Trudeau’s utterly daunting promise to immediately build an Alberta’s worth of new homes
It’s one new home every two minutes … for seven consecutive years
As part of a routine rollout of pre-budget announcements, last week the Trudeau government casually announced that it was going to solve the housing crisis.
In a Friday press release headlined simply “Canada’s Housing Plan,” the Prime Minister’s Office laid out a plan to “unlock 3.87 million new homes by 2031.”
“Canada can and will solve the housing crisis,” read an attached quote by Housing Minister Sean Fraser.
In the media, it was mostly treated as yet another Liberal housing pledge, similar to the week before when the PMO had launched a new “rental protection fund.”
“Federal government launches new housing strategy,” read CBC’s headline on the plan.
But what Ottawa has just pitched as a pre-budget bauble is one of the most mammoth promises ever issued by a Canadian federal government.
In terms of cost, effort and raw logistics, building 3.9 million homes in just seven years would easily rank as one of the most awesome expenditures of national effort outside of the world wars.
It is 552,857 new homes constructed every year for seven consecutive years, in a country that already struggles to build half that each year.
For the last 10 years, the annual rates of new homes has averaged just 197,000. In fact, as per the latest estimates from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the most optimistic forecast is that homebuilders will be able to break ground on 232,267 homes by year’s end (the “pessimistic” scenario is that they’ll manage only 215,989).
