Thank you, Chair.
Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for having me here.
I'm going to start with three things, not magic wands, that might matter.
First, the next national housing strategy should create targets for affordable market and non-market housing completions, not starts. That builds on some of the testimony you heard in the last hour.
Second, the next national housing strategy should adopt one definition of affordable housing for all of its programs, and that should be based on an area's median household income bands. Middle-income people need different interventions from low-income people.
Third, the federal government should adopt programs to achieve targets of 200,000 new or acquired affordable non-market homes being developed per year, with half of these being deeply affordable for very low- to low-income households, towards an eventual goal of 20% of all housing stock being non-market.
I have written a book called Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis and I've done some recent work for the federal housing advocate on a rights-based approach to housing needs.
I want to start with the title of this particular hearing. We should be measuring housing completions, not starts, because people can't live on a construction site, and there are too many stalled projects in Canada. That's something my colleague would definitely agree with.
Despite greater federal engagement in housing policy since the 2017 national housing strategy, construction trends simply do not match the urgency of the moment. The CMHC stopped tracking completions from 2023 to 2025, but there were fewer housing starts in 2025 than there were in 2022, and there were fewer housing completions in 2022 than there were 50 years earlier, in 1972, when Canada had half the population it does today and families were larger.
The national housing strategy has provided over $110 billion in financial support, mostly for market developers, over the last eight years, but less than 10% of their housing completion targets have been met. Only 3% of the only 18,000 rental homes completed under the $55-billion apartment construction loan program since 2017 have been affordable to the low-income households most likely to be in housing need, and these were mostly studio apartments, which are unsuitable to couples and families.
What's even worse than poor housing completions is worsening housing outcomes. I think you heard that in the last hour. By any measure, such as middle-income home ownership affordability, low-income tenant affordability or homelessness, Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis. Canada's median multiple for home ownership is now almost two times the affordable cost. It's three times the affordable cost in Toronto and four times in Vancouver.
Trying to bring house prices down to half or a quarter of what they are in a short period of time, like a decade, is a recipe for economic disaster, and it certainly won't lead to more than doubling housing supply, as the CMHC recommends. For instance, in Toronto, where condo prices have fallen 18% since 2022 and sales volumes have dropped 95% from 2021, there were no new condo projects registered in the first quarter of 2026.
The national housing strategy's two headline targets were to reduce core housing need by 530,000 households and to reduce chronic homelessness by 50%, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer projects that housing need will have increased from 1.7 million households in 2016 to 2.6 million households in the 2026 census. Chronic homelessness doubled from 2018 to 2022.
There is only one way to address those basic needs: Invest in non-market and limited dividend affordable housing.
There are three things that the federal government needs to do.
Focus finance on the needs of most Canadians. The federal government should limit its low-interest financing to projects that are 100% affordable to the majority of Canadians. Very low-income to median-income households are 60% of households and 100% of those in unaffordable housing. That means rents of no more than $2,500 per month nationally and ownership homes that cost no more than $254,000. It would be less in Gander, where incomes are lower, and more in Victoria, where incomes are higher.