Canada wants to build 400,000 homes a year. Who’s going to build them?

Canada's housing supply is not keeping up with population growth — in 2016, there were 427 housing units for every 1,000 Canadians, and in 2020, there were was 424.

The government has promised to build about 400,000 homes annually for the next decade.

There’s just one problem: It’s not clear there are enough workers to build them.

“The reality is, they’re dealing with labour shortages, they’re dealing with material shortages, they’re dealing with all kinds of challenges in obtaining the material that they need to build homes,” said Jean-François Perrault, chief economist at Scotiabank.

“So it’s not even clear that you’d be able to increase the (construction) pace significantly, given how challenging a labour and a material situation is facing the industry…right now.”

The average selling price of a home in Canada has surged more than 50 per cent in the last two years, according to Reuters. Construction, meanwhile, has failed to keep up with the country’s growing population — in fact, a report published by Scotiabank last year found Canada has the “lowest number of housing units per 1,000 residents of any G7 country.”

About 286,000 new homes are currently built each year, according to 2021 data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

But the country’s housing supply is not keeping up with population growth. In 2016, there were 427 housing units for every 1,000 Canadians, and in 2020, there were was 424, according to a report Perrault published in May 2021.

During that time, Canada’s population grew by more than 1.3 million people.