Thank you.
I'd like to begin with two suggested friendly amendments to Bill C-20.
The first is that Bill C-20 be adopted with the following amendment: “The purpose of the Corporation is to promote, support and develop the supply of affordable non-market housing in Canada.” The added word would be “non-market”.
As a second suggested recommendation, as part of the renewal of the national housing strategy this year, the following standard definition of “affordable housing” should be adopted. This would include adding some words to the Build Canada Homes website to say, “Affordable housing means spending less than 30% of a household's pre-tax income on housing”—this would be the addition—“and energy costs, with a focus on very low- to median-income households.”
Furthermore, I recommend that the Build Canada Homes income bands be adjusted to be consistent with the federal government's recommended definitions in their municipal needs assessments.
I know these are very technical points. I'm happy to answer any big-picture questions.
I'm a senior housing researcher at University of Toronto's School of Cities. I'm also the author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis, which was published late in 2024. Among other recent work, I've written a number of reports for the federal housing advocate on a rights-based approach to calculating housing needs and evidence-based approaches to meeting those needs. I've been on the federal government's expert panel on Canada's homebuilding industry. I've written several other reports, including the report cited in the last hour by Maytree on finance, land and construction approaches. Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada consulted with me on the Build Canada Homes framework. However, all points expressed here are my own.
The establishment of Build Canada Homes reflects international evidence-based good practices, so Bill C-20 should be adopted. The use of government land to scale up non-market housing is a hallmark—as said in the earlier hour—of successful initiatives in Canada, from war-time homes in the 1940s to the heyday of public, co-operative and non-profit homebuilding in the 1970s and 1980s. It's been a successful land policy tool for affordable housing, along with long-term, low-rate financing and modern methods of construction, in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Singapore and many other countries.
Sweden, for example, was able to build a million low-cost homes from 1965 to 1974, in what was then a country of eight million people, using these mechanisms.
Canadian government leadership within a large public land portfolio, with the explicit promotion of non-market family housing, allowed 4,000 homes to be developed in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood in Toronto in the 1970s. Equally important was the explicit promotion of non-market housing. One-third was public housing, one-third was non-market co-operative and the remaining third was for two- and three-bedroom family-sized condominiums.
Vienna's Aspern Seestadt has a target of 25,000 homes and 20,000 jobs in a former airfield 10 kilometres from the city core, with 60% non-market housing. That's public housing, but it's also limited-dividend housing associations serving low- to median-income households. The project broke ground in 2009 and now has 11,000 homes and 10,000 jobs.
To address Canada's affordable housing crisis, Build Canada Homes must explicitly prioritize non-market housing for three reasons.
First, non-market development is one of the easiest ways to cut construction costs. There are non-market developers across Canada—from Habitat for Humanity to B.C.'s Community Land Trust—with strong track records of delivering large-scale, mixed-income projects on government land.
Second, evidence clearly shows that non-market housing is more likely to remain affordable over time than private development.
Third, non-market housing was a significant enabler of supply during Canada's building heyday in the early 1970s, when there were more home completions than there are today despite Canada's population having doubled in the last 50 years. Unlike private development, which slows down when profit margins dip—as we're seeing now—non-market, mission-oriented developers have an almost unlimited demand for their homes.
It's vital that Canada use consistent income bands for defining and addressing affordability. In 2023, I counted six separate definitions of affordable housing in federal housing programs that were part of the national housing strategy. Build Canada Homes provides a seventh definition, with its income bands differing from an eighth definition used by the City of Ottawa in its recent Build Canada Homes agreement.
The housing assessment resource tools project, which I've been affiliated with, uses a methodology based on proportion of area median household income, which reflects differences between Gander and Victoria—