Builders waiting for guidance on how rebates will work

By Richard Lyall

May 6, 2026

The past several months have produced an extraordinary volume of housing policy announcements from both Ottawa and Queen's Park.

On paper, the residential construction industry should be encouraged. In practice, we have been watching announcement after announcement land on our desks while the cranes remain still, the sales centres stay quiet, and the pipeline of new housing supply continues to shrink rather than grow.

The story of 2026 so far is not a shortage of intent; it is a shortage of implementation.

Consider the file as it is today. Bill C-4, the federal First-Time Home Buyer GST Rebate, received royal assent in February. Ontario had joined this initiative on Oct. 28 for first-time buyers. Then, on March 26, 2026, both the federal and provincial governments announced a sales tax rebate for one year for all new buyers.

These are consequential reforms that RESCON has long advocated for, and the HST rebate has increased some sales centre traffic and tire-kicking. However, the results have yet to be tabulated.

Meantime, builders, lawyers and buyers are still waiting for the regulations and administrative guidance that will tell us, in operational terms, how the rebate is to be applied, claimed, reconciled, and audited.

Without those rules, agreements of purchase and sale are being drafted in a fog, and the very buyers the program is meant to help cannot make confident decisions. 

The first step in terms of federal enabling legislation, Bill C-26, remains stalled at first reading, the very beginning of the legislative process.

The March 30 federal-provincial agreement to reduce municipal development charges by up to 50 per cent for three years is, on its face, exactly the kind of bold action the sector has been urging. But the announcement was light on the specifics that matter most: which charges, in which municipalities, effective when, with what backstop for municipal infrastructure budgets, and applying to which projects already in the approvals queue.

Until those questions are answered with precision, pro formas cannot be re-run and stalled projects cannot be unstuck.

Bill 98, the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act, is similarly promising but remains in the legislative process. The government has moved it to “time allocation,” which could mean passage soon. We are hopeful this will occur. The provisions on minimum lot areas, upper-tier planning roles, and standardization of approvals are sound directions, but they are directions, not yet rules.

The pattern repeats. The push to streamline and digitize the approvals process - a reform first called for as far back as 2014 and reaffirmed in countless reports since - remains stuck at the survey and engagement stage.

We do not need another round of discovery. We know what works. OneOntario and similar digital-first initiatives should be in deployment, not in diagnosis. Meanwhile, the statutory 10-year Greenbelt review is now more than a year overdue, leaving long-term land-supply planning in limbo at precisely the moment certainty is most needed.

The cumulative effect is a chilling one. Every reform announced but not fully implemented becomes a reason to wait. Buyers wait for clarity on rebates. Lenders wait for clarity on charges. Municipalities wait for regulations. Builders wait for all of the above.

The market has stalled, starts are falling, and the supply response that these reforms were designed to trigger is being delayed by the very process meant to deliver it.

Two things must change.

First, the alignment of housing policy across federal, provincial and municipal governments must improve - not in communiqués, but in synchronized regulations, timelines and transitional rules that builders can actually plan against.

Second, housing policy must be modelled in concert with the files it cannot be separated from: immigration, health care, education, and economic development. Population growth is not a housing problem alone, and housing targets without integrated plans for the systems that surround them are targets in name only.

RESCON's message to all orders of government is straightforward. Set the targets, yes - but back them with meaningful plans, firm timelines, and the regulatory follow-through that turns announcements into shovels in the ground. The industry is ready. The reforms are written. What is missing is the execution.