Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a new initiative on Sunday aimed at increasing the availability of affordable housing in Canada. This comes nearly six months after he pledged to double the number of homes built each year. The initiative involves the creation of a new government agency called Build Canada Homes (BCH), which will focus on developing affordable housing across the country.

The BCH will receive an initial funding of $13 billion and plans to construct 4,000 new affordable homes on federal land in cities including Dartmouth, Longueuil, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Toronto. However, construction is not expected to begin until next year, and it may take years before any of these homes are occupied.

Carney appointed Ana Bailão, a former Toronto city councillor, to lead the new agency. Bailão has experience in affordable housing, having served on the board of Toronto Community Housing and chaired the planning and housing committee. However, her record has raised concerns. During her time in office, the stock of non-market housing in Toronto decreased from 77,742 units in 2010 to 72,143 in 2022. Furthermore, the city has only completed 1,242 of the 65,000 rent-controlled homes it aimed to build by 2030.

The announcement comes amid ongoing challenges in addressing Canada’s housing crisis. The federal government has previously launched initiatives such as the $40 billion National Housing Strategy (NHS) in 2017, which aimed to build 125,000 new public housing units and refurbish 300,000 units. Despite these efforts, a report indicated that the homeless population increased by 20 percent between 2018 and 2022.

Critics argue that the new initiative may not effectively address the underlying issues contributing to the housing shortage. Many of the barriers to building new homes fall outside the federal government's control, making it easier to create new bureaucracies than to tackle the root causes of the housing supply crisis.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has previously highlighted the need for municipalities to relax zoning rules and reduce bureaucratic hurdles to facilitate housing development. The BCH's approach, which involves significant public funding and government oversight, has raised questions about its potential effectiveness in increasing the supply of market housing.

As the government moves forward with this new plan, it remains to be seen whether it will yield the desired results in addressing the housing affordability crisis in Canada.