Op-Eds
Dahir, Robson - Cities sit on too much cash. Here’s how they could help with Canada’s housing crisis
Published in The Globe and Mail.
The short supply and high cost of housing are top-of-mind concerns for many Canadians. So it is necessary to pay more attention to the quirks of municipal financial management, as cities budget for and finance infrastructure in ways that can slow construction and raise costs.
Many of Canada’s major cities are sitting on large amounts of cash that they collected before – often years ago – the capital projects they were collected to fund are under way. If cities matched the revenues they collect more closely with the expenses they incur, we could enjoy more and less expensive housing.
Panic over cities’ budgets is an annual ritual. And when Ontario municipalities gather in Ottawa this…
Pas facile de se faire une tête dans ce dossier, où promoteurs et opposants présentent des arguments valables, mais aussi des positions critiquables. Prenons de la hauteur pour en juger.
L’argument central avancé dans ce journal par le ministre de l’Économie, de l’Innovation et de l’Énergie, Pierre Fitzgibbon, est de « développer au Québec une économie basée sur des secteurs d’avenir » et de « réduire notre écart de richesse avec le reste du Canada » pour financer la santé et l’éducation.
Des objectifs louables, certes, mais le gouvernement de la CAQ ne semble appliquer qu’une moitié de la stratégie préconisée pour lutter contre le réchauffement climatique, qui est de s’attaquer tant aux risques…
Wouldn’t it be great if more government infrastructure were built faster and cheaper? The Ontario government certainly thinks so and is creating the Ontario Infrastructure Bank (OIB) to get that done.
Unfortunately, inadequate funding is not the problem plaguing infrastructure investment. The province never comes close to spending the money it allocates to infrastructure. In 2022-23 alone, it underspent its infrastructure budget by a whopping $3.4 billion (15 per cent). Under-spending has happened every year in recent memory.
What’s more, increasing funding over time has not increased actual infrastructure output. According to Statistics Canada, the combined capital expenditures of all levels of government in Ontario have…
Although housing is mainly a provincial jurisdiction, the federal government is seized with the pressing political and policy problem of how to increase the housing stock, and sooner rather than later. Ottawa’s proper role in housing is to focus on areas of direct federal control like taxes and immigration. Direct intervention on city-by-city zoning decisions would be unwise and would likely only worsen the housing crisis.
The federal government has made a good start on housing by exempting rental construction from GST. But it needs to do more. Ottawa’s GST take from housing has been rising stealthily since the early 1990s because of inflation. To merely reverse the increases, it should inflation-index and nearly double…
The cost of housing in Canada has increased dramatically in recent years. In some cities, barriers to getting new homes built are a major reason why.
Barriers to constructing new single-detached homes drive a wedge between what it costs to build and the market price. On average between 2011 and 2021, a single-detached home in the Vancouver area cost homebuyers $2 million. But the construction cost of a new home was only about $700,000. The $1.3-million difference reflected high costs for the right to build on the limited land governments allowed housing to be built on. Homes in the Toronto area now cost homebuyers $350,000 more than they cost to build. In the Montreal area, however, the difference between cost…
