If you own a home, the Canadian housing “crisis” isn’t a crisis at all — it’s the best thing that ever happened to you. And if you’re wondering why governments keep announcing solutions that never quite solve anything, it’s because that’s the entire point.
Between 2020 and early 2022, Canadian home prices rose 65 per cent, the second-fastest appreciation of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development country. Because of this, the average Canadian homeowner now holds a net worth 5 times more than the average renter.
Of course, this gap has nothing to do with financial discipline or professional merit and everything to do with whether you happened to buy before the window closed.
Contrary to how the issue is often framed, the high prices aren’t a bug in the system for people who already own a home. They are, in fact, the single most important investment of their lives, and as the price of homes increase, so too does their return on investment.
In Canada, 52 per cent of the average household’s wealth is from real estate, nearly double that of Americans at 28 per cent. This means if we are to implement corrective measures to decrease the price of homes, it will invariably come at the direct expense of existing Canadian homeowners.
Unsurprisingly — that is not something they want.
For instance, research from UBC Sauder in 2024 found that for every 10-percentage-point increase in homeownership rates within a Toronto ward, the likelihood of a councillor voting against new housing developments rose by 16 per cent. Researchers attribute this to homeowners rationally protecting property values that increase with supply constraints.
Likewise, UBC Public Policy Professor, Paul Kershaw identified homeowner reluctance to their see property values drop as a significant constraint in the efforts of Canadian lawmakers to address the crisis. 66.5 per cent of Canadians owned their primary residence in 2021 — a voter base politicians are unwilling to alienate by letting prices fall.
And why would they?
Homeowners are much larger voting bloc than renters, homeowners vote more on average, and their tax revenue constitute a significantly higher proportion of the government operating budget. Reform comes at the cost of further alienating a voting demographic that, in full transparency, simply is not a meaningfully influential political force at the moment.
Obviously, the people most harmed by this are not difficult to identify. Homeownership among Canadians aged 25 to 29 has fallen from 44 per cent to 36 per cent in a single decade. The median first-time buyer in Ontario is now 40 years old.
The government response — first-time buyer incentives, foreign buyer taxes, supply pledges that materialize slowly if at all — have been calibrated with remarkable consistency to expand access at the margins without exerting any meaningful downward pressure on prices at the core. That consistency is not accidental.
Battles have played out in Vancouver, where single-family zoning survived decades of densification pressure before finally being dismantled provincially, over the objection of councils that had long treated neighbourhood “character” as a policy value worth protecting.
The vacancy taxes with teeth, the zoning reform at scale, the speculation levies that would actually move prices — these have remained perpetually adjacent to the policy agenda without ever quite landing on it, because the people with the most to lose from them have also been the most reliably present when decisions get made.
The political conditions for addressing that growth have never materialized because homeowners, collectively, have made sure they would not. They turn out, they organize, they write to councillors, and a political system that rewards the organized over the excluded has given them every tool to hold the line.
Let’s level with ourselves: this housing “crisis” is not Canada’s housing crisis; it’s our housing crisis.
Tags
affordability, Canadian politics, housing crisis
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