The Landlord Is The Government

What’s the best way to open an investigative article? A well written thesis or idea may work. Though, the federal government's own website says it plainly — if you know where to look.

"The Government of Canada owns and manages the largest real estate portfolio in Canada.”¹

The institution telling you it's solving the housing crisis is, by its own admission, the largest real estate holder in the country. It has been sitting on that land for decades. And for the better part of a decade, while rents climbed and first-time buyers were priced out of every major city, Ottawa responded by building bureaucracies instead of buildings.

The Portfolio Problem

The numbers on federal real estate mismanagement are not speculative. They are documented by the government's own watchdog.

According to an Auditor General report released in 2025, the federal government lacks even basic data on its own real estate portfolio, routinely misses internal targets for consolidation, and continues to rely on a process that takes six to eight years to offload surplus buildings.² In plain terms, the government doesn’t really known what properties it owns, isn’t meeting its own goals to manage or reduce them, and they take a very, very long time to sell off buildings they no longer need.

To be precise, six to eight years to sell a building nobody is using. While Canadians are paying $2,400 a month for a one-bedroom in Scarborough.³

The government first acknowledged in 2017 that half its office space was underused.⁴ By 2023, after years of stated effort, the federal office footprint had barely moved, shrinking from 6.0 million to 5.9 million square metres. Nearly a decade of inaction on properties they already own. That is not inefficiency, it is much worse. The Leafs will, probably, win a Stanley Cup before we see any distinct changes.

The Solution? More Government

So what is Ottawa's answer to a housing crisis caused, in part, by its own failure to deploy land it controls?

More government.

In September 2025, Prime Minister Carney launched Build Canada Homes: a new federal housing agency backed by $13 billion in federal capital, with direct control over federal lands deemed suitable for housing.⁵

Build Canada Homes was given access to 88 federal properties spanning 463 hectares,⁶ or roughly the size of downtown Ottawa. But less than 1% of those land holdings are located within Canada's three most populous cities:⁷ Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal — the places where people actually cannot afford to live. The places where the crisis is most acute. Barely touched.

Then came the question every journalist should have asked at the podium and most didn't: how many homes, exactly, will this build?

Housing observers noted that the legislation contained no key performance indicators: no targets for units built, no price points, and no benchmarks for success.⁸ When the Housing Minister was pressed directly on a quota, he said the number of homes built depends on how much private capital they can bring in.⁹

A $13 billion federal agency with no targets, and the minister's answer is: it depends.

If These Numbers Could Speak, What Are They Saying?

The gap between what is being promised and what is being built is not narrow. It is a chasm.

The CMHC, or Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, is calling for 430,000 to 480,000 new homes per year by 2035 to address Canada's housing shortfall. A Parliamentary Budget Office report found Canada is on track to build 2.5 million new homes by 2035, roughly 700,000 short of the minimum needed.¹⁰

Meanwhile, in Canada's largest city: the Greater Toronto Area is on pace for its lowest annual housing starts in 30 years.¹¹ In July 2025 alone, housing starts dropped 25% in Ontario compared to the same month in 2024.¹²

The government's solution to this, Build Canada Homes, has proposed an initial tranche of 45,000 factory-built homes,¹³ which would represent less than 1% (~0.93%) of the 4.8 million new starts CMHC says are needed by 2035.¹⁴

Though, there is a version of this story that is sympathetic to Ottawa. Crown land is complicated. Development takes time. The private sector needs de-risking. These are real constraints, constraints are very real.

But they do not explain a decade of paralysis on properties the government already owned. They do not explain an Auditor General finding that the feds don't even have reliable data on their own portfolio. They do not explain launching a $13-billion agency without a single hard target for the number of homes it will build.

The Fraser Institute put the contradiction plainly: if the federal government cannot efficiently downsize its own office footprint despite ample funding and years of effort, how can it credibly promise to deliver complex housing projects?¹⁵

The answer is: it can't. But making that promise is politically useful. Building homes is hard, and announcing agencies is easy. And as long as the announcement generates a news cycle, the math doesn't need to add up until after the next election.

In the meantime, the largest landlord in Canada keeps growing its portfolio and calling it a solution.

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌

‌