‘All hands on deck’ needed to address housing affordability, economist says

With serious investments needed to address Canada’s housing crisis, a top economist suggests a collaborative approach is required to make homes affordable.

A recent report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation found the 3.5 million additional new homes needed to make housing affordable in Canada by 2030 will cost an expected $1 trillion on top of what’s already planned.

“The idea is just to convey to people the scale of the challenge, that we need fundamental reform, we need systematic change, we need change by governments and the policies, but we also need a lot of change by the private sector,” Aled Ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist with the CMHC, told BNN Bloomberg Wednesday.

“This is all hands on deck.”

Ab Iorwerth said further tax breaks on construction are needed, such as the federal government’s previously announced plan to remove the GST from new rental builds.

“There need to be incentives and encouragement to the private sector to put that money at work in housing construction particularly in rental,” he said.

When it comes to international markets worth emulating, Ab Iorwerth says the U.S. is dealing with a lot of the same issues Canada faces, but many European nations have overcome them with more cookie-cutter builds instead of custom homes.

“I think our examples are from Europe that we need to be looking at, to get more out of the construction industry, to get more collaborative and to cut costs,” he said.

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