By Natasha Rombough, Senior Director, Operations & Communications, CHBA
The cost of living, including housing affordability, continues to be a defining challenge facing Canada. The current federal government is focused on Build Canada Homes (BCH), which will build social housing principally on federal lands, as a solution. While BHC is important, it won’t support market-rate housing, which is what most Canadians live in. Maintaining balance in federal housing policy is critical; our governments must ensure that efforts to expand non-market housing are matched by policies that enable builders to increase overall supply and deliver homes that reflect what Canadians actually want and can afford.
This slip by the federal government back into prioritizing social housing while neglecting market-rate housing needs to be corrected. To help make the point in a way that registers with politicians, CHBA enlisted Abacus Data, one of Canada’s best known and most respected polling and market research firms, to find out how the public viewed homeownership, government efforts to-date, and some of CHBA’s key recommendations.
In December 2025, Abacus polled 3,000 Canadians from coast to coast. CHBA used the data leading up, during, and after its advocacy around the 2026 Day on the Hill in Ottawa, with Abacus amplifying the messaging. The data will continue to be used throughout the year as part of CHBA’s multi-faceted public relations strategy.
Below are some insights from the study. At a high level, what the data tells us is that Canadians still have a strong desire for homeownership. That dream is getting harder to achieve, though, which people see as a systemic failure – one that they believe the federal government should be focused on trying to repair.
Key Issues: GST and development charges
According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, first-time buyers make up only 5.8 per cent of buyers of new homes, so while GST relief for first-time buyers of new homes is a start, CHBA has been pushing for the GST relief to be expanded to all buyers of new homes, as well as to renovations that add an additional unit of housing to existing homes, like Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and secondary suites. Once the rational was explained, more than half of all Canadians support expanding the GST relief.
Development charges have grown to an unsustainable level, deeply impacting housing affordability and supply in many of Canada’s toughest markets. In the Greater Toronto Area, they make up nearly $200,000 of the price of a typical new home, and in the Greater Vancouver Area, it’s nearly $100,000. When polled, a majority of Canadians (51 per cent) agree that development charges place too much of the infrastructure cost on new home buyers and that these costs should be shared across the broader tax base. Just 16 per cent disagree.
Perceptions of government performance
Overall, satisfaction about government action is low: Only 17 per cent think the federal government is doing enough to address affordability for homeownership. But while the federal government is uniquely positioned to lead on market-rate housing affordability, all levels of government have an important role to play, and the public recognizes this. Across the board, Canadians say their governments aren’t doing enough.
More than half of Canadians are not familiar with Build Canada Homes, which is the federal government’s plan to build social housing principally on federal lands. Once informed about Build Canada Homes, and the fact that it will only create about one per cent of the new construction needed, most say the initiative won’t be enough, and they expect more to be done.
Canadians’ views on homeownership
Homeownership remains a core aspiration for Canadians, despite worsening affordability: 88 per cent of those under the age of 44 want to own a home, and 78 per cent of Canadians say that homeownership is an important life milestone. Nearly seven in 10 believe homeownership should be realistically achievable for most people, and 76 per cent tie it to feeling financially secure. But only 29 per cent of non-homeowners are confident they’ll ever be able to own a home one day, and 83 per cent are concerned about affordability – that number jumps to 93 per cent when looking at people under the age of 30. When asked about how they feel about declining homeownership rates, 70 per cent say that is a negative direction for Canada to be headed.
