We must say it louder for the people in the back: Canada is not in a housing crisis. We are in an infrastructure and policy crisis.
Until we start solving the right problems, all the money, headlines, and government promises in the world won’t get us anywhere near sustainable growth.
Getting to the root cause
Let’s start by unpacking the narrative. Across every level of government, housing has become the political scapegoat of choice. But blaming the housing “shortage” is like blaming a doctor shortage for long ER wait times—it sounds intuitive, but it’s fundamentally misleading. In health care, we don’t actually lack physicians; we lack compensation structures that reward patient throughput.
Under Ontario’s Academic Funding Plan, for example, many doctors receive a salary rather than fee-for-service billing. There’s no financial incentive to increase volume. So waitlists grow, not for lack of supply, but for lack of systemic efficiency.
Sound familiar?
In real estate, we face the same false premise. There’s no actual shortage of land, materials, or interest from developers.
What we lack is coordinated infrastructure, aligned policy, and a functional approval process.
Kingston: A case study for collaboration
Take Kingston, Ont. as a case in point. The city already has the land capacity to meet growth projections with medium- and high-density housing. But the Provincial Policy Statement (PPS) is pushing expansion beyond the urban boundary anyway, forcing new infrastructure spending in areas that don’t need it. That’s not growth. That’s sprawl.
Even worse, when we do invest in infrastructure, we often do it in silos. Picture going to work and discovering that your entire organization has been building toward different goals, with different blueprints, timelines, and metrics. That’s how cities operate when housing policy is separated from transportation, utilities, schools, and health care planning. Everyone’s working hard, but no one’s working together.
That’s why it was so refreshing to see the City of Kingston take a different approach: aligning its updated Official Plan with the Integrated Transportation and Mobility Master Plan and utility infrastructure strategy.
This is what real master planning should look like. For too long, “master-planned communities” have been a marketing slogan, not a reality. If you don’t believe me, go look at school bus routes. Many of our new subdivisions were built without long-term demographic logic. They fill quickly with young families and then age out, leaving brand-new schools half empty a decade later.
We should be building communities people can live in across every life stage—from first-time buyers to retirees—all in the same postal code. Instead, we’re spending more public dollars than ever, producing fewer homes, and pointing fingers at the wrong culprits.
“We need carrots, not sticks”
The truth? Government doesn’t need to get back into construction. It needs to get back into coordination. Growth can and should pay for growth. New tax revenue can fund social and affordable housing—if we allow development to happen on time, on budget, and in alignment with local infrastructure needs. But that only works if we stop penalizing builders with outdated fees and start incentivizing them to build efficiently.
The Housing Accelerator Fund made a great headline, but very few municipalities will see the money. Why? Because the targets tied to that funding are unrealistic. We need carrots, not sticks. Instead of dangling unreachable housing starts, why not eliminate development charges and redirect federal dollars toward infrastructure expansion? Why not reform the New Home Warranty Act to encourage emerging builders with completion-based incentives instead of regulatory gatekeeping?
The system isn’t broken. We’ve just stopped reading the rulebook—if we ever had one to begin with. Fixing this isn’t about grand reinventions. It’s about understanding how all the moving pieces fit together, and then holding people accountable for playing their part.
Let’s stop chasing housing headlines. And start solving infrastructure problems.
