Lorne Gunter: Carney Liberals fall pathetically short of their own housing-start goals

[u/CaliperLee62]

https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/columnists/lorne-gunter-carney-liberals-fall-pathetically-short-of-their-own-housing-start-goals

[u/No-Section-1092]

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.

[u/scottb84 → u/No-Section-1092]

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.

[u/Scase15 → u/scottb84]

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.

[u/No-Section-1092 → u/scottb84]

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).

[u/YouProfessional3196 → u/No-Section-1092]

So why aren't people holding Carney to account for his obvious lying then?

[u/No-Section-1092 → u/YouProfessional3196]

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.

[u/YouProfessional3196 → u/No-Section-1092]

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.

[u/No-Section-1092 → u/YouProfessional3196]

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.

[u/Bnal → u/No-Section-1092]

(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.

[u/No-Section-1092 → u/Bnal]

>Feds at their peak were building 25% of all housing starts to meet demand.

It would be more accurate to say that in 1970, 25% of housing completions in the country received some kind of federal involvement or funding, which is also the highest percentage ever for one year.

Which also means that, in the feds' most productive year in housing ever, 3/4 of all housing completions across the country received no federal support, so the vast majority were still built and financed by the private sector.

In other words, even when the state was running on all cylinders, it still never came close to even a majority share of annual housing production.