Liberals promise to build nearly 500,000 homes per year, create new housing entity

VAUGHAN, Ont. — Liberal Leader Mark Carney says his government would double Canada’s rate of residential construction housing over the next decade to nearly 500,000 new homes per year.

The plan announced Monday would create a new federal housing entity that the Liberals say would oversee affordable housing construction, speed up construction and provide financing to homebuilders.

“By getting government back into the business of building affordable homes and by making the market work better, we will drive a huge increase in housing supply so we can bring cost down for Canadians,” Carney told reporters in Vaughan, north of Toronto. “We will build at a pace not seen since the Second World War.”

Carney says the new agency, Build Canada Homes, would act as a developer to build affordable housing at scale, including on public lands, and would develop and manage projects.

He said the “lean, mission-driven organization” would provide more than $25 billion in financing to prefabricated homebuilders and $10 billion in low-cost financing and capital to builders of affordable homes. A Liberal-led government would transfer all affordable housing programming to the new agency from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, he said.

Carney likened his plan to the massive homebuilding effort that took place in the post-WWII era, when then-prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government oversaw construction of tens of thousands of thousands of affordable starter homes for returning veterans and their families.

He said his government would emphasize prefabricated and modular housing, which can be built quickly, affordably and sustainably using Canadian materials.

The party is also proposing to lower the cost of homebuilding by cutting municipal development charges, facilitating the conversion of existing structures and building on the housing accelerator fund. The fund offers communities federal dollars in exchange for changes to bylaws and regulations that would boost home construction.

Carney said the building program would also create new jobs and stimulate the economy at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a trade war marked by repeated tariff threats.

“We can give ourselves more than any foreign government, including the United States, can take away,” he said. “But to do that, we need to do things that were previously thought impossible, at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”

The Liberals previously announced that they would eliminate the GST for first-time homebuyers on homes sold for up to $1 million.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 31, 2025.

The Canadian Press