The Hidden Supply Crisis: Why Canada’s Housing Strategy Must Include What We Already Have
Every housing strategy I review eventually comes down to the same question: how many units can we add, and how fast? It is the right question for a country facing a supply shortage. But new census data out of CMHC reminds us there is a second question we cannot afford to ignore. How many units are we quietly losing while we focus on the ones we have not built yet?
As of 2021, nearly one million homes across Canada required major repairs. That is not a rounding error in a national housing stock of roughly 15 million dwellings. It is a meaningful share of existing supply sitting at risk of falling out of the market entirely, at precisely the moment every level of government is chasing new construction targets. Overall repair rates have held relatively stable since 2016, but a growing housing stock means the absolute number of units in trouble keeps climbing. From a development strategy standpoint, that is a supply pipeline working against itself.
The distribution of this risk is where the real planning story sits. Indigenous populations live in housing with major repair needs roughly three times the national average, with Inuit Nunangat and on reserve First Nations communities facing rates five to six times higher. Residents of subsidized housing face a repair need rate 1.7 times the national average, and renters overall are more likely than homeowners to live in a home requiring major work, 7.3 percent versus 5.3 percent. These are not marginal pockets of the market. They are concentrated in exactly the segment of the housing system that is hardest to replace at scale and most essential to affordability.
Regional data sharpens the picture further. Nunavut sits at a striking 26.6 percent major repair need rate, with the Northwest Territories at 18.4 percent and Yukon at 12.3 percent, all well above the 6.1 percent national figure. Meanwhile provinces like New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ontario, along with urban centres including Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg, have actually improved their repair rates since 1996 as new construction and renovation activity outpaced deterioration. That divergence tells development planners something important: where growth and reinvestment are active, housing stock quality tends to follow. Where they are not, conditions compound.
Maintaining the homes we already have is just as central to solving the housing shortage as building the homes we still need.
There is real capital already moving here, and it belongs in any serious feasibility conversation. Canadian households spend roughly 25 billion dollars annually on maintenance and repair, with rental stock spending running about 23 percent higher than owner occupied housing. Ottawa’s Affordable Housing Fund has committed more than 2.89 billion dollars to renew over 174,000 non-market units since 2018. Ontario has funded repairs to more than 30,000 affordable rental units, Quebec runs dedicated renewal programs for social and community housing, and Toronto and Vancouver both finance retrofit programs aimed at extending the life of aging rental buildings. This is development capital in every sense, it just flows toward preservation rather than groundbreaking.
For anyone thinking about housing supply strategy at the city or project level, the lesson is straightforward. A unit preserved through timely repair is a unit that never has to be replaced, financed, entitled, or built from scratch, and it usually comes at a fraction of the cost of new construction. Deferred maintenance does not just degrade a building, it quietly erodes the supply base that affordability strategies depend on, concentrated in the communities least equipped to absorb the loss.
Canada’s housing conversation will keep centering on construction targets, and it should. But a credible long term housing vision treats renewal of the existing stock as part of the same pipeline as new development, not an afterthought to it. The strongest growth strategies I have seen pair both approaches deliberately, because losing affordable supply at the back end undermines every unit added at the front end.
Source: CMHC, “Build more, lose less: why maintaining existing homes matters”
