Trudeau Announces $600M in Loans and Funding to Build Homes, Rental Units Faster

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes a housing announcement in Calgary on April 5, 2024. The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh

Ottawa is designating $600 million in loans and funding to make it easier and cheaper to build homes for owners and renters, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced.

The April 5 announcement is the latest in a lineup of pre-budget announcements geared toward younger voters.

“Younger generations, like millennials and Gen-Z, feel like they’re falling behind because housing costs are just too high,” Mr. Trudeau said during a Calgary press conference. “That’s not OK—and it needs to change.”

He said the government wants to accelerate the pace of home construction “to levels not seen since the end of the Second World War.” To do that, “we need to change our approach and adopt innovative technologies.”

The funding will include allocating $50 million toward a home-building technology and innovation fund, with the aim of getting more homes built by “scaling up and promoting innovative technologies and materials like modular and prefabricated homes,” he said.

Another $50 million is earmarked for regional initiatives to modernize home-building practices through technologies such as mass timber construction, robotics, 3D printing, and automation. Additionally, $11.6 million will go toward plans to standardize up to 50 new home designs, including frames for row housing, modular homes, fourplexes, and other high-density designs, the prime minister said.

“We know that builders want to be able to build quickly and right for Canadians,” Mr. Trudeau said. “The permitting can be accelerated when we draw from these catalogues for...high-density housing.”

Housing Initiatives Announced

The Liberals have been highlighting upcoming initiatives to help with housing and rental affordability ahead of the April 16 budget. Mr. Trudeau said last month his government would introduce a new “bill of rights” for renters, putting in place a national standard lease agreement and a requirement that landlords disclose an apartment’s pricing history to tenants.

The prime minister announced April 3 that his government would allocate another $15 billion in the upcoming budget for its Apartment Construction Loan Program, with a goal of building at least 30,000 new apartments within the next decade. He also announced a $1.5 billion rental fund the following day to help non-profit organizations buy rental units and keep prices affordable for renters.

The average rent in Canada for February 2024 was $2,193 per month for all property types—a 10.5 percent increase from last year and a 21 percent increase from 2022—according to a report from Rentals.ca. A Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation report from 2023 projected Canada would need 3.5 million new homes built within seven years to make homeownership affordable again.

Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman accused Mr. Trudeau during an April 5 press conference of “doubling down” on old policies “that simply are not getting houses built.”

“We have a crisis in this country, and a bunch of recycled, rebranded announcements aren’t going to fix the problem that Justin Trudeau created,” she said.

The Conservatives have proposed to speed up housing construction by requiring big cities to boost home building permits by 15 percent per year or lose access to federal grants and mandating that every federally funded transit station have high-density apartments built around it.