The Nation-Building Strategy Nobody Can Tariff

At the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto this month, Canada presented global investors with a 66-page prospectus: 167 projects across eight sectors, ranging from a $57-billion Arctic port expansion to coastal pipelines, critical minerals and quantum computing, all aimed at attracting $1 trillion in international capital.

Behind that pitch sits the machinery. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Major Projects Office currently supports 18 major projects and eight transformative strategies deemed vital to Canada’s economic interest. The projects make the headlines — LNG Canada’s second phase, the Red Chris mine expansion, small modular reactors. The strategies are broader — critical minerals, Atlantic energy, port gateways.

What is the common denominator? Every project on that list carries offtake risk. Beyond what our small domestic market consumes, someone outside this country must agree to buy what it produces, at a price that clears, under trade rules that hold. Gas, copper, power, minerals.

Housing is the only nation-building asset available to Canada with no offtake risk at all. The demand is fundamentally domestic, demographically underwritten, and cannot be tariffed, blocked at a border, or repriced by another country’s trade policy. That should make it the most attractive infrastructure category on the list.

However, the Major Projects Office does not list housing anywhere.

That omission is a strategic error, and it is fixable.

Stephen Harper put a price on sovereignty at the launch of his book Flags of Canada last year: “I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we’re facing.” That is a serious man telling the nation that we may be called to make real sacrifices for our sovereignty, and plenty of Canadians are quietly doing the same math.

Singapore’s history is the argument that it does not have to be a trade-off at all. As founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew documented in his memoir, From Third World to First, a city-state with virtually no natural resources — not even enough domestic fresh water — and a per-capita income comparable to Ghana’s chose, as one of its first acts of sovereignty, to build housing for its own people. Because of this decision at a critical juncture in Singapore’s history, it became one of the globe’s richest countries, and its people thrive without ever choosing between independence and prosperity. They treated housing as infrastructure, and got both.

I was born in Singapore, but my parents immigrated to Canada in the mid-1970s before I turned three. I have lived here for five decades, married a Canadian I met in high school, and raised two sons who are now in university. My perspective is not that of a homesick expatriate. It has been formed by five decades of being Canadian, and by my work in real estate and finance.

The automatic view in my industry — one I held myself — is that supply is a market problem with a market solution, and that government involvement is the disease rather than the cure. But after spending the better part of a decade studying how other countries, including the country of my birth, house their people, I have concluded that the evidence points somewhere uncomfortable for those of us who naturally prefer market solutions. My firm is also a partner in one of the projects I use as part of the evidence below, and I will flag it when I get there.

Housing is key to productivity

Start with the number that should be driving Canadian economic policy and mostly isn’t. The OECD has projected Canada will post some of the weakest real GDP per capita growth of any advanced economy through to 2050.

Housing is not the only reason, but it is a larger one than its usual placement in the social policy file suggests. And the fact it is often missing from the economic policy file is a big part of the problem. Capital locked into an overpriced starter home for 30 years is capital not deployed into machinery, equipment or research and development. Shelter costs that outrun wages suppress household formation and consumption. And an unaffordable housing market is a direct constraint on labour mobility: workers cannot move to the cities where their productivity would be highest. That mobility is the single most reliable engine of productivity growth an economy has.

A 2023 Deloitte study for the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association and Housing Partnership Canada found a strong link between community housing investment and productivity growth, on top of housing’s established multiplier effect on GDP. The mechanism isn’t mysterious. It is what happens when a country stops charging its most productive workers a premium to live near their work.

It also creates a virtuous fiscal loop. When you supply attainable housing for the middle class, fewer households are driven to the financial brink, which directly reduces the downstream demand on traditional social housing and emergency services. Simultaneously, the resulting boost to economic productivity strengthens the tax base. You cannot sustainably fund a social safety net for the most vulnerable while actively impoverishing the middle class that pays for it.

The same distortion runs through the banking system, where an insured residential mortgage is close to the most capital-efficient asset a Canadian bank can hold, while a loan to a business trying to grow is nothing of the sort.

The federal standard is that housing is affordable when shelter costs stay under 30 per cent of before-tax household income. By the 2022 Canadian Housing Survey, 22 per cent of Canadian households were spending 30 per cent or more of their income on shelter. Among renters, that share rises to one in three.

But that statistic does not capture what housing scarcity and precarity actually feel like. Think of my friend Julie, a nurse I have written about previously. Her 12-hour shifts at St. Paul’s Hospital aren’t her entire workday. She also faces a two-hour (or more) daily commute from Maple Ridge because she can’t afford to live closer to the patients she cares for. The real cognitive toll of the housing crisis gets paid in Julie’s car on the Golden Ears Bridge. It is the mental math of calculating grocery inflation while stuck in gridlock, and the exhaustion that guarantees she will not have the energy to volunteer at her kid’s school or sit on a strata council, let alone fulfil her aspiration to train as a nurse practitioner.

This is not a character flaw. Economist Sendhil Mullainathan and behavioural psychologist Eldar Shafir have found that scarcity eats up mental capacity, erodes executive control and worsens the decisions people make about every other aspect of their lives. People forced to go all out to simply keep a roof over their heads have less time, and less emotional and psychological bandwidth available for retraining, for risk-taking, for starting something. An economy that prices its citizens to the edge of their paycheques because of structurally high housing costs is inexorably shrinking its own capacity to innovate and build, and undermines the ability for its people to thrive.

When we treat housing as traditional social policy, it competes for funding with every other social program.

But if we were to treat it as economic infrastructure, it competes with pipelines and ports — a comparison that reflects its actual importance to overall economic output and productivity.

The market is working exactly as designed

Why isn’t the market delivering the housing we need and why should government play a much larger role in fixing that?

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Fall 2026 Housing Supply Report says the country needs to build 417,000 to 469,000 homes a year through to 2036, just to restore affordability to pre-pandemic levels — not to make housing actually affordable. Against that, the national housing agency expects housing starts to fall from 259,000 in 2025 to roughly 241,000 this year, and to keep declining through 2028, with the weakest construction concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia.

A project shelved in 2026 is a building that doesn’t exist in 2030, which is roughly when demographics say demand will return, particularly if the nation again begins to accept higher numbers of immigrants.

The trough in construction and the return of demand are scheduled to arrive together, likely with a vengeance.

The ground nobody can price

That is a textbook co-ordination failure, and it sits on top of a second problem. In the second largest country on Earth, the binding constraint was never land itself. The constraint is entitled land with the appropriate zoning and development permits in place — on a predictable timeline. What the industry refers to as “entitlement risk” in this country is close to unpriceable.

Consider a project I know from the inside because my firm is one of the project proponents: East Village, on East Hastings in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood, one of the most marginalized in the country by virtually any metric. My firm has partnered with BC Housing — through the province’s BC Builds program — and Westbank to deliver close to 1,000 secured purpose-built rental and social housing homes near the new St. Paul’s Hospital campus. We envision it will ultimately be owned and operated by a non-profit housing society.

The obvious objection — that a man with an application in front of council would of course argue for faster entitlement — is one I would make myself. But read what follows accordingly, and then check it, because all of it is on the public record.

The timeline tells the entire story. The capital formation process started in 2016, and after many twists and turns, in July 2022, Vancouver council unanimously supported the project proceeding through enhanced rezoning. In the March 2024 development application package, BC Housing signalled its strong support for the project and included a letter to the City of Vancouver that confirmed it, offering up to 100 per cent of the interim construction financing for the two rental buildings (with all the usual caveats you would expect from a public program).

Yet the application did not even reach a public hearing until February 2026. Two weeks later, council referred it back to staff for further review, even though staff supported the application.

Nearly four years passed between a unanimous council direction to proceed and a council decision to kick it back down the hall. I checked my records before writing this piece. If the project is approved this year and built on a reasonable schedule, more than a decade will separate the first drawings from the first resident moving in.

BC Builds Associate Vice-President Raymond Kwong said: “This is an important housing project for the community, that’s why BC Housing is supportive of it, but there is no project until there is zoning to allow the development.”

What provider of housing can hedge that? None can.

Today we have a housing system where the risk gets priced as a premium into every square foot, or projects don’t proceed at all. Neither path produces affordable homes at the scale our society needs.

This has been solved elsewhere

None of this is unique to Canada, and none of it has gone unsolved. Let’s return to the example of Singapore, along with some other nations’ approaches.

According to the Urban Land Institute’s 2025 Asia Pacific Home Attainability Index, public housing flats in Singapore cost about 4.3 times the annual median household income. Private housing — same island, same construction supply chain, same labour market — runs 16.9 times. For scale, Demographia’s 2025 survey put Vancouver at 11.8 times, across all housing forms, condominiums included — the fourth-worst of 95 major markets worldwide.

The objection that Singapore is a small non-Western city-state whose model doesn’t transfer has at least three rejoinders in Western Europe. The Netherlands houses close to 30 per cent of its population through non-profit associations backed by a national guarantee fund. Austria offers roughly a quarter of its stock through limited-profit associations that compete head-to-head with private developers. And in Vienna, non-market housing represents close to 60 per cent of that city’s housing stock. Denmark sponsors large-scale non-market housing — both rentals and co-op ownership — and recycles capital through a national building fund. These are ordinary property regimes, with no expropriation at below-market value, and with institutions built to do what the market cycle will not.

How those systems actually finance themselves is worthy of its own article. What matters here is simply that they exist, at significant scale.

What Canada doesn’t have

In contrast to Singapore and the examples from Western Europe, non-market housing represents roughly four per cent of Canada’s housing stock. A private sector that withdraws precisely when land and labour are cheapest cannot be the only builder. Building through a downturn requires an institution with a 30-year horizon and capital that is patient. That is the gap that Prime Minister Carney can fill by making a bold commitment to change Canada’s failing housing equation and working with provincial governments to do so.

That is not a critique of private developers, who should be commended for building the homes that people need and taking on often unknowable risks to do so. Nor is it even a critique of planning departments or municipal councils, who are serving the system they operate within and the residents who elected them. It is a description of a structural gap that no institution in this country is currently mandated or capitalized to fill.

Ottawa can close half of it with a decision it can make this year, at no cost.

The Major Projects Office should designate a National Housing Delivery Strategy as its ninth transformative strategy, anchored in the renewal of the National Housing Strategy that expires in 2027 and is being redesigned now. Designation is not a political label. It is what determines whether an undertaking gets treated as national infrastructure — with the capital, the priority and the co-ordinated path through government that a pipeline receives — or as a program competing for room in a budget cycle.

This is personal

My family came to Canada in the mid-1970s because we were drawn by the promise of this country. Canadian per-capita income was three times that of Singapore, which had only achieved sovereignty in 1965. Singapore was still an emerging state facing a number of existential challenges, not least of which was figuring out how a small island with inadequate domestic drinking water supply and no natural resources could build a viable economy. Today, the per-capita income comparison between Singapore and Canada is the other way around. My family’s early years here were spent 10 people deep in a small three-bedroom townhouse in North Vancouver. For us then, that cramped townhouse was a way station. For far too many families today, it is the end of the line.

My father was diagnosed with cancer soon after we arrived in Canada, when I was seven, and he died in a hospital bed at the old Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver when I was 10. The early years of our Canadian journey, the townhouse years in North Vancouver, were hard years. During those years, I asked him why we had come. I have never forgotten the answer: “Ernest, Canada is a land of milk and honey, and you and your brothers can build a good life here.”

Although he didn’t live to see it, Canada proved him right, and that promise was fulfilled for his sons in time. I have never stopped being grateful that he believed in Canada.

When we arrived in the 1970s, the ratio of home prices to average incomes was reasonable enough that immigrant families with humble backgrounds like ours could see a clear pathway to a good life. In 1977, the average cost of a detached home in Greater Vancouver was approximately $80,000, against an average annual Canadian family income exceeding $20,100. A standard Vancouver family could buy a detached home for about four years of pre-tax earnings. Families like ours who were willing to work hard, scrimp and save could climb the most important economic ladder in this country.

Today, as reported in the August 2026 edition of National Bank of Canada’s Housing Affordability Monitor, the median home price for townhouses and detached houses in Greater Vancouver is $1.58 million, against a median annual household income of $95,324. That pushes the price-to-income ratio past 16. The comparison is conservative on built form: 1977 uses detached houses, while 2026 uses the cheaper townhouse-and-detached basket. The actual gap is even wider than four-to-16 suggests. The rungs on the housing ladder have grown so far apart that, unless a Canadian has significant inherited wealth or is in the highest echelons of income brackets, homeownership is a fantasy.

My father’s answer was true for his sons. I do not know that it will be true for mine.

In a future piece I will detail the historical precedent in Canada for what I believe is urgently necessary, a level of government intervention in the creation of affordable housing that makes the current effort look like a rounding error.

When Canada dismantled its public housing capacity in the 1980s and ’90s, we didn’t just stop building homes. We started building distance, undermining the collective faith and hope in the future that is essential to a good society. Leaving housing off the list does not answer the question. It defers it — at a cost measured in homes not built, productivity not gained and a generation quietly concluding the arithmetic here no longer works for them.

Reversing this direction should be a top priority for Prime Minister Carney and his Major Projects Office.