To solve the housing crisis we must embrace change

By Grant Cameron

June 5, 2026

When times get tough, the tough get going. In many instances, that requires taking a deep breath, reassessing the situation and ditching what isn't working.

Governments are now at that fork in the road. The residential construction sector is reeling and in the doldrums.

The reason?

Taxes, fees and levies are crippling the industry and significantly adding to the cost of new housing. To fix the problem, governments must adapt. They must chart a new course.

There is no point sitting on your hands. Change is a fundamental driver of growth and progress, it builds resilience, fuels innovation and ensures we keep up with the times. RESCON has been driving reforms. We pushed both the federal and provincial governments for temporary sales tax rebates for new home buyers, made the case for cutting bureaucratic red tape and speeding up the approvals process, and called for a rollback in development charges.

These reforms are critical if we are to lower the cost of building new homes. The cost of inaction, as we noted in a recent housing report card, is a very dramatic decline in industry jobs.

In a column in Real Estate Magazine, we highlighted the reforms that need to be undertaken to accelerate homebuilding. Some of the initiatives include permanent HST relief, shorter approval times, restructured development charges and the need to embrace industrialized housing construction.

In a column in The Toronto Sun, we noted that we need deliberate, co-ordinated reform across all orders of government.

Municipal Fees

In a column in Senso Magazine, we expressed concerns that, while sales taxes on housing are being cut by senior levels of government, the move risks being eroded by rising municipal fees.

Technology

Recent reports indicate that in comparison to other sectors, Canda’s construction industry is falling behind on the adoption of AI.

The industry is beginning to experiment with tech tools but, for example, only 9.6 per cent of construction firms reported using AI software and 3.6 per cent reported using AI hardware.

In a column in Canadian Real Estate Wealth, we wrote about how the industry can move forward by adopting PropTech and ConTech, and we outlined some of the tools available to the industry.

Offsite construction

In a column in Canadian Contractor, RESCON president Richard Lyall explained how modern methods of construction, such as offsite and modular, can deliver real productivity gains.

By shifting work off-site into controlled environments, he wrote, builders can reduce weather delays, standardize processes, and run factory production in parallel with site preparation. The result is genuine on-site schedule compression - often in the range of 20 to 50 per cent.

in a piece in Canadian Forest Industries magazine, we noted how offsite construction methods offer valuable labour productivity benefits and are useful for niche applications such as remote communities, purpose-built rentals, and emergency housing.

Apprenticeship system

In a Builder Bites column, we wrote that it is time for Ontario to get serious about skilled trades data and explained that we must make pragmatic improvements to fix the bottlenecks in our apprenticeship system as, presently, too few trainees complete their programs.

Apprenticeship bottlenecks are also worsening the Ontario labour shortage. In a column in Daily Commercial News, we pointed out that, while we are investing heavily in getting people into apprenticeships, to our detriment we are paying far less attention to getting them through the training.

Policy problems

In a column in Storeys, we tackled another thorny issue, namely that Ontario has a policy problem. Simply put, we have a shortage of serviced, approved and buildable land - a crisis created not by geography, but by decades of policy choices.