Unlocking affordable homes in Canada: A roadmap to success

Canada’s affordable housing challenges

Canada faces a historic housing affordability and supply crisis. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has called for roughly 4 million new homes by 2030 to restore affordability, but progress has been constrained by high construction costs, bureaucratic red tape, fragmented governance, and limited capacity.

The federal government’s new entity, Build Canada Homes (BCH), was established to change this trajectory by building affordable homes, financing mission-driven supply chains, and catalyzing a resilient domestic housing industry. To succeed at speed and scale, BCH leaders must incorporate global best practices, robust data infrastructure, and practical tools—including digital and AI frameworks—to reduce delivery friction for builders, municipalities, financiers, and communities.  

Global lessons of value

Around the world, jurisdictions facing similar constraints have delivered significant, cost-effective improvements in affordable housing development efforts by pairing incentives with regulatory clarity, digital tooling, and evidence-driven evaluation frameworks. Several insights are particularly relevant for Canada to consider emulating.

Pair fiscal incentives with outcome discipline. Successful programs use targeted tax incentives, concessional finance, and performance-linked subsidies to unlock private capital while protecting public value. Examples from Europe combine affordable housing goals with energy-efficiency standards to reduce lifecycle costs.

Harmonize incentives and standards nationally. The Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes’ national model codes release in December 2025 represented a key step toward nationally aligned, sustainable, accessible construction standards. BCH could build on this momentum by harmonizing incentives and relevant regulations across provincial and territorial jurisdictions to establish a consistent national framework. This would reduce regulatory fragmentation, create investment certainty, and enable scalable housing delivery models—supporting more consistent, efficient capital deployment and broader participation from builders and institutional investors across the country.

Use partnerships to accelerate delivery at scale. Canada has demonstrated the effectiveness of public-private partnerships in affordable housing through programs such as Alberta’s Affordable Housing Partnership Program and British Columbia’s Community Housing Fund. These models show how such partnerships can convene governments, developers, financiers, and community partners to unlock private investment and deliver housing more efficiently. Expanding and harmonizing these approaches at a national level would enable builders and investors to replicate proven delivery models across jurisdictions, increasing scale and speed while providing the certainty needed to attract sustained private-sector investment.

Digitize compliance and integrate data for policy success. The European Commission’s EU Building Stock Observatory provides a blueprint for consolidating fragmented datasets into a unified database for tracking progress and effectiveness. Canada could create a similar housing stock observatory by linking energy certificates, grant systems, and policy dashboards. Consolidating datasets from across Natural Resources Canada, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and Statistics Canada would improve clarity, reduce administrative burdens, and enable targeted, evidence-based, cost-effective interventions.

Integrate grid expansion into housing strategy. Effective housing policy doesn’t treat housing in isolation but plans for it within the broader infrastructure systems it depends on. This includes ensuring that energy systems are prepared to support new housing supply while remaining aligned with decarbonization targets. International precedents underscore this approach. Singapore’s Housing Development Board develops housing in coordination with national infrastructure agencies, including its electricity grid operator, while Japan’s rail-oriented new towns integrate housing with power and transport infrastructure from the outset. Similarly, BCH could work with gas and electric utilities in regions of greatest housing need to ensure that energy systems are adequately scaled and coordinated—supporting the delivery of reliable, affordable, clean electricity and heating for new housing.

Integrate climate resilience into housing strategy. Climate risk is increasingly understood as a material financial and delivery risk for housing. According to The Swiss Re Institute, global insured natural catastrophe losses as of 2025 have exceeded US$100 billion for six consecutive years. And a 2025 Canadian Climate Institute analysis estimates that by 2030, new housing developments in Canada could face up to CA$3 billion in wildfire and flood losses annually under a worst-case scenario. To address these risks, BCH could develop a comprehensive housing strategy that integrates climate risk assessment into development planning, incorporates adaptation measures into incentive structures and codes, and actively engages the insurance industry to support long-term resilience, insurability, and private investment. 

A smart foundations approach

Drawing from our extensive global experience across these areas, we recommend a three-pillar approach to developing a cost-effective BCH strategy that would deliver measurable improvements in housing affordability and supply and industry resilience.

Pillar 1: Build a Canada-wide housing stock observatory
By unifying information currently dispersed across Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Natural Resources Canada, Statistics Canada, and provincial/municipal systems, BCH could use that data to track the buildings and units it’s targeting. The model should also integrate modules for retrofit/new build activity, affordability metrics, supply elasticity, and workforce/capacity analytics. This would provide:

• A single source of truth for Canada’s residential building stock
• Integrated KPIs
• Evidence-based design of incentives and permitting reforms
• Transparent progress reporting to investors, provinces, and the public
• The ability to assess broad climate risk, energy performance, forecasting, and policy effectiveness

Pillar 2: Deploy tools that reduce cost and complexity for builders
By adapting digitization for compliance and financing, BCH could unlock faster, cheaper delivery through:

• A building energy performance tool adapted for Canadian climate data, regulations, and zoning frameworks that would streamline Energy Performance Certificate pre-checks, link projects to incentives, and give builders clear guidance to meet performance thresholds
• A unified grants and financing platform providing a single, cloud-based funding program entry point to reduce administrative burdens, automate compliance, and accelerate disbursements
• A national modular and prefab project marketplace that would aggregate public-sector demand for modular and prefabricated housing (federal, provincial, municipal, Indigenous), publish forward pipelines (volumes, timelines, typologies), and align capacity and investment for builders and manufacturers to justify capital investment

Pillar 3: Implement and integrate a national stakeholder engagement network
Replacing fragmented, ad hoc stakeholder engagement with a coordinated, national approach would enable BCH to systematically gather, integrate, and respond to building-sector input aligned with its target programs and delivery objectives. The network ideally would include:

• A centralized stakeholder registry of builders, manufacturers, developers, financiers, nonprofit organizations, Indigenous partners, and municipal authorities—building a network for comprehensive, consistent engagement
• Formal feedback integration mechanisms to systematically capture and incorporate stakeholder input into program design, standards development, and implementation decisions
• Centralized news and updates dissemination to all relevant housing and building industry stakeholders

A roadmap for action

The following key steps provide a roadmap for BCH to deliver on its goals for catalyzing the housing industry and improving affordability in Canada.

1. Create a Canadian housing stock observatory. Aggregate and standardize the collection of relevant building and housing stock data that’s currently distributed across various entities. This would form the first step toward a national observatory of the relevant housing stock that BCH is targeting.
2. Determine key performance indicators. Decide on which indicators and metrics will be used to track progress toward improved housing affordability and to measure the cost-effectiveness of policy interventions.
3. Pilot selected policy tools and interventions. Test selected subsidies, tax incentives, public-private partnerships and other policy levers to move forward on BCH goals. 
4. Deploy select digital tools. Consider implementing a building energy performance tool for housing developers, a digital grants management and disbursement platform, a national prefab and modular marketplace, and a digital platform for integrated stakeholder engagement across the country.
5. Build workforce capacity. Play a coordinating role in strengthening workforce capacity across the housing sector with an emphasis on trades, modular and prefabrication skills, and modern project delivery capabilities. Partner with educational institutions and potential stakeholder sponsors to augment housing sector trade skills and roll out certification programs that support a robust national supply chain of prefab and modular designs. 
6. Integrate planning. Align housing strategies with urban planning, especially with transit planning so that new developments can be part of transit-oriented communities that align with the country’s sustainable development strategies. Engage local electric and gas companies and encourage them to incorporate housing development and forecasted growth needs into their plans. Integrate a broad, comprehensive view of housing-related climate risk into forecasts and planning and incorporate insurance industry feedback and participation.
7. Monitor and iterate. Use outcome-based metrics and annual progress reporting to inform policy adjustments.

Charting the path forward

Canada’s housing crisis can’t be solved through construction targets alone. It demands a systems‑level approach that aligns supply, capital, governance, and data into a coherent delivery model. Housing systems can deliver more affordable, energy-efficient homes at lower public cost when builders, land, and manufacturing capacity are matched with patient capital, coordinated federal, provincial, and municipal action, and transparent, real‑time performance data. With the right foundations in place, Canada has a clear opportunity to reset its housing system by catalyzing industry capacity—delivering affordability, supply, resilience, and sustainability at scale.