Minister pushes back against PBO report, housing projections

The Front Bench examines how the PBO report affects the PM’s fiscal image, the timing of its release, and whether it could sway undecided MPs ahead of the vote.

OTTAWA — Canada’s housing minister is pushing back against a new report by the parliamentary budget officer, which projects Ottawa’s new housing agency will add 26,000 units to the housing supply.

“I’ve got to go into detail, look at their numbers, but I think that’s just based on the raw number,” said Housing Minister Gregor Robertson. “It’s not based on attracting a lot of investment from provinces, from the private sector and making sure that we’re modernizing the industry and delivering more homes per dollar.”

The Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report on Thursday that projected Build Canada Homes (BCH) would add 26,000 housing units over five years, approximately 13,000 of which would be new units for low-income households.

Interim parliamentary budget officer (PBO) Jason Jacques says that it represents a 2.1 per cent increase in housing completions relative to his office’s baseline project.

“Our assessment is that … BCH should be expected to make a modest contribution towards housing supply and affordability,” the report said.

The federal government launched BCH in September to help finance, build and fast track the construction of new homes. Ottawa has said it intends to double the pace of housing construction over the next decade to build over 500,000 homes a year.

The PBO says no plan has been presented to meet this goal.

However, Robertson says the goal is “just the beginning.”

“We’re going to deliver a ton of affordable housing, and we’re going to leverage a lot of investment from across Canada to get that done,” he said.

‘An unprecedented scale’: minister

During its launch, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the agency would prioritize six public land sites for the creation of 4,000 factory-built homes, with “additional capacity of up to 45,000 units across the portfolio.”

The PBO also warned in his report that overall federal spending on housing is set to drop by 56 per cent over the next three years, unless current Trudeau-era housing programs are renewed.

“While the new spending under Build Canada Homes is incremental to previously published spending plans, total federal planned spending on housing programs is set to decline 56 per cent from $9.8 billion in 2025-26 to $4.3 billion in 2028-29, due to the expiry of funding for existing programs and cuts set out in Budget 2025,” the report said.

Asked about the spending cuts highlighted in the report, the housing minister said he had yet to review the report in detail, but that the government’s work on affordable housing was just getting started.

“We will be scaling that work, bringing the capital to the table so we can build on affordable housing at an unprecedented scale,” Robertson said.

Ottawa allocated $13 billion over the next five years in the budget for loans, financing and land acquisition, as part of BCH. Robertson called that figure “just the initial capitalization.”