Canada’s newly announced housing plan includes a variety of measures intended to encourage faster, lower-cost construction, increase housing affordability, and ultimately make it easier for Canadians to rent or buy a home. Calling it “the most comprehensive and ambitious housing plan ever seen in Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emphasized that his “bold new strategy” would lead to the construction of 3.87 million homes by 2031.

While the Federation of Rental-Housing Providers of Ontario (FRPO) says it welcomes the government’s introduction of “significant and expanded low-cost financing” and other financial supports to encourage high-density, purpose-built rental construction, some groups felt the plan left a little to be desired. Betsy Agar, director of the Buildings Program at the Pembina Institute described the government’s green housing initiatives as “a good first step” but with a few notable gaps.

“We welcome the federal government housing plan announcement and the $903.5 million investment in the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program, renewing and improving existing energy efficiency programs and continuing to develop national approaches to home energy labelling,“ she wrote. “While these investments represent progress on some priority issues for greener housing, it leaves significant gaps on other critical housing safety and affordability challenges for Canadians and falls short of what’s needed to reach a rate of 600,000 home retrofits per year.”

The plan includes another $400 million toward the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) in addition to a new $6 billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund to accelerate both the construction and upgrading of critical housing infrastructure. It also legalizes more housing types by adopting zoning that allows four units as-of-right and that permits more “missing middle” homes, including duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, and small multi-unit apartments.

New (and previously announced) supply-boosting measures include:

• A Public Lands for Homes Plan to lead a national effort to build affordable housing on federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal lands across the country.
• $15 billion in additional loans for the Apartment Construction Loan Program to build a minimum of 30,000 new rental apartments, in big cities, small towns, and rural communities. With this additional financing, the program is on track to build over 131,000 new apartments by 2031-32.
• Launching Canada Builds, a “Team Canada” approach to building affordable homes for the middle class on under-utilized lands. Canada Builds combines federal low-cost loans with provincial and territorial investments to scale up construction on rental homes for the middle class.
• Supporting Indigenous Peoples living away from their communities in urban, rural, and northern areas through investments in Indigenous housing to be delivered by Indigenous governments, organizations and service providers.
• Putting measures in place to protect tenants against “unfairly rising rent payments” including the Tenant Protection Fund.
• Extending mortgage amortizations to 30 years exclusively for first-time home buyers purchasing new builds.
• Providing $1 billion for the Affordable Housing Fund to build affordable homes and launch a permanent Rapid Housing Stream to build on the success of the previous three rounds.
• Launching a $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund to protect and expand affordable housing.

The Prime Minister also announced the following new measures to attract, train, and hire the skilled-trade workers Canada needs to build more homes:

• $90 million for the Apprenticeship Service, creating apprenticeship opportunities to train and recruit the next generation of skilled trades workers.
• $10 million for the Skilled Trades Awareness and Readiness program to encourage high school students to enter the skilled trades.
• $50 million in the Foreign Credential Recognition Program, with a focus on residential construction to help skilled trades workers get more homes built. Like the previous $115 million investment, this funding will remove barriers to credential recognition so workers spend less time dealing with red-tape.

Click here for more info: Canada’s Housing Plan | Prime Minister of Canada (pm.gc.ca)