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To tackle Ontario’s housing supply and affordability crisis, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to look at what’s working in jurisdictions like Alberta and follow their lead.

The western province appears to have found the magic formula as it had 54,858 housing starts in 2025, a record high, compared to 47,827 in 2024. That’s a hefty 15-per-cent increase.

Ontario, on the other hand, is headed in the wrong direction. According to the CMHC, housing starts in the province dropped to 65,376 in 2025, compared to 74,573 in 2024, a decrease of more than 12 per cent. The government expects starts to fall to 64,800 units in Ontario this year.

What’s Alberta doing right?

At RESCON’s last housing summit, we heard that the mindset of the government is to implement decisive action to eliminate burdensome regulatory protocols and excessive fees on housing.

In other words, housing is a priority of the Alberta government. The province takes the situation seriously and is taking steps to bring more supply on stream. The province has set rules municipalities must follow to get homes built faster and more affordably and is prepared to step in if need be.

The approach has included collaborating with the industry on solutions and adopting a can-do mindset. The result has been lower municipal fees on builders, faster approvals by city hall for new housing projects, and relaxed rules regarding what can be built and where in the province.

Mind you, it helps that Alberta has no provincial sales tax on housing. In Ontario, meanwhile, 36 per cent of the cost of a new home is due to taxes.

Development charges (DCs) are a big part of the problem in Ontario. A recent study found DCs in the City of Toronto over the past 25 years have increased by 5,186 per cent.

Recently, the federal and Ontario governments announced steps to lower costs for a year by eliminating the HST on new homes priced under $1 million and providing reduced rebates for homes above that threshold. First-time homebuyers get the break for a few additional years.

The governments also joined forces to support the vital reduction of DCs, agreeing to spend $8 billion over the next decade to fund infrastructure for municipalities that lower DCs.

These measures will help. But affordability is still an issue. And there is much more to be done to right the ship.

Over the last 25 years, the typical house price‑to‑income ratio in Ontario has roughly doubled, moving from about three times a middle‑income household’s annual pre‑tax income in 2000 to 6.5 to 7.5 times today, with a peak of nine times in 2021-2022 in the pandemic.

Under current‑pace building, CMHC estimates Toronto house prices will rise by 60 per cent by 2035, versus 50 per cent in the rest of Ontario. And, if incomes grow by 13 per cent over that time period, the scenario implies significantly higher price‑to‑income ratios, especially in Toronto.

Lack of housing has resulted in people – especially young families – leaving Toronto and Ontario to go to Alberta, Nova Scotia and south of the border in search of affordable home ownership.

Taxes and DCs are too high. They are a self-inflicted wound. Governments must keep the ball rolling.

The tax burden must be reduced further. We also need to speed up homebuilding via digitizing the planning approvals processes and adopting technology to make the process more transparent and predictable, provide financial support for new approaches to homebuilding such as offsite methods of construction, and incentivize private market residential construction.

Digitization of the planning approvals processes is critical. It is also crucial the Ontario government encourage, support, finance and implement advanced modern planning approvals processes and approve standard designs and more expansive as-of-right building modalities.

Approval timelines in Ontario are among the slowest anywhere in the world. It is not unusual for builders to experience multi-year delays in securing approvals for homebuilding projects as they deal with multiple layers of planning approvals processes characterized by red tape, unnecessary bureaucracy and a lack of transparency which has resulted in reduced accountability.

Ontario must also engage with leading innovative homebuilders that specialize in off-site construction methods, and address issues of sustainable funding and streamlining regulations.

Emerging PropTech and ConTech technologies can also be used to accelerate potential residential development by identifying suitable land and eliminating long and unnecessary planning approvals processes and zoning practices that have significantly impacted homebuilding.

Meanwhile, both provincial and municipal land transfer taxes, which are regressive and impact housing costs, should be suspended for three years for new and never-occupied homes.

Jurisdictions like Alberta have upped their game. Yet the residential construction sector in Ontario remains stalled at a time when homebuilding is needed most. We must continue to press for solutions.

Richard Lyall is president of the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON). He has represented the building industry in Ontario since 1991. Contact him at media@rescon.com.