Housing Minister Rob Flack, asked in late March what Ontario’s new internal target for home construction actually is, gave an answer that would have been unthinkable on the 2022 campaign trail. “As long as we sell more homes than we did the month before, than we did the year before, and we see a progressive change upwards, I’m happy.” The province had promised 1.5 million homes by 2031. The minister is now describing month-over-month progress as the benchmark.
That’s not a recalibration. That’s abandonment.
The Numbers Don’t Move in the Right Direction
The Ford government set its 1.5 million homes by 2031 goal before the 2022 election, when Steve Clark was housing minister and the province was riding comparatively strong construction numbers. Annual targets were staggered: 110,000 for 2023, 125,000 for 2024, 150,000 for 2025, and 175,000 per year from 2026 onward.
Ontario recorded roughly 94,753 housing starts in 2024. Against a target of 125,000, that’s a gap of about 30,000 homes in a single year. Then 2025 got worse.
The Financial Accountability Officer reported that housing starts in the first quarter of 2025 were at their lowest levels since 2009. By August 2025, just 5,149 new homes had broken ground that month, down four per cent year-over-year. At that point, Ontario had managed only 26 per cent of its annual target two-thirds of the way through the year. Final 2025 starts came in roughly 23 per cent below 2024.
Ontario was the only province in Canada where housing starts were worse in 2025 than in 2024. Not one of the slower ones. The only one.
Housing Starts vs. Annual Target
The cumulative math is brutal. With only around 260,000 housing starts recorded since the target was set, Ontario would need to average 218,000 starts per year for the remaining five years to hit 1.5 million. That’s more than double the current pace, and more than three times what the province is projecting for 2026.
A Budget That Keeps Lowering the Bar
Every successive provincial fiscal document has revised housing projections downward. Not once.
Comparing the spring 2024 budget to the Fall 2025 Economic Statement revealed Ontario predicted 81,700 fewer homes than it had hoped for in that window. Then the November 2025 statement projected 315,000 new housing starts from 2025 to 2028. By the March 2026 budget, that figure had dropped to 276,900, a cut of more than 10 per cent in four months.
The 2026 budget projects just 64,800 housing starts this year. The original plan called for 175,000. That’s 40 per cent of the target, and the government is treating it as a projection, not a failure.
Context: The province’s housing targets were set under Steve Clark as Housing Minister before the 2022 election. When Paul Calandra replaced Clark after the Greenbelt scandal, he expanded what counts toward the target to include long-term care beds, postsecondary student housing, additional residential units (basement apartments), and congregate retirement home suites. The province has used this expanded definition in all subsequent progress reports.
What Counts Is a Choice
The counting controversy matters more than it might seem. When Ontario announced in 2023 that it had met its annual housing goal, the headline number included long-term care beds. Not rental apartments. Not condos. Long-term care beds.
Even with that expanded counting methodology, 2024 marked a significant drop. The province tracked five separate data streams to claim progress: CMHC housing starts, additional residential units, new and redeveloped long-term care beds, new postsecondary student housing beds, and new congregate retirement home suites. Add them all up and the province still landed far below its 125,000 target for the year.
The one genuinely encouraging number: nearly 18,000 purpose-built rental units started construction in 2024, the second-highest level on record after 2023’s record of almost 19,000. That’s a real achievement. It just doesn’t come close to covering the gap everywhere else.
The Ford-Carney Deal
The most consequential development in Ontario housing policy in years arrived not in a provincial budget but in a joint announcement on March 30, when Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Ford announced a federal-provincial housing partnership worth $8.8 billion over 10 years in cost-matched infrastructure funding.
"Funding will be prioritized for municipalities that agreed to cut DCs by up to 50 per cent, as well as municipalities that have already lowered DCs in recent months... if you don't cut DCs, you aren't getting any money."
The centrepiece is HST removal. The full 13 per cent HST will be lifted on new homes valued up to $1 million, saving buyers up to $130,000. The maximum rebate holds for homes up to $1.5 million and tapers out above $1.85 million. It applies to eligible agreements signed between April 1, 2026, and March 31, 2027, which makes it a one-year window, not a structural fix.
Development charges will be cut in half for three years for municipalities that comply. Ford made the conditionality explicit: no DC cuts, no federal-provincial money.
The Ontario government estimates the HST measure alone will generate nearly $2.2 billion in tax relief, support an additional 8,000 housing starts next year, create up to 21,000 jobs, and add $2.7 billion to provincial GDP. The Building Industry and Land Development Association called it a genuine inflection point; BILD’s Dave Wilkes noted that “this week sales centres were buzzing, they haven’t been buzzing for two years.” That’s a low bar after two years of near-stasis, but it’s a real market signal.
What the deal doesn’t contain: any affordability mandate. Developers aren’t required to price any portion of new units below market rate to qualify for the tax savings. The HST break flows through to buyers on market-rate condos and homes, which is meaningful for middle-income purchasers. For people who need deeply affordable housing, it’s a different story entirely.
The 44th Parliament’s Legislative Record
Two government bills in the 44th Parliament address housing supply directly. Bill 17, the Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act, introduced by Housing Minister Flack, restricts Toronto from requiring green roofs, accelerates transit-oriented community approvals, and expands as-of-right minor variances. Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, targets Landlord and Tenant Board backlogs and streamlines adjudication processes.
Both bills drew approval from industry. Neither addresses the cost of construction, which Flack himself identified as the core reason building is at a “standstill.”
The NDP’s Bill 28, the Homelessness Ends with Housing Act, sits in opposition territory. It would require the government to design and maintain a homelessness elimination strategy with a 10-year deadline. It won’t pass. But the numbers it points to are not abstract: more than 80,000 Ontarians are currently homeless, and without intervention that figure could reach 300,000 within a decade. The province’s supply-side policy has produced no mechanism to reach people at that end of the spectrum.
NDP housing critic Jessica Bell put it plainly: “It’s expensive to rent, it’s hard to find a home to buy and homelessness is just going from bad to worse.” Interim Liberal Leader John Fraser was more measured, acknowledging the difficulty of the file while pointing to the absence of a realistic plan from the outset. Liberal MPP Adil Shamji called it more directly: “Doug Ford has dug a deeper hole for Ontario housing than any other province.”
Who Gets the $1.2 Billion
The province’s Building Faster Fund committed $1.2 billion over three years to reward municipalities that hit at least 80 per cent of their annual housing target, with bonuses for exceeding them. More than $280 million has been awarded against 2023 performance.
The mechanism is sensible in theory. Municipalities that build get funded to build more. In practice, the program rewards performance against targets that have themselves been repeatedly revised downward. A municipality hitting 80 per cent of a lowered target may be receiving funds while producing fewer homes than it did before the fund existed.
Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy attributed some of the recent slowdown to U.S. tariff uncertainty. That explanation has a timing problem: the construction slowdown was underway before Donald Trump returned to office and before tariffs were reintroduced. The government had been citing interest rates and market conditions well before tariffs entered the conversation.
Flack, to his credit, didn’t hide from the situation. “It was a goal set in 2022 when we had robust housing starts,” he said of the 1.5 million target. “We don’t today.” That’s accurate. It’s also an admission that the province’s most prominent housing commitment was calibrated to a market that no longer exists, with no clear plan for what replaces it.
The Ford-Carney deal is the biggest single intervention in Ontario housing in at least a decade. Whether 8,000 additional starts next year, against a gap of over 100,000 from the annual target, is enough to change the trajectory is the question the government hasn’t answered. Because it hasn’t been asked to answer it yet.
Sources and verification: Housing start figures (94,753 for 2024) are drawn from provincial tracking data at data.ontario.ca and CMHC methodology; a slight variation in provincial counts (94,144) reflects different counting methods and is noted in the research. The Ford-Carney HST removal and $8.8B partnership announcement is sourced from the Prime Minister’s Office release dated March 30, 2026 (pm.gc.ca). The 2026 budget projection of 64,800 starts and the revised four-year projection of 276,900 are from budget.ontario.ca/2026/highlights.html, with CBC’s March 27, 2026 analysis providing comparative context between budget documents (cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-housing-start-projections-9.7145188). Rob Flack and Jessica Bell quotes are drawn from attributed media reporting; readers should verify against original press transcripts. The 80,000 homelessness figure and 300,000 projection are cited in Bill 28 legislative materials at ola.org.
Track Ontario housing legislation and municipal performance data at Ontario Pulse.