The Construction Industry’s Collapse In Ontario: By The End Of 2025 We Will All Understand How Bad This Is
It’s very simple really: New Residential Construction Starts have fallen off a cliff in Canada’s most populous province
It started 18 months ago in Single Family
A thread by mortgage broker, Ron Butler.
London Ont. didn’t get Ron’s memo.
Yeah …. Calgary doesn’t seem to have got the memo either.
Because everybody is moving here from Ontario.
I’m not sure what this guy is talking about because there is no background information. (Not an X user)
I’ve never understood why various levels of government think that huge fees charged to builders before construction is a good idea. Municipal governments will charge property taxes on homeowners and rental properties for decades. In a rational world governments would keep pre-build fees as low as possible because more home and commercial construction creates long term revenue.
The same goes for the ever-expanding building regulations and approvals. Completely unnecessary red tape and paperwork. Would going back to the building regulations of say the 1990s really result in unsafe homes or devastation to the environment?
I read a while back that a company wanted to build a warehouse in both NW USA and British Columbia. The warehouse in the US was completely built before the warehouse in BC had gotten anywhere near finishing the government approval process and the costs involved in Canada were significantly more expensive. All of those fees, regulations and lengthy approval process (time is money) add tens to hundreds of thousands to the the costs of homes and commercial buildings.
But the employ otherwise unemployable government employees!! This is the endgame of Canadian governments.
Probably a big part of it :
– existing staff decides they need new regulations
– new staff is hired to implement the new regulations
– more money is needed to pay staff who were hired to implement the new regulations so building fees go up.
– repeat cycle of new regs, new staff and increasing fees causing housing costs to skyrocket
– create a new government (tax funded) program to help solve problems after builders and consumers can’t afford to build or purchase new homes.
– hire more government employees to manage the new home builders and home buyers programs.
A carpenter friend of mine tells me that the city of Winnipeg requires R40 insulation not just in the attic itself, but right over top of the outer walls in new houses. This necessitates much deeper and more expensive rafter frames. It’s regulations like this which are driving massive commercial building development just outside the city limits in municipalities that are more business friendly.
BC is nucking futs … my condo in Fernie BC was built in 1983 and had some changes in designated use, for example a group of 8 hotel rooms were being separated out to single studio units. This is a simple resurvey … ie a paper change on the blue prints and reregistering with the BC condo / strata.
The approval sat for around a year with the BC highways / roads folks holding up the entire process and all they had to do was acknowledge that internal re naming has nothing to do with the roads but being BC it took a year to do nothing.
Bring Cash / BC is a commie lite socialist fuster cluck of greentards and nitwits … the stupidity of the average BC government worker is beyond belief.
Re BC red tape. My former neighbor bought an acreage near Creston BC 2 years ago and has been doing renovations since then. Just to get a new electrical panel took at least 6 months. He applied for a permit for a new garage and it took over a year to get it approved with requirements that are unusual in Alberta. Then there’s building inspectors who are not too interested in timely attention to a reasonable request, holding things up even longer until their inspection can be completed and passed. Top it off with the local contractors’ dragging their feet to work for a “come from away” guy. Luckily he’s a plumber with handyman skills so can do a lot himself, but what a nightmare it would be for someone with no experience.
Yep. These are the types of senseless regulations that are at the root of Canada’s problems – unsustainable government expansion. Not just housing but productivity, people and businesses leaving Canada, crazy high taxes, etc. Of course, adding in mass immigration has made these problems even worse.
The real estate carnage is clearly most concentrated in the GTA. Not surprising, given that values ran up at a rate that most other cities never came close to. Other locales, like Calgary or Winnipeg, have experienced only minor declines in prices. But before anyone gets too nonchalant about that, remember that the 2008 housing bust in the US was not universally felt either. Housing values in many cities did not crash. But enough cities experienced a crash that it started to bring down some major banks. Given that the Canadian economy is only a fraction of the size of the US, a crash in Ontario would do an awful lot of damage.
Ron Butler mentions building codes as being something that needs to be looked at….
The plumbing and gas code books are typically revised every 5 or so years, and the powers that be have been working on those revisions for 4 years having meetings and conferences to decide who’s pet peeve gets to be in the next code update.
This aspect of the building condos in GTA isn’t going to change by autumn of 2025.
If the gov’t wants to free up some housing for actual Canadians, there are +4 million people in Canada who’s visas will expire next year and by not renewing those visas that’ll take care of “some” of the problem, as well as ease up the health care wait times. I doubt any of the parties in government want to take that on, and all sectors of education in Canada will scream about how many $millions of tuition they’ll lose.
Be Strong, or fold and face the consequences….
Has anyone asked The Turd™ how construction on those millions of new homes is lately?
I doubt there’s anyone or group to blame but the #Libranos and their enablers within the NDP/Bloc
I expect the worst. I’ve been conditioned to expect the worst when nothing is done, and when the gov’t says “no problem, we’ve got this” … I expect it’ll be worse than the worst.
AB/Sask. should be working on separating from this dumpster fire.
There are several problems that cause construction delays, gov’t regs are only one of those, and a big one. Gov employee incompetence is another, regulations happen bc a lot of trades people are stupid and incompetent , I know bc I’v had to fix things up after them quite a few times.
Not to worry. AI will replace all those construction jobs. Hipster coders will be able to build their own homes using the universal construction knowledge of AI. Hell, the homes will virtually build themselves. As former Fed Chairman Volker said … we don’t need middle class jobs … we live in a tech. society … where nobody is needed to build anything. Just code, baby! ht/ Al Davis.
If the people who need housing can’t afford housing, housing won’t be built. Illiterate goat herders from Afghanistan are not in high demand in the Canadian economy yet we import them by the million.
When it is finally over there will be a big sigh of relief from someone, somewhere, maybe…..
The government could solve the housing crisis with the stroke of a pen. Make the first $50,000 in rental income tax free. The increase in available rooms and apartments would boggle the mind.
Here in my area of Ottawa, there are still several high-rise condo/rental(?) buildings going up; but they all were started back a year or so ago.
Money invested in the market just has one tax to be concerned with. Money invested in building construction has so many taxes and fees to consider that we’ve long past the threshold of where now, builders and their financiers are shrugging. Canada’s biggest housing cost impediment is the shortage of private land suitable and allowed to be used for housing. At 89% Crown ownership nationally, Canada is virtually a feudal nation.