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Canada faces an urgent need for affordable housing and the federal government is uniquely positioned to address it. It owns much underused urban land, has greater fiscal capacity than other levels of government and faces strong public demand for action.

Despite this, federal progress on housing has lagged. The adoption of Canada’s National Housing Strategy (NHS) in 2017 set clear policy goals but lacked a coherent plan to achieve them. Its implementation was fragmented across agencies and levels of government, with competing interests. The introduction of the Build Canada Homes Act in February fixes this by consolidating responsibility into a single Crown corporation with one clear mandate and timeline, but issues remain.

Why the National Housing Strategy wasn’t enough

Since 2017, federal housing policy has been defined by the NHS. The strategy was the basis for key programs such as the Affordable Housing Fund, the Apartment Construction Loan Program, the Rapid Housing Initiative, the Housing Accelerator Fund, and the Federal Lands Initiative.

As of December 2025, $49.5 billion had been committed through NHS-linked initiatives to create 348,240 “affordable” units by either building new units or converting existing ones. An affordable unit is defined as one for which rent or mortgage payments are less than 30 per cent of the local median household gross income.

While this added volume of affordable units may seem significant, it pales in comparison to the 3.5 million new units the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) estimates will be required by 2030 to restore housing affordability.

So, how can output jump from nearly 350,000 over 10 years to 3.5 million in under five?

Fragmented process and bottlenecks

To date, a key barrier is decentralized delivery. For housing on federal lands, CMHC devises a plan, Public Services and Procurement Canada identifies surplus land, and the Canada Lands Company........

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