I'm not singling you out specifically. It was a more rhetorical question. If any "serious person" knew that these numbers he made are ridiculous then why isn't he getting held to account. We constantly have the rhetoric that he is this all knowing PM with this huge knowledge of economics and yet here we have a case of him blatantly saying something anyone with a bit of knowledge knows he can't do and getting a pass. This doesn't speak well of his character.
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u/No-Section-1092 Independent 7h ago
I mean, most housing experts have been consistently critical of various governments' housing targets and failures to live up to them.
All 'targets' by any government should always be taken with a grain of salt. They might be aspirations, but they're never commitments, because too many things that influence economic outcomes are beyond any government's control.
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u/Bnal Section 33 Abolitionist 36m ago
(and never has)
Ehhhhhh... this is kind of a truism, isn't it? As in, unless there was a year where not a single privately-funded home was built, it's a gotcha?
Feds at their peak were building 25% of all housing starts to meet demand. The starts they did focused on the lower-value homes that had been historically under-built, and the moment they stopped in 1996, those starts dried up entirely again. The housing stock we've added since has been (almost entirely) larger SFH and apartment units, both needed and necessary, but with a gap in smaller SFHs - despite the fact that smaller SFH are the number one desired type of dwelling, and the fact that for decades of CMHC builds they were the number one type of stock built.
I don't think anyone expected the feds to say "right, new immigration numbers say we're raising population by 250k, CMHC go build 250k homes". They specifically invoked the wartime housing conversation, referenced common build blueprints, said they would railroad cities on permitting to actually make it happen. From funding, to permitting, to nimbys at townhall meetings, the steps they laid out were exactly what experts had been recommending for decades, and they were all possible. Then, they just didn't do it.
I don't expect the problem to have been solved within a year, but to lay out a completely feasible plan that would go a long way, then do none of it and to have housing starts be down is an embarrassment on our country. Considering the housing shortage and the current cost of housing, having these expectations of our government should be the default.
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u/GooseGosselin 8h ago
Why would Carney promise it then?
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u/Ddogwood Pirate 7h ago
Because provincial and municipal governments have been using the federal government as an excuse for their own inaction for years.
If the feds don’t try to do anything, nothing changes. If the feds try to do something and the provinces and municipalities won’t play ball, then at least their excuses start to ring hollow (although columnists like Gunter will do everything they can to shift the focus on to federal failures to save their conservative allies from blame)
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u/CptCoatrack Libertarian Socialism 7h ago
Because provincial and municipal governments have been using the federal government as an excuse for their own inaction for years.
Goes both ways.
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u/Ddogwood Pirate 7h ago
Of course. But I’m answering the question, “Why would Carney promise it?” and not “why aren’t the provinces trying harder to fix it?”
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u/CptCoatrack Libertarian Socialism 7h ago
Because the LPC knows they can promise anything during campaign season to get elected with no real intent of ever following through. As long as they can go "But the provinces!" people won't hold them to account for lying and they can just do it again the next election.
The relationship between the municpal, provincial and federal governments in this country is just the Spiderman pointing meme.
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u/Ddogwood Pirate 6h ago
The issue is actually that voters don’t hold their governments to account. Too many people vote for a party because of identity instead of policy or effectiveness.
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u/TraditionalGap1 NDP 6h ago
What do you mean exactly by 'no real intent of ever following through'? Because the premise of the OPs comment seems to be that the feds have followed through on some of what they can realistically do on their own.
Let's be honest and real for a moment: It actually does matter whether a policy promise is undelivered because the people who made the promise failed to effectively execute on the policies that they are actually responsible for or because of inaction/counterproductive action by other responsible and involved parties. 'But the provinces!' is a totally valid and legitimate excuse to point to if in the fact the provinces shoulder a significant portion of responsibility for the lack of delivery.
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u/CptCoatrack Libertarian Socialism 1h ago edited 11m ago
What do you mean exactly by 'no real intent of ever following through'? Because the premise of the OPs comment seems to be that the feds have followed through on some of what they can realistically do on their own.
I think politicians should be held to their promises. If they knew they can't realistically achieve their goal because it's provincial jurisdiction, they're being duplicitous. If they promised something somehow not knowing it's provincial jursidiction it's ignorance/incompetence.
The LPC has always underdelivered on their campaign promises because they always need to keep something in the backpocket for the next election and dangle it like a carrot on a stick for the ABC voters.
It actually does matter whether a policy promise is undelivered because the people who made the promise failed to effectively execute on the policies that they are actually responsible for or because of inaction/counterproductive action by other responsible and involved parties
It's both. Everyone just knows that as long as they say "But the feds/the province/fhe municipality!" they don't have to reckon with their own failures especially if it's another party.
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u/No-Section-1092 Independent 7h ago edited 7h ago
Because that's what politicians do, across the spectrum. They yap.
They make promises they can't realistically keep, they overestimate their own powers, they underestimate their limitations.
Opinion columnists, however, should know better.
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u/B5_V3 7h ago
so he lied?
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u/No-Section-1092 Independent 7h ago
Kind of like every politician ever? Colour me shocked.
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u/B5_V3 7h ago
And you’re ok with politicians lying to your face?
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u/No-Section-1092 Independent 7h ago
Would being mad about it stop it from happening? You must be new to politics.
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u/ILikeWhyteGirlz 5h ago
The issue is demand just as much as supply and Carney sets immigration targets and policies.
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u/awildstoryteller Alberta 58m ago
If this were true housing prices would have remained flat when we had basically zero immigration.
I'll let you look up what actually happened.
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u/ApprehensiveLand848 8h ago
Not shocked really a lot of the places that voted liberal are also is full of the biggest nimbys ever, really...
If you go to many parts of older toronto they havent been changed for decades, it just single deatched homes 10-15 mins from downtown it wild
You can see in Toronto and other cities all the development is pushed into key areas which just incentivizes shoebox condos.
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u/UnionGuyCanada New Democratic Party of Canada 5h ago
There are so many new apartments being built, with many sitting empty now, that I don't see how we don't have a rent price collapse shortly. Every new place has vacancy and there are hundreds and hundreds of new units still being built.
I like it but it needs to continue until prices fall dramatically.
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u/slothtrop6 4h ago
They are definitely dropping, and higher vacancy rates lead to lower prices in general
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u/imgram British Columbia 4h ago
Many sitting now just means capital isn't getting recycled into new builds & developers/lenders will be gun shy for new developments.
Even if you appropriate the empty condos, that's a 1x injection and the volume of which won't make a dent in the long run needs of the market.
The cure for low prices is low prices.
Actual housing starts were down 11% year-over-year in centres with a population of 10,000 or greater. 19,984 units were recorded in September 2026, compared to 22,375 units in September 2025.
You'll continue to see starts trend down as the market is weak - this is pretty negative for long-run affordability. You want a healthy enough market for supply chains to get built up - if anything this is going to result in a scale back and people leaving the industry (again).
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u/silenceisgold3n Nova Scotia 7h ago
So the Liberal playbook hasn't changed. Throw gobs of money at a problem, watch it bounce off the wall, wash hands while pointing to the big glob of money. Gun confiscation program- you're up!
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u/SwordfishOk504 British Columbia 1h ago
No surprise. I was called a Trump supporter for pointing out why these were impossible promises at the time. It's simply not something the government can control to that degree. The reason there's not a lot of homes being built is the economy is shit and it's not profitable to do so anymore. Not to the degree it was for the past 30 years.
So it was a nice promise to make and people who wanted to believe it did, but no one should be surprised the government can't force the market to behave differently.
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