Want Affordable Housing? Stop Taxing It to Death

People across Canada are sounding the alarm: housing is no longer affordable for many, especially young Canadians trying to buy their first home. You hear it from families in Winnipeg, business owners in Calgary, and parents in the Maritimes watching their kids give up on the dream of homeownership.

In response, politicians are rushing to microphones with their latest promise: eliminate the GST on new home purchases. They say this will make housing more affordable. It’s too little, too late. And frankly, it’s a distraction.

Let’s be clear. If politicians really wanted to make housing more affordable, they would stop taxing it to death.

Consider the number of times you pay taxes on a single home. It’s not once, or twice. It’s at least four or five separate tax events – often more – that hit both the builder and the buyer.

Let’s start from the top.

When a home is built, there’s GST on the purchase of the land. Then, there’s GST on construction materials and labour. There are permitting fees – which are taxes by another name – and you pay GST on those too. When the home sells, there’s a land transfer tax. That’s all before you move in.

Then come the annual hits: property taxes, waste collection fees, new water fees, and whatever else the city can squeeze in. In Winnipeg, waste fees alone have nearly tripled this year, and City Hall still insists it’s fighting for more affordable housing. If Mayor Scott Gillingham wants to make housing more accessible, he could start by rolling back these unnecessary charges. But he won’t, because governments have become addicted to the revenue.

And don’t forget Mark Carney’s “reciprocal” tariffs. The Liberal leader slapped a 25% tariff on select goods coming in from the United States and China. That’s a 25% increase in the cost of construction materials, plain and simple. And who’s going to absorb that? Not the builders – they’ll pass it on to buyers.

It’s nonsense. Countries like Germany and Japan aren’t rushing to impose these kinds of tariffs. In fact, many of our competitors are working to make construction faster and cheaper, not more expensive. Meanwhile, Carney is touring the country, claiming he’ll make housing more affordable. The contradiction would be funny if it weren’t so damaging.

Look at the data. According to the Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA), government-imposed costs can account for over 25% of the price of a new home in major urban centres. In Vancouver and Toronto, that number climbs even higher. In a 2022 CHBA study, government charges added more than $200,000 to the price of a new home in the Greater Toronto Area. That’s not market forces – that’s bureaucracy and taxation.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) has also pointed out that permitting delays and development charges are choking housing supply and driving up prices. Red tape costs time and money. And when governments grow larger, more expensive, and less efficient, that cost trickles down to everything – especially housing.

Politicians talk about affordability, but their actions say otherwise. They won’t reduce their own spending. They won’t shrink government payrolls. They won’t streamline permitting. Instead, they create new programs, new fees, and photo ops.

If they were serious about helping Canadians buy homes, they would:

• Cut taxes on construction and land development.

• Eliminate wasteful permitting delays.

• Roll back the endless list of municipal fees.

• Reduce tariffs on critical building materials.

• And yes, start cutting the size and cost of government itself.

It’s not complicated. You can’t inflate the cost of housing through layers of taxation and regulation and then claim to be solving the problem by shaving off one tax at the end of the process.

That’s not leadership – it’s PR.

The average Canadian is smart enough to see through this. They know housing costs have exploded because of decisions made by all levels of government over the past two decades. They know wages aren’t keeping up. And they’re not buying the talking points anymore.

Homebuilders are warning us. Realtors are warning us. Economists are warning us. But too many in government are refusing to listen. Either they don’t understand the system they’ve built, or they do – and they’re benefiting from it.

We’ve reached a breaking point. Either we reset the approach to housing policy in this country, or we accept that homeownership will be out of reach for more Canadians every year.

There’s still time to change course. But it starts with truth: governments are a major reason housing costs so much. And until they admit that, don’t expect real affordability anytime soon.