Housing remains a priority for feds, but results will take time, says CREA
(Image from CPAC livestream)
Shaun Cathcart, director and senior economist at the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), speaks before reporters in West Block during the organization's January 15, 2026, press conference.
Despite falling out of the news spotlight, affordable housing continues to be a priority for the Liberal government, says Shaun Cathcart, director and senior economist at the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA).
“We’ve gone from our housing agency saying ‘we need to double construction, but there’s no way to do it’ to ‘we’re actually going to try to do it and really scale something up,’” said Cathcart. “We hope that that work will continue this year, but obviously, there are other things that have popped up on the front burner for the government…but I still think it remains a number one priority.”
CREA’s advocacy efforts led to increased engagement with the federal government, said Cathcart, noting that “we had a lot of great meetings in the latter half of last year, a lot more than we had ever had before, quite frankly.”
Those meetings have shown the organization that Build Canada Homes as an agency is “very serious, and they’re scaling up very quickly. This isn’t just a press release, this is creating an entirely new body to do this.”
Build Canada Homes, which is directed to oversee the federal Liberal’s plans to increase housing capacity and address the housing crisis, was officially launched in September 2025.
Cathcart told The Lobby Monitor that the federal government’s approach to housing has been encouraging, specifically pointing at the idea of modular factory-built housing. Focusing on this method of building new homes will allow for significantly higher volumes of homes to be built more efficiently and at a reduced cost.
“Off-site modular construction [using] panelized mass timber…I think that is really the big idea here, that Canada is uniquely placed to really do something impressive that would solve a problem that a lot of countries have,” he said.
As for what type of housing is necessary right now, there needs to be a middle ground between single family homes and small apartments, said Cathcart.
“You can’t just have the low density housing that we built in the second half of the 20th century nor the high density tiny apartments that we’re building now. There’s got to be something in between there,” he said.
Representatives of CREA held a Jan. 15 press conference in Ottawa to discuss their quarterly housing forecast and predictions for the housing market.
“We think that we’re probably going to see a lot of first time buyers this year…because interest rates are higher than they’ve been for the last 15 years, but they’re about as good as they’re going to get,” said Cathcart during the interview with The Lobby Monitor. “Young people that have been locked out of the market for four years are probably going to say, ‘it’s now or never,’ whereas existing owners are going to say, ‘4% interest mortgage rate? no, thanks. I’ll just stay where I am.’”
Cathcart also noted that while the market rental space has seen a boom in construction, the non-market space is crucial to addressing the housing crisis.
“The way I look at it…there’s the ownership space, the market rental space, and the non-market rental space,” he said. “The market rental is doing really well right now, at least for apartment buildings, it just absolutely exploded. So to the extent that we didn’t do that for three decades, and we needed to do a lot more of it, we’re doing that now.”
“The next important one, with the housing market in crisis and a lot of vulnerable people falling at the bottom of the system, is non-market,” Cathcart continued. “Build Canada Homes since launch, has massively prioritized non-market housing, which is a smart thing, because you don’t actually have to build it, you can achieve it much faster just by acquiring property and declaring it to be non-market [housing].”
Cathcart told The Lobby Monitor that Canada’s non-market housing is only about 3.5 per cent of the country’s entire housing stock compared to some European and Asian countries where non-market housing makes up 10-15 per cent of their housing stock.
While the government has started implementing important policies and initiatives, it will take time to see the results of these changes, he said.
