Green shoots of housing hope visible at RESCON Summit

By Patrick Flannery

Canadian Contractor

Sept. 23, 2026

The Residential Construction Council of Ontario hosted its half-day online Housing Summit 6.0 on Sept. 23, welcoming experts, analysts and officials to deliver a firehose of information on Ontario’s homebuilding sector and issues confronting Canadian contractors generally. Here are some highlights.

Flack says it’s working

Admirably plainspoken Ontario housing minister, Robert Flack, reviewed his ministry’s actions to stimulate homebuilding and previewed some possible future initiatives. He was direct about his view that traditional government expenditure would never be able to build the amount of infrastructure required for the amount of housing needed. Instead, he said his ministry is looking at alternative models such as public water utilities, municipal service corporations and communal water organizations to pick up the slack. He dismissed the “growth pays for growth” trope used to justify using development charges as the major source of funding new development, acknowledging tax dollars would have to flow.

Flack characterized the HST rebate and DC reduction program as successes. He pointed to new single-family home starts tripling year-over-year in the Greater Toronto Area. Single-family home sales increased 130 percent across Ontario this year and purpose-built rental starts are up 41 percent.

Flack also claimed the DCRP is having the desired effect, naming several municipalities that have reduced DCs. Rural municipalities that do not impose DCs can apply for money under the program to assist with their infrastructure needs, as well. All told, Flack said the province is directing between $12 and $13 billion at building housing infrastructure, but it will be a “drop in the bucket” relative to what is ultimately needed.

The minister also expressed his desire to see the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit renewed in the next federal budget. COHB provides $2 billion in funding for low-income housing.

Lessons from Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia housing minister, John White, took the screen to talk about his province’s efforts to get more housing built. Many of the measures were similar to what is being implemented in Ontario, including seeking to streamline approvals, encourage skilled trades training and channel Build Canada Strong funds into new developments.

One novel approach is Nova Scotia’s Down Payment Assistance Program, which gives first-time homebuyers interest-free loans for up to five percent of a home’s value, and the First Time Home Buyer’s Program, which enables the buyer to only put down two to four percent as a down payment with the government guaranteeing 90 percent of the remaining mortgage value, elminating the need for mortgage insurance. White said these programs were enabling people with $50,000 to $80,000 household incomes to buy homes in Nova Scotia.

Halifax has an Executive Panel on Housing, White reported, consisting of executives from the Halifax region, the housing ministry and industry groups. This body has been able to get several projects jump-started that might otherwise not have gotten off the ground.

Slay the sacred cows

Listening to Carleton university professor, Ian Lee, talk is a bit like standing outside in a hurricane, but the ideas and information are good and frequently puncture assumptions. Lee pointed out that the housing affordability crisis is by no means spread evenly across the country, and is so much worse in Vancouver and the GTA as to be a different issue entirely. The prices in those cities are not, in his view, primarily due to the usual suspects of high land and material costs associated with big urban areas. He pointed to large American cities like Omaha, Neb., where his daughter recently bought a four-bedroom, 2,400-square-foot home in a nice neighbourhood for $400,000. Similar homes can be had in Atlantic Canada for under $500,ooo, he pointed out, even though materials are more expensive there. The culprit, in Lee’s analysis, is government policy over the last few decades.

Lee gave a whirlwind review of the big trends affecting housing. He showed that Canada needs to build 450,000 homes per year to meet its targets but is managing only 250,000. By 2032, all population growth in Canada will be from immigration – birth rates are nearly at replacement levels only. That means by 2035 there will be two retirees alive for every person in the workforce – in the 1970s the ratio was seven workers for each retiree. But even though immigration has been cut about 2/3 from its peak two years ago, the Canadian population is still growing faster than its housing starts. Government spending will never be able to fill the projected supply shortages, Lee showed, and only a surge of private investment will prevent an extended and worsening housing crisis. Most Canadians still want a suburban single family home with a yard and any successful policy should seek to support that kind of building.

Lee got heated talking about DCs. They represent, in his view, a transfer of wealth from young people to old people as first-time homebuyers pay the fees and Baby Boomers sitting in their homes they’ve owned for decades reap the benefits of upgraded infrastructure and lower property taxes. The goal, he said, should be zero DCs…discard the system and raise property taxes as necessary.

Lee showed interesting graphs linking municipal housing performance to other metrics. Faster approval times are correlated with lower housing prices. Overall better performance on municipal government benchmarks correlates with an adequate supply of housing – better governments do better, go figure.

Finally, Lee took a shot at the anti-sprawl environmentalist paradigm that has informed civic planning for the last couple decades. Municipalities that refuse to expand urban boundaries to accommodate more homebuilding are, in his view, telling young people and immigrants that they can’t have the same lifestyle their parents enjoyed. He pointed out that carbon emissions per person in Canada have been in steep decline for decades and that accomodating more people will not cause an environmental catastrophe.

Prices not as bad as we think?

Jason Mercer of the Toronto Real Estate Board put forth his view that buyer confidence was a bigger drag on the Toronto real estate market than housing prices. He noted that sales are only slightly improved year-over year through July of this year. The household income needed to buy the average home in the GTA is down to $140,000 from a peak of about $180,000 two years ago. Condo rents are also declining. The gap between expected demand and supply has narrowed. Yet sales activity is not responding in the manner the Board would expect. Mercer felt that consumer confidence is shaky because of uncertainty from tariffs, inflation from war-affected oil prices and the likelihood that interest rates will rise with increasing bond yields. His theory is that buyers are waiting for better conditions and demand is building up.

There was more – much more – in the five-hour conference. RESCON is promising to make the full recording available in the days to come.