Ontario promised 1.5 million homes. The infrastructure wasn't ready in 2022, and in community after community across Canada, it still isn't. Here's what the debate isn't saying.
Thanks for reading. I'd actually push further than party blame: right now no government, of any stripe, is speaking clearly and honestly about what's actually stalling housing. It's easier to promise the win (the approval, the funding announcement) than to admit the unglamorous truth that municipal pipes, water systems, and road capacity are the real bottleneck. We can't fix a problem nobody in power will name out loud.
As Leni says above, it's all governments. Roads and infrastructure are not sexy, so governments don't think that the public cares about them. Which, for the most part, we don't, except if the road makes the CAA bad road list. But as was pointed out in the article if we don't build the not-sexy, basically invisible until you need them stuff, the nice stuff like new homes do not get built.
Exactly, and that's the trap: infrastructure only becomes visible the moment it fails, a watermain break, a road that can't handle new development, a sewer system at capacity. By then it's an emergency line item, not a planned investment. I genuinely believe it's the responsibility of every elected official, at every level, to be upfront with people: we are at best five years away from making real headway on the housing crunch, and only if we invest heavily now in correcting hard infrastructure that's been neglected for decades. Until that gets said out loud, plainly, the "nice things" like new homes will keep getting held hostage to a system nobody wanted to pay for when it was still boring.
Absolutely. Just look at everyone freaking out over the main feeder in Calgary breaking and the analysis of why that happened. And it boiled down to deferred maintenance to keep the budget down by both the city and the province. And they knew it was going to happen.
In this situation the NDP let us down as well. Stiles did push at Doug Ford, rightfully. His government did mess up…but she had an opportunity to name the real blockage when it comes to housing starts in Ontario…and didn’t. The blame game goes round and round, and the fundamental problem remains untouched.
There is so much partisan brand of theatrics. These brands, when in government, don't do any better in areas such as infrastructure which require longer-term planning rather than fixations on election cycles.
Much of what opposition parties do is oppose for the sake of opposing rather than even attempting to produce better decisions. The Westminster system was set up to be a debate club to advise an actual king, and a very different type of system is needed to create functioning governance.
Are we surprised? Think how many people redecorate instead of maintaining their homes. They would rather buy a new couch, cushions and some paint than replace their leaky roof or repair their cracked foundation. We've forgotten the old adage... an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure ( apologies to the metric system!).
So, not surprised that politicians and planners do the same. Depressing.
Perfectly said! Government top level leadership doesn’t listen to the experts, hence the ridiculous campaign promises and false propaganda. Infrastructure is always required before any building projects (whether it’s housing, healthcare, transportation or any type of production industry). Infrastructure comes out of the pockets of tax payers…therefore we need an ethical, honest government foundation to guide the public’s spending and budgets! In Ontario and Alberta, we don’t have the government leadership that does this.
Good piece, Leni! Allow me to posit an explanation as to why no political party is willing to openly name or address this issue:
The title of your piece is a very astute observation. Perhaps your most critical insight is captured in your subheading: “The Announcement Is Not the Infrastructure”. This is the defining feature of modern provincial and national projects. These announced plans are 90% aspirational theater, with 10% or less resulting in actual shovels in the ground. The electorate is temporarily appeased with grandiose promises, while the time required to bring actual relief to those suffering from affordability or housing crises is pushed a decade into the future.
As you rightly point out, the lack of infrastructure precludes timely action—but that functions as much as an excuse as it does an explanation. It leaves the false impression that government has a plan, creating illusions that take the political heat off our elected representatives. But these illusions don't put roofs over heads, lower grocery bills, or provide stable jobs with real benefits. The question we must ask is: why is the system designed this way?
The answer is that our elected officials have no intention of using the public sector to build houses, protect supply chains, or directly employ people. They are counting entirely on the private sector to do the heavy lifting via public-private partnerships (P3s). They promise that deregulation and rolling back environmental restrictions will incentivize the market to step up. But that is an industrial textbook from a bygone era.
To cut labour costs and bypass domestic regulations, traditional production capitalism was offshored decades ago and replaced with rentier capitalism. Today, corporate profits are derived from extracting economic rents and tolling essential networks, not from producing tangible goods and services. Our rising GDP is largely an illusion driven by inflated asset values and soaring rents—the exact drivers of our wage stagnation and affordability crises. Mega-asset managers like Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) thrive in this environment at the expense of the productive economy.
Crucially, the announcements alone, without a single shovel hitting the dirt, instantly inflate corporate asset values, juice stock prices, and trigger executive remuneration based on potential future yields. Canadian corporate capital doesn’t refuse to invest in domestic machinery because executives are "lazy" or "disappointing"; it refuses to invest because rent-seeking is vastly more profitable and far less risky than actual production. While a developer or resource company may eventually build, they will not deploy capital until their future rents are entirely de-risked by the state. Until then, they can simply buy back stock and reward shareholders using the economic boost generated by the announcement itself.
The ultimate, state-sanctioned extension of this rentier model is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). It represents the one remnant of productive heavy industry that was shielded from offshoring under the guise of "national security." Yet it functions on the exact same extractive logic. Despite multi-trillion-dollar budgets and hyper-sophisticated targeting technology, this apparatus does not deliver definitive strategic victories—because for a financialized defence sector, a permanent state of crisis is far more lucrative than a resolution. Because it is framed as an indispensable shield against largely manufactured external threats, taxpayers are conditioned to accept devastating cuts to domestic housing, healthcare, and social spending, while completely accepting a blank check for the toll-booths of war.
Stewart, this is a sharp extension of the piece, thank you for taking the time to write it out.
The rentier capitalism framing is the part I want to sit with. You’re right that “the announcement inflates the asset value before a shovel moves” is doing more explanatory work than “government is slow” ever could. It reframes the delay not as a bug in the system, but as the system working exactly as designed for the people who benefit from it.
I’d add one layer: some of what looks like pure rent extraction is also genuine capacity loss. We hollowed out procurement expertise, skilled trades pipelines, and public-sector project management muscle right alongside the financialization you’re describing. The two reinforce each other. Weak public capacity makes P3s look like the only option, and P3s further erode the appetite to rebuild that capacity.
On housing specifically, I’d want to be careful not to let the rentier frame carry more weight than it can hold. REITs and corporate landlords are real and worth scrutinizing, but they’re riding on top of a scarcity problem that predates them: zoning restrictions, municipal approval timelines, and development charges that add years and real cost before a developer or lender is even in the room. A lot of that bottleneck is created and defended by existing homeowners voting to protect their own property values, which is a democratic capture problem as much as a corporate one. Take every REIT out of the market tomorrow and Canada would still be underbuilding relative to population growth. The rentier lens explains a lot, just maybe not the whole story on housing specifically.
The MIC parallel is the one I want to think about more. I’m not sure I’d go quite as far as “manufactured” threats, but the underlying point, that a permanent state of low-grade crisis is more profitable than resolution, applies well beyond defence.
I might come back to this in a future piece. You’ve named something I’ve been circling without quite landing on the word for it.
About the MIC aspect, maybe the word or phrase you're looking for is "military Keynesianism". Stimulating the economy via public defence spending. Any other form of debt-financed stimulation would receive a great deal of pushback for increasing the deficit and would remove the easiest way to get present and future taxpayers to support and finance Keynesian economics.
P.S. If the military threats aren't manufactured, try ranking alleged military threats alongside other existential threats, such as global warming, resource destruction and depletion, lack of access to a doctor or emergency room care, etc. If the military threats aren't manufactured, they are sure are being exaggerated!
Good piece, Leni Spooner! Allow me to posit an explanation as to why no party is addressing or naming this issue:
The title of your piece is a very astute observation. Perhaps your most astute and important observation is captured in your subheading: “The Announcement Is Not the Infrastructure”. This is true of most provincial and national projects and solutions. These announced projects are 90 % aspirational, and only 10% or less result in shovels in the ground. The electorate can be appeased with these grandiose promises and aspirations, but the time required to implement these announcements, to solve problems and bring relief to those suffering from affordability and/or homelessness crises, etc., is, at best, almost always a decade or more. And you are absolutely right: the lack of infrastructure precludes timely action. But that is as much an excuse as it is an explanation. The announcements leave the electorate with the impression the government is aware of, and has a plan to address the problems. Without the infrastructure, or, more precisely, without the shovels in the ground, these solutions are illusory. These illusions serve to take the heat off our elected representatives. They don’t and won’t put a roof over the heads of the homeless, nor do they make groceries, rent, and housing more affordable, nor do they provide good jobs with good pay and benefits to the unemployed. The question is, why? Or, why not?
Our elected officials are not proposing that the public sector build houses, nor hire more people and provide jobs, nor subsidize groceries. They are counting entirely on the private sector to do the heavy lifting. They tell us that, with deregulation, less red tape and rolled-back environmental restrictions, the private sector will step up to the plate -public-private sector partnerships (PPPs). And maybe that is how things used to work, but that’s not how they work anymore. To reduce labour costs and avoid environmental restrictions, most industry offshored their production decades ago. Industrial capitalism has been replaced with rentier capitalism. Profits are derived from economic rents, not from producing goods and services. Any rise in the GDP is the result of rising rents and increased asset value, hence the wage stagnation and the affordability crisis. A corporation like Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) benefits from these rising rents, at the expense of pretty much everyone else. The announcements themselves, without putting a shovel in the ground, increase the value of corporate assets, corporate profits, shareholder dividends, and executive remuneration. The increase in potential profits increases their value. Canadian corporate capital doesn't refuse to invest in machinery because executives are lazy or "disappointing". It refuses to invest because rent-seeking is vastly more profitable and far less risky than production. That is not to say that a mining company with proprietary rights over a mining concession will never work the mine, or a pipeline company with a pre-approved pipeline will never build a pipeline, or a developer with reduced regulations and red tape will never build houses. They may, but they are not going to put money into any project until they are absolutely sure of a market and future profits. Regardless, they already got an economic boost as a result of the announcement alone. They may consider buying back stock and increasing shareholder dividends to be a more risk-free, far less capital-intensive way to please their shareholders.
The remnant of productive capitalism that has not been offshored is the industrial military complex. It remains highly profitable, ostensibly because it is too important to contract out to China or whomever, but that justification no longer holds much water. Despite a multi-trillion-dollar military and the most sophisticated weaponry imaginable, the US has yet to win a war. But because it is deemed so indispensable, more and more taxpayer dollars will be funnelled into the pockets of the MIC owners. Taxpayers fearful of largely manufactured false military threats may deny the destitute access to food and shelter and accept cuts in social spending, but will always, without complaint, accept increases in “necessary” military spending.
Conservatives are full of freaking promises. Voters need to realize this before you get a Danielle
Thanks for reading. I'd actually push further than party blame: right now no government, of any stripe, is speaking clearly and honestly about what's actually stalling housing. It's easier to promise the win (the approval, the funding announcement) than to admit the unglamorous truth that municipal pipes, water systems, and road capacity are the real bottleneck. We can't fix a problem nobody in power will name out loud.
As Leni says above, it's all governments. Roads and infrastructure are not sexy, so governments don't think that the public cares about them. Which, for the most part, we don't, except if the road makes the CAA bad road list. But as was pointed out in the article if we don't build the not-sexy, basically invisible until you need them stuff, the nice stuff like new homes do not get built.
Exactly, and that's the trap: infrastructure only becomes visible the moment it fails, a watermain break, a road that can't handle new development, a sewer system at capacity. By then it's an emergency line item, not a planned investment. I genuinely believe it's the responsibility of every elected official, at every level, to be upfront with people: we are at best five years away from making real headway on the housing crunch, and only if we invest heavily now in correcting hard infrastructure that's been neglected for decades. Until that gets said out loud, plainly, the "nice things" like new homes will keep getting held hostage to a system nobody wanted to pay for when it was still boring.
Absolutely. Just look at everyone freaking out over the main feeder in Calgary breaking and the analysis of why that happened. And it boiled down to deferred maintenance to keep the budget down by both the city and the province. And they knew it was going to happen.
The Calgary story is being replicated in some form, to some degree, in municipalities across the country.
Hopefully some people are taking a serious lesson from this and protecting the citizens from broken, because we didn't maintain it, infrastructure.
Dug Fraud strikes again! 🤮 And Ontarians get what they voted for. Again! 🤔
❤️🇨🇦
In this situation the NDP let us down as well. Stiles did push at Doug Ford, rightfully. His government did mess up…but she had an opportunity to name the real blockage when it comes to housing starts in Ontario…and didn’t. The blame game goes round and round, and the fundamental problem remains untouched.
There is so much partisan brand of theatrics. These brands, when in government, don't do any better in areas such as infrastructure which require longer-term planning rather than fixations on election cycles.
Much of what opposition parties do is oppose for the sake of opposing rather than even attempting to produce better decisions. The Westminster system was set up to be a debate club to advise an actual king, and a very different type of system is needed to create functioning governance.
Excellent- legal research on EE
Excellent from an informative point of view and entertainment
a story about elders, establishing capacity and information about House finance and fraud
Definitely worth your time💕
Outstanding research and analysis.
Sounds like housing & the supporting infrastructure is a game of "ping-pong" amongst layers of bureaucracy. Depressing!
While the finger-pointing continues, the homeless are moved from one encampment to another.
Are we surprised? Think how many people redecorate instead of maintaining their homes. They would rather buy a new couch, cushions and some paint than replace their leaky roof or repair their cracked foundation. We've forgotten the old adage... an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure ( apologies to the metric system!).
So, not surprised that politicians and planners do the same. Depressing.
Perfectly said! Government top level leadership doesn’t listen to the experts, hence the ridiculous campaign promises and false propaganda. Infrastructure is always required before any building projects (whether it’s housing, healthcare, transportation or any type of production industry). Infrastructure comes out of the pockets of tax payers…therefore we need an ethical, honest government foundation to guide the public’s spending and budgets! In Ontario and Alberta, we don’t have the government leadership that does this.
Good piece, Leni! Allow me to posit an explanation as to why no political party is willing to openly name or address this issue:
The title of your piece is a very astute observation. Perhaps your most critical insight is captured in your subheading: “The Announcement Is Not the Infrastructure”. This is the defining feature of modern provincial and national projects. These announced plans are 90% aspirational theater, with 10% or less resulting in actual shovels in the ground. The electorate is temporarily appeased with grandiose promises, while the time required to bring actual relief to those suffering from affordability or housing crises is pushed a decade into the future.
As you rightly point out, the lack of infrastructure precludes timely action—but that functions as much as an excuse as it does an explanation. It leaves the false impression that government has a plan, creating illusions that take the political heat off our elected representatives. But these illusions don't put roofs over heads, lower grocery bills, or provide stable jobs with real benefits. The question we must ask is: why is the system designed this way?
The answer is that our elected officials have no intention of using the public sector to build houses, protect supply chains, or directly employ people. They are counting entirely on the private sector to do the heavy lifting via public-private partnerships (P3s). They promise that deregulation and rolling back environmental restrictions will incentivize the market to step up. But that is an industrial textbook from a bygone era.
To cut labour costs and bypass domestic regulations, traditional production capitalism was offshored decades ago and replaced with rentier capitalism. Today, corporate profits are derived from extracting economic rents and tolling essential networks, not from producing tangible goods and services. Our rising GDP is largely an illusion driven by inflated asset values and soaring rents—the exact drivers of our wage stagnation and affordability crises. Mega-asset managers like Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) thrive in this environment at the expense of the productive economy.
Crucially, the announcements alone, without a single shovel hitting the dirt, instantly inflate corporate asset values, juice stock prices, and trigger executive remuneration based on potential future yields. Canadian corporate capital doesn’t refuse to invest in domestic machinery because executives are "lazy" or "disappointing"; it refuses to invest because rent-seeking is vastly more profitable and far less risky than actual production. While a developer or resource company may eventually build, they will not deploy capital until their future rents are entirely de-risked by the state. Until then, they can simply buy back stock and reward shareholders using the economic boost generated by the announcement itself.
The ultimate, state-sanctioned extension of this rentier model is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). It represents the one remnant of productive heavy industry that was shielded from offshoring under the guise of "national security." Yet it functions on the exact same extractive logic. Despite multi-trillion-dollar budgets and hyper-sophisticated targeting technology, this apparatus does not deliver definitive strategic victories—because for a financialized defence sector, a permanent state of crisis is far more lucrative than a resolution. Because it is framed as an indispensable shield against largely manufactured external threats, taxpayers are conditioned to accept devastating cuts to domestic housing, healthcare, and social spending, while completely accepting a blank check for the toll-booths of war.
Stewart, this is a sharp extension of the piece, thank you for taking the time to write it out.
The rentier capitalism framing is the part I want to sit with. You’re right that “the announcement inflates the asset value before a shovel moves” is doing more explanatory work than “government is slow” ever could. It reframes the delay not as a bug in the system, but as the system working exactly as designed for the people who benefit from it.
I’d add one layer: some of what looks like pure rent extraction is also genuine capacity loss. We hollowed out procurement expertise, skilled trades pipelines, and public-sector project management muscle right alongside the financialization you’re describing. The two reinforce each other. Weak public capacity makes P3s look like the only option, and P3s further erode the appetite to rebuild that capacity.
On housing specifically, I’d want to be careful not to let the rentier frame carry more weight than it can hold. REITs and corporate landlords are real and worth scrutinizing, but they’re riding on top of a scarcity problem that predates them: zoning restrictions, municipal approval timelines, and development charges that add years and real cost before a developer or lender is even in the room. A lot of that bottleneck is created and defended by existing homeowners voting to protect their own property values, which is a democratic capture problem as much as a corporate one. Take every REIT out of the market tomorrow and Canada would still be underbuilding relative to population growth. The rentier lens explains a lot, just maybe not the whole story on housing specifically.
The MIC parallel is the one I want to think about more. I’m not sure I’d go quite as far as “manufactured” threats, but the underlying point, that a permanent state of low-grade crisis is more profitable than resolution, applies well beyond defence.
I might come back to this in a future piece. You’ve named something I’ve been circling without quite landing on the word for it.
About the MIC aspect, maybe the word or phrase you're looking for is "military Keynesianism". Stimulating the economy via public defence spending. Any other form of debt-financed stimulation would receive a great deal of pushback for increasing the deficit and would remove the easiest way to get present and future taxpayers to support and finance Keynesian economics.
P.S. If the military threats aren't manufactured, try ranking alleged military threats alongside other existential threats, such as global warming, resource destruction and depletion, lack of access to a doctor or emergency room care, etc. If the military threats aren't manufactured, they are sure are being exaggerated!
Good piece, Leni Spooner! Allow me to posit an explanation as to why no party is addressing or naming this issue:
The title of your piece is a very astute observation. Perhaps your most astute and important observation is captured in your subheading: “The Announcement Is Not the Infrastructure”. This is true of most provincial and national projects and solutions. These announced projects are 90 % aspirational, and only 10% or less result in shovels in the ground. The electorate can be appeased with these grandiose promises and aspirations, but the time required to implement these announcements, to solve problems and bring relief to those suffering from affordability and/or homelessness crises, etc., is, at best, almost always a decade or more. And you are absolutely right: the lack of infrastructure precludes timely action. But that is as much an excuse as it is an explanation. The announcements leave the electorate with the impression the government is aware of, and has a plan to address the problems. Without the infrastructure, or, more precisely, without the shovels in the ground, these solutions are illusory. These illusions serve to take the heat off our elected representatives. They don’t and won’t put a roof over the heads of the homeless, nor do they make groceries, rent, and housing more affordable, nor do they provide good jobs with good pay and benefits to the unemployed. The question is, why? Or, why not?
Our elected officials are not proposing that the public sector build houses, nor hire more people and provide jobs, nor subsidize groceries. They are counting entirely on the private sector to do the heavy lifting. They tell us that, with deregulation, less red tape and rolled-back environmental restrictions, the private sector will step up to the plate -public-private sector partnerships (PPPs). And maybe that is how things used to work, but that’s not how they work anymore. To reduce labour costs and avoid environmental restrictions, most industry offshored their production decades ago. Industrial capitalism has been replaced with rentier capitalism. Profits are derived from economic rents, not from producing goods and services. Any rise in the GDP is the result of rising rents and increased asset value, hence the wage stagnation and the affordability crisis. A corporation like Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) benefits from these rising rents, at the expense of pretty much everyone else. The announcements themselves, without putting a shovel in the ground, increase the value of corporate assets, corporate profits, shareholder dividends, and executive remuneration. The increase in potential profits increases their value. Canadian corporate capital doesn't refuse to invest in machinery because executives are lazy or "disappointing". It refuses to invest because rent-seeking is vastly more profitable and far less risky than production. That is not to say that a mining company with proprietary rights over a mining concession will never work the mine, or a pipeline company with a pre-approved pipeline will never build a pipeline, or a developer with reduced regulations and red tape will never build houses. They may, but they are not going to put money into any project until they are absolutely sure of a market and future profits. Regardless, they already got an economic boost as a result of the announcement alone. They may consider buying back stock and increasing shareholder dividends to be a more risk-free, far less capital-intensive way to please their shareholders.
The remnant of productive capitalism that has not been offshored is the industrial military complex. It remains highly profitable, ostensibly because it is too important to contract out to China or whomever, but that justification no longer holds much water. Despite a multi-trillion-dollar military and the most sophisticated weaponry imaginable, the US has yet to win a war. But because it is deemed so indispensable, more and more taxpayer dollars will be funnelled into the pockets of the MIC owners. Taxpayers fearful of largely manufactured false military threats may deny the destitute access to food and shelter and accept cuts in social spending, but will always, without complaint, accept increases in “necessary” military spending.