Lorne Gunter: Carney Liberals fall pathetically short of their own housing-start goals

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CHMC) — the federal Crown corporation in charge of monitoring and financing housing in this country — reported that Ottawa fell well short of its goal of assuring 500,000 new housing units in by 2030.

Indeed, at 259,000, just a little under 52 per cent of the target promised by Prime Minister Mark Carney was met last year. Admittedly that was better than the 245,000 new units (including rentals and condos) in 2024.

Despite the 2025 increase, housing starts are still well below pre-pandemic levels of 270,000. And after an 11 per cent drop in home construction in September, CMHC now projects that starts will decline this year and next.

Also, 2025’s starts of 259,000 are only about half of what they were in 1976, when the country had a population of not quite 23,000,000 but built 273,200 new homes. Now our population is nearly twice that — 42 000,000 — and we can’t even match the raw number of 1976 starts.

What’s more, CMHC estimates there must be “417,000 to 469,000 new housing units annually to restore pre-pandemic affordability by 2036.”

The situation is so bad and the feds are so off target that recently the department of housing and infrastructure stopped quoting Carney’s promise of 500,000 a year. Instead, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, the department announced that, “The success of Build Canada Homes will be closely tied to improvements in broader thematics related to increasing housing supply and affordability.”

I’m guessing that means whatever the minister and his bureaucrats need it to mean.

If a reporter asks, “Did you meet your housing goals this year?” a senior acting deputy director of housing goals can answer, “We achieved broader thematics related to increasing housing supply and affordability.”

Huh!?

Despite the department’s pathetic and inadequate performance, Blacklock’s also discovered that 90 per cent of federal housing executives received bonuses averaging nearly $20,000 last year. That’s nearly $1,700 a month in extra cash despite the government coming nowhere near it’s housing goals.

The justifications for this more than $2-million windfall would be laughable if they weren’t so detached and so commonplace in government circles.

An internal memo to Minister of Housing and Infrastructure, Gregor Robertson, the former “Mayor Moonbeam” of Vancouver, explained the bonuses were necessary because they prove housing is “a Government of Canada priority.” Over 100 department executives had to — had to — be paid extravagant bonuses to prove Ottawa was taking the housing affordability crisis seriously.

Oh, yes, I’m sure the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who would love to buy a home, but who can’t because prices are too high due to too few homes being built, will sleep better knowing housing bureaucrats pocketed an extra 20 grand last year.

Those bureaucrats’ new decks on their homes or their winter vacations in overwater bungalows in Mauritius will no doubt take the sting out of the housing hunt for hundreds of thousands of young couples.

According to the memo to the minister, “The scale and distribution of payouts do not suggest bonuses have become entitlements as executives must meet clear performance commitments each year. Eligibility is not automatic … but tied to demonstrated results.”

Keep in mind that most federal departments set their own performance goals, and even then, nearly half of them fail to meet the goals. Yet bonuses still get paid year after year. (Sounds like entitlements to me.)

And here’s a truly scary line, “Average total expenditures for performance pay among executives aligns with government-wide norms.”

In other words, everybody in the federal government is doing the same thing.

Indeed, in 2025 the Canadian Taxpayers Federation revealed that more than 88 per cent of executives across the entire federal public service received average bonuses of $17,000, whether their departments met their self-imposed performance goals or not.

Who cares if the housing crisis will ever be solved? The brave, plucky bureaucrats over at CMHC are getting their automatic bonuses just like every other senior federal bureaucrat.

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