Can Any Party Actually Fix Housing?

We finally got the all the housing platforms and this is what we think of them

Meredith Martin

Mike Moffatt

, and

Sabrina Maddeaux

Apr 25, 2025

In this episode of The Missing Middle, hosts Sabrina Maddeaux and Michael Moffatt discuss the housing platforms of Canada's major federal parties as they approach the April 28 election.

They analyze the promises made by the Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP regarding housing starts and affordability and the implications of these policies on young Canadians. The conversation delves into the commonalities and differences in party platforms, the impact of municipal incentives and rent control, and critiques of the math behind the promises. They also explore the sociological implications of housing policies and the relationship between immigration and housing supply.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So Mike, housing is the issue for Millennials and Gen Z. Polls show it's the top concern for young voters; you know I feel it personally. So let's start with the big headline promise. The Liberals and Conservatives are both promising to double housing starts to around 500,000 homes a year. That obviously sounds huge, but is it at all realistic given the constraints we face?

Mike Moffatt: Building half a million homes anytime soon in a given year is completely unrealistic. It's just not going to happen. We just don't have the labourers, the sort of factories to build factory-built homes, all of the things that we need to scale up that quickly.

And none of the parties are putting in place measures that would get us up to that level, that speed. I would also argue that that's probably not; we shouldn't even be striving for that. We do have a massive housing crisis and a massive housing shortage. Our estimates here put it at about 1.2 million units, and that's going to depend on the type of homes that we need. But we shouldn't try and fill that up right away. Trying to go from the 250,000 homes we have now up to 500,000. And then once that kind of hole is closed, our estimates are that given current immigration and population growth levels, we only have demand for about 200,000 additional homes a year.

So imagine if we somehow pulled this off, where we went from a quarter million homes to a half million homes, and then all of a sudden we had to go back down to a quarter million. There would be massive layoffs, there'd be factories closed, that kind of thing.

Now, fortunately, the good news is we can't get up to half a million. So that's more of a hypothetical problem. But it's a completely unrealistic promise.

I know where it comes from. It comes from the CMHC's housing needs assessment that they did a year or two ago. But that was before recent changes to immigration policy. So, having that level of production, it just isn't necessary.

The three of us, you, me, and Producer Meredith, chatted about this. We have a WhatsApp group chat, and over the weekend, as these policies came out, we exchanged some messages. And one of the things I think that caught us all a little bit by surprise when it came to the housing platforms was just how much they have in common. So, can you run through what are all of the commonalities between the Conservative plan, the Liberal plan, and what the NDP are offering?

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, like you said, there's not a ton of light between them. And we're going to have a piece out soon on this. So look for that on Substack.

But commonalities do include incentives for municipalities and provinces to change policies, recognition that development charges are too high and need to come down, the use of public land to build homes, and both the liberals and conservatives have GST cuts in their platforms.

There are some significant differences in details, of course, but all the parties seem to realize that at least some of the causes and solutions to a lack of housing supply are similar. So let's look at a couple of these now, starting with municipal incentives. Mike, what exactly are the parties offering here?

Mike Moffatt: All of the parties are focusing on lowering municipal development charges. That seems to be sort of the primary focus. Both the Liberals and Conservatives are talking about cutting them in half.

I'm going to say some nasty things about the Conservative numbers later, but I will note that when it comes to the costing, I think the Conservatives were a little bit more realistic on how much money it would take to have development charges.

The Liberals had it, I think, at about $1.5 billion. And basically, I can't imagine municipalities agreeing to that deal. I think the federal government would have to put more money on the table.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, they're raking in just so much money with these charges right now. It's going to be hard to convince a lot of them to bring them down.

Mike Moffatt: Well, absolutely, because not only are they required to bring them down, but it also means that they can't raise them anymore. So the federal government would be tying the hands of municipalities by forcing them to freeze development charges and then lower them by half for a pot of money that might not cover the lost revenue. They put other things in place.

So the Conservatives are talking about scrapping the housing accelerator, but then replacing it with their program to get municipal reforms, which sounds an awful lot like the housing accelerator, with some requirements that a handful of municipalities increase housing starts by 15 percent.

The NDP, on the other hand, have some additional incentives placed at looking at issues like rent control that are more provincial in nature.

And actually, I wanted to ask you about that one, because that is one incentive that isn't consistent across the parties. The Conservatives and Liberals don't say anything about rent control. They say, well, that's a provincial matter. That's not up to us. The NDP, on the other hand, are saying, well, yeah, it is a provincial matter, but we can incentivize provinces to institute rent control the same way that the federal government incentivizes municipalities to make other changes.

So you're a renter, and I'd like to know, as a renter, I'd love to get your thoughts on the promise. Does the NDP promise to enforce rent control or get provinces to enact rent control? Does that speak to you as a renter?

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, so I'm kind of two minds on this. On one hand, I am personally, as you said, a renter, and I do live in a condo that falls under Ontario's rent control purview because it was constructed before 2018. And actually, last time I was looking to move - I moved into my current place in 2020 - I refused to look at any buildings that were constructed after 2018 for that very reason, that they weren't going to fall under that rent control provision. And I had known people who lived in places where suddenly landlords would increase their rent by 10, 20, even more percent per year. And that's obviously just entirely devastating. And you're essentially forced to move at that point. So I definitely see the benefits of rent control.

…I think in this year in Ontario, they can raise it by 2.5 percent, which is supposed to be in line with inflation. But when you're dealing with already very high housing costs and you're getting that 2.5 percent every year, that also really adds up on top of the fact that wages aren't rising and the cost of everything else is going up.

So on a personal level, it's an unstable lifestyle to begin with, being a renter. There are some concerns that broad rent control can perhaps have unintended consequences when it comes to supply or people willing to be landlords. Now, I do tend to think that in Canada, we have a lot of people willing to be landlords. And actually, maybe we need to disincentivize overinvestment and mom and pop landlords taking on too much systemic risk. But I'd be curious to get your perspective on that as an economist.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, there are certainly pros and cons. You know, I find this conversation a lot. We focus on a kind of high-level level, like, is rent control good or bad? And a lot of it really depends on the details. I think rent control can be quite helpful so long as there are provisions in place like we have in Ontario that if certain expenses are going up, landlords can go to the province and say, ‘we need to be able to raise this by more than 2.5 percent to make this work.’

So you do get those concerns around if we're not allowed to increase rents, that might cause apartment builders to either build condos instead of rentals or just build another province or another state instead of, you know, building, say, here in Ontario.

… I've got a part old 100 year 100-year-old apartment building that's about six or seven stories down, and I used to talk to one of the renters a lot when she was walking her dog….It's one of the drawbacks of being a housing guy that's visible, you can't walk down the street without somebody wanting to ask you a question about housing or talk about housing. She was kind of two minds about this. Like she was incredibly grateful for the existence of rent control because she says, ‘ I couldn't afford this place today if I had to rent it. But it also means that I'm kind of trapped here forever because I can't leave. Anywhere that I go to is going to be significantly more expensive than here.’ So, I do think that these policies can help. But I think overall, the big thing we need is just more rental supply, more options, more market discipline, along with more social housing and below-market housing.

So, at the end of the day, rent control can be helpful, but it is no substitute for increased supply.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now, both the Liberals and the Conservatives say they would reduce the GST on new housing.

The Liberal plan would eliminate the GST for first-time home buyers on homes at or under $1,000,000, saving them up to $50,000. Now, the Conservative plan would eliminate the GST and all new homes worth up to $1.3 million, regardless of the buyer.

My concern here is that the GST relief actually won't do that much to increase supply, which is the entire point, or release more of the types of supply young Canadians are looking for into the market, because it's just too targeted, especially in the Liberal plan. You've also been critical of the Liberal promise. So why do you like the conservative one better?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think the Liberals have been looking at the GST promise the wrong way. They're focusing on the idea that, well, if we get rid of the GST, the homes are five percent cheaper. Ownership homes are five percent cheaper. And, you know, that would give first-time home buyers a leg up. But the point of eliminating the GST shouldn't just be to lower the sticker price. GST - it's only on new homes. It basically acts as a construction tax. It's fundamentally really not that much different than a municipal development charge, which all of the parties agree are too high. So the point of reducing the GST should be to stimulate construction, to make marginal projects more viable. It's ultimately a supply-side measure. So I think just kind of focusing on the sticker price effect is somewhat missing the point.

And when we look at the Liberal promise, they said first-time homebuyers need the most help. Like, I don't disagree with that, but there are a lot of ways to help first-time homebuyers.

One of the biggest ways we can help those buyers and help young families is to incentivize the construction of smaller seniors-friendly housing. So, seniors have options to downsize. They can sell their suburban homes and move into something smaller. Now their kids have moved away, and so on. And there are a lot of ways we can do that, from lowering the GST to cutting development charges to eliminating land transfer taxes and so on. Because for a lot of seniors, it just doesn't make economic sense. The taxes are too high to make that swap.

So I do like the Conservative plan much better when it comes to the GST because it incentivizes all of that construction. Whereas I think the Liberal one is too micro-targeted.

And in general, I think that's been kind of a problem across the board with a lot of Liberal policies, is that they really want to micro-target when this is a broad-based crisis and we need broad-based solutions.

Now, speaking of math, we've both been critical of the math in some of these platforms. And I'll start by asking you about the Liberal platform, because from what I gather from our WhatsApp chat, you think that there's a mismatch between how many homes Liberals are promising. And we mentioned that's about half a million and how much money they're willing to put towards that goal.

So could you walk us through your problem with this Liberal math and their housing platform?

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, they're throwing out a lot of big numbers. You hear like 10 billion dollars here, 10 billion dollars there. But when you actually break it down over the years, and then you look at what they're promising to build in this wartime effort they're talking about, it doesn't really add up.

So the Liberals, in reality, they're only committing five billion a year in new housing-related spending and tax cuts, which is only equivalent to $20,000 per new home promised in a country where the average home price is now over $700,000 and is even more in a lot of markets. So once you start to crunch those numbers, it doesn't seem to add up. Despite the fact that there's a lot of spending attached to this, the state of the crisis is such that it's still just not enough. At least if this is how they're planning on solving the supply issue.

What are your thoughts on that, Mike? Does this add up to the wartime-like effort they're advertising, or is it just smoke and mirrors?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I would say somewhere in between. I do think the Build Canada Homes or whatever they're calling their new crown corporation, I think certainly could be helpful, but it is off by an order of magnitude. I don't see how we get to $500,000. Maybe we get from $250,000 to $300,000, which would be great, which would certainly help with the housing crisis. But I don't see how we get there under any conditions, let alone the current marketing conditions we have right now, where all of those mom and pop investors who have been funding pre-construction condos have just disappeared from Toronto and Vancouver. Lik,e those condo markets have just absolutely evaporated.

So, you know, I think the challenge for the government is actually going to be to prevent housing starts from falling in a lot of places, let alone this idea that we can double it. So no, I don't think the math adds up there.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now it's my turn to ask you about the math.

On X, after the Conservative platform was released, you wrote the following and, you know, got some feedback on it. And I quote: In all seriousness, I haven't seen a fun with numbers costing like this in a Conservative platform since the 2014 Ontario PC campaign.

Now, Mike, I know that comment was broader than just housing pledges, but keeping it to housing right now, can you explain the problems you have with the Conservative numbers?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, so there are a couple of things…one of which is not a Conservative issue.

So, one of the things all the parties do is they go to the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), which was an agency set up by the Harper government. That's arm's length from the government that parties can go to and say, hey, we have this idea. Tell us how much it's going to cost. And the PBO has not covered itself in glory during this campaign. They have some of the costing, just they don't make any sense. Like they're just substantially off. Any back-of-the-napkin estimate shows that they don't make sense. So one of the ones where they're really off is on the conservative GST costing, where you kind of sketch this out and go, ‘OK, you're going to have 100 to 150,000 homes eligible for this, the average price of about $700,000 a home.’ You do the math, and their promise should be about a four billion dollar tax cut. The PBO says that it's under two billion. And it just doesn't make any sense.

The PBO didn't show their math. And I'm not suggesting that they're in the bag for the Conservatives. It's an issue across NDP, Liberal, and Conservative promises, where the PBO just came up with these really weird costings. They didn't show their math.

And I’ve got to imagine that the Conservative war room had to be thrilled when they sent this platform item for the PBO to get costed, because I know the people in that war room, they're very smart people. They're very competent. And I'm sure when they got it back, they were having a laugh. They're having a victory party because they had to have expected the number to come in at like four to five billion, not two.

So that's an issue, but that's not the Conservative problem. That's actually a larger structural problem.

Where I will criticize the Conservatives, however, is in their platform; they make a number of promises, some around housing. Like, OK, we're going to build close to 500000 homes a year. But we're also going to make these capital gains, tax cuts and a number of things. And what they've done is they say, ‘OK, all of these measures are going to be really stimulative to the economy. And we're going to estimate, because they're so stimulative, how much extra revenue that's going to bring in and we'll put it on the books.’

That's typically not done in Canada. Parties tend not to do that because they want to make small-C conservative assumptions about the effectiveness of their policy and so on. And if you're going to have a budget, you know, you want to overdeliver. So you want your estimates to be a little bit on the conservative side.

So the Conservative plan is booking over four years an extra 60 billion dollars in these phantom revenues, which just doesn’t make any sense. Like, it's off by an order of magnitude.

And again, like the PBO, they didn't show their math. They didn't illustrate, ‘OK, this is how we're getting this’.

They're showing that if they cancel Bill C-69, the Pipeline Act, that's going to immediately lead to more revenue. And I don't get the argument. ‘OK, we make pipelines easier to build and in three, four or five years from now we might have some enhanced construction.’ But the idea that you eliminate a bill and then just tomorrow you start getting all this extra revenue, it just doesn't make any sense.

So, you know, my view is that this platform looks like it was very hastily put together. They really wanted to show that they had lower deficits than what the Liberals were offering. But if you get rid of all this phantom math, just kind of like the housing platforms, there's really not that much difference between the Liberal and Conservative platforms when it comes to the overall size of the deficit.

So that's the economics of it. But let's pivot to sociology, because here at the Missing Middle, we are fans of all the social sciences. And Sabrina, in a recent episode, you talked about how housing costs are tearing at Canada's social fabric. In your view, do either of these platforms or the NDP platform address that deeper issue, like giving young people a sense of belonging to the country? Or in your view, are they just kind of throwing money at tax cuts and buildings or what have you? And are any of the parties speaking to the level of the crisis, particularly given how similar the three parties seem to be when it comes to the housing issue?

Sabrina Maddeaux: The short answer here is no. I'm happy to see some progress on housing and the fact that all the parties now actually recognize we have a housing crisis and they need to contain some real measures towards solving that in their platforms. But I just don't see, with them being so similar, that there seems to be a real safe approach to this. There's not a real competition for the best or boldest ideas. And I think with the state of the crisis, we need to see more of that.

I'm especially disappointed by the NDP. I think by virtue of being quite far behind and also just who their base traditionally is, they could have come out swinging a lot harder. But they chose not to. They've been weak over the last few years on economic issues, including housing.

…It's important, obviously, to make these funding commitments to building supply. But at the same time, you did mention something which is striking at the heart of the issue, which is that Canadian society has become a place where we're seeing intense generational inequality and divisions.

The parties are still very focused, all of them, it seems, on the divisions between the working class or the middle class and the upper class. Or lower income versus what they call upper income. Whereas that's really not the divide anymore. In Canada, much of that wealth divide is generational. And yet there doesn't really seem to be this acknowledgement of that, or the language or the policy or the vision to go along with solving that.

Every time there's an election campaign, whether it's federal or provincial, we get closer to election day, and everyone's getting nervous about voters 55 and up or seniors. And you start to see more and more pledges that are, again, redistributing wealth to older generations who are already the wealthiest generations. And we've seen that again in this federal election campaign.

So, as a young person, it is disappointing. But I will say also, as a young person, that doesn't mean we can just check out of the system. The reason why older voters are catered to is because they vote. So if we don't get out there and vote and get involved, then the problem will just continue to perpetuate, unfortunately.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I mean, I'm with you, I'm really surprised at the lack of boldness in the NDP platform, particularly as a party that is at no risk of forming government anytime soon.

You would think that would create an avenue to be bold, but there's really not much there. And you can say that about the Greens as well. You look at their housing platform, and you don't get the sense that like, ‘Wow, these guys really want to transform the country.’ It's very modest.

And all of what we've discussed is largely on the supply side of housing. And it's not a coincidence that you and I have spent the first 20 minutes or whatever it's been of this conversation, talking about the supply side, because that's what the parties are talking about. But there's also the big demand side of the housing market.

And one of the biggest demand drivers, not the only one, but one of the biggest ones, is demographic change and population growth. In a previous episode about this time last year, we had then Immigration Minister Mark Miller on to talk about the importance of ensuring that our population growth policies, particularly international students and our housing policies, are aligned. And, we hear from both the Liberals and Conservatives the importance of keeping those aligned. But we really haven't seen much in the way of details about how they would actually do that.

So are you disappointed by the lack of details that we're seeing from those parties?

Sabrina Maddeaux: Disappointed might be an understatement. I’m incredibly frustrated. I can't believe we're at the point where we are in the immigration conversation.

Everyone's seen the data, and everyone agrees that this needs to be solved. And yet you look at the party platforms, and the solutions range from disappointing to frustrating. And that's across parties.

It still seems like this third rail that they don't really want to engage with in a meaningful way because they haven't had to in so long, and they're afraid of the consequences. But you know what? It's young Canadians paying the consequences of not addressing it. So the leaders all, like I said, now nod to the fact that immigration has to be more sustainable and also match our housing capacity. But the numbers they're putting out, they're vague or arbitrary or, in my opinion, still quite irresponsible.

I mean, the Liberal platform has us returning to permanent resident admissions at one percent of Canada's population per year, starting as soon as 2027. And that's over 415,000 new residents per year. And that doesn't include temporary workers or students, which are pretty similar to Trudeau's immigration targets that they just had to walk back. And I just don't think we're going to see the housing supply by 2027.

But then you look at the Conservative platform and they pledged to, and I quote, keep the rate of population growth below the rate of housing growth, job growth and health care accessibility. But then they don't have any formula for this or any numbers that they put out there. So it's difficult to think that they're serious about solving the immigration issue without any numbers. And it feels more like they're hedging their bets. They have to say something, but they're kind of being dragged into this by the population.

So do you think this is as big a miss as I do?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I want to see more and more and more details. And, you know, I tend to be someone who is probably more pro-immigration than the Canadian average. And I think that, given our demographic challenges, it makes sense to have fairly robust immigration targets. But that's only sustainable if you build the infrastructure around that.

Like we're not doing anybody any favours, particularly the newcomers, if we're not having enough-not just enough homes, but enough family doctors, enough schools, parks, you name it. And that requires a plan, right? So, you know, you're not being pro-immigration by just writing a large number and just going, ‘OK, whatever happens, happens.’ You know, the way to be pro-immigration is to have a serious plan going, ‘OK, these are the numbers we want. So let's put some serious dollars towards health care and education, and housing supply. Let's make it so that we can build more homes, which is going to require things like opening up more land and so on.’

So, yeah, I am disappointed. As somebody who thinks that immigration is particularly important to Canada's economy and our social fabric, we don't have more details. We don't have a serious plan from any of the parties on how we can grow our population in a sustainable way, and how we can make the investments needed to help both the newcomers but also society as a whole.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Absolutely, and I want to underscore that, you know, addressing immigration in a responsible and sustainable way is not anti-immigration.

It's often the immigrants themselves who are suffering because of our poor and predatory policies. But also, maintaining the Canadian consensus on immigration is important. And we've already seen immigration go from a non-issue to a top-three issue for many demographics. And that consensus begins to erode unless our parties begin to take it seriously. We're going to go further down that path.

So I hope whoever wins this election does a little bit more work on the immigration file. In fact, a lot more work on the immigration file than what we've seen in their platforms.

But we'll continue to hold them to account on that and all the other housing policy issues for sure. Thank you so much, everyone, for watching and listening. And please do remember to vote on April 28th. And thank you as well to our producer, Meredith Martin.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about Fun With Numbers, please send us an email to [email protected]

Sabrina Maddeaux: We'll see everyone next time.