By Anthony De Luca-Baratta for Inside Policy

When it comes to housing unaffordability in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has correctly diagnosed the problem – but prescribed the wrong solution. The cost of new homes across the country increasingly exceeds the average family’s budget. But Carney’s proposal to establish a new federal entity, Build Canada Homes, to “get the government back in the business of homebuilding,” will make matters worse.

During the recent election campaign, the Liberal leader promised to make the federal government into an affordable housing developer by, among other proposals, offering low-cost financing to affordable-housing builders. This approach falsely implies that housing is what economists call a public good – something governments provide because the market cannot.

National defence is a perfect example of a public good: private contractors alone would be unable to withhold protection from those who failed to pay for their services, incentivizing many to welcome the security without paying a dime. In economics jargon, this is known as the “free-rider problem.” Defence contractors would quickly go bankrupt, and the nation would be left defenceless. For this reason, the government is the primary provider of national defence in all functioning states.

If housing suffered from the same market failure as national defence, the government’s approach would have some merit. But it does not, indicating that housing is not, in fact, a public good. The laws of supply and demand are thus the most efficient way of determining both the quantity and price of housing.

In a free housing market, when prices begin to rise, builders build more units to earn higher profits. Over time, competition among builders, homeowners, and landlords forces prices back down because individuals who overcharge lose customers to those who do not. Because overcharging is bad for business, the market provides an abundance of housing at prices negotiated among millions of buyers and sellers. The result is a natural supply of affordable housing – no special incentives needed.

Some in Canada might dismiss this logic as hopelessly naïve. According to these individuals, inflated prices come primarily from landlords and developers squeezing Canadians for more profit and greed is running rampant in the Canadian housing market.

The truth is that developers and landlords are responding rationally to bad economic policy, and homebuyers and renters are footing the bill. Municipalities across Canada limit building heights, set aesthetic standards, ban certain types of construction in designated areas, impose parking requirements, and legislate minimum lot sizes, among a host of other land-use regulations.

These rules make housing harder and more costly to build, constraining supply and radically inflating prices. The C.D. Howe Institute estimates that these regulations cost homebuyers an average of $230,000 in Vancouver, Abbotsford, Victoria, Kelowna, Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa-Gatineau. In Vancouver, that figure is an eye-watering $1 million.

It is this economic reality, not an unwillingness to build affordable housing, that lies at the root of Canada’s housing crisis.

Housing Minister Gregor Robertson inadvertently admitted as much when he cautioned that there would be no quick solution to Canada’s housing crisis because “projects take years to approve and build.” The minister failed to acknowledge that these delays are due to cumbersome municipal regulations.

To solve Canada’s housing crisis, Carney must begin by recognizing that affordable housing in Canada is in short supply because local governments have made it impossible to build. The housing market could provide affordable housing on its own – no taxpayer-funded subsidies required – if only the government would reduce burdensome industry regulations. Just look at jurisdictions with virtually no land-use regulations, like Houston, Texas, where housing is abundant and affordable. Studies have consistently shown that wherever land-use regulations are low, so are home prices.

To be fair, the Liberal Party’s election platform did acknowledge the need to cut federal housing regulations. It also suggested that it wanted local governments to streamline development, though it was short on specifics. But since the election, there is no sign that the government is moving forward with any of these proposals.

The prime minister needs to tell local governments that their federal funds will dry up if they don’t start getting out of the way of housing development. He should also offer bonuses to cities that are especially quick to build new units. Canadians need shovels in the ground now. It is time for the prime minister to use the bully pulpit to put them there.

Anthony De Luca-Baratta is a contributor to the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, a project of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a Young Voices Contributor based in Montreal. He holds a master’s degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Tom Flanagan

Senior Fellow Tom Flanagan argues media and government keep backing unmarked graves claims with no bodies, no documents, no data. Public doubt is rising, and Ottawa’s chequebook fuels the narrative.

After years of claims, Canadians are still left questioning whether remains will ever be found

In May 2021, the Kamloops First Nation announced the discovery of 215 burial sites near a former residential school—a claim that sparked global headlines about “mass graves” and left Ottawa’s flag at half mast for five months.

We now know this was a mistake. A group of researchers, myself included, published Grave Error, laying out the reasons for skepticism. The ground-penetrating radar (GPR) results had almost certainly been misread, confusing thousands of feet of buried weeping tile in the orchard with human burials.

Our book can’t claim all the credit, but it probably helped shift public opinion. A clear majority of Canadians now say they want to see actual evidence, exhumed human remains, before accepting further claims of unmarked graves.

But despite Kamloops collapsing under scrutiny, the beat goes on. In August 2025, three new stories appeared about more supposed discoveries.

The Penelakut Tribe on Vancouver Island made headlines with a claim of graves on the grounds of the former Kuper Island residential school. The reporting was so vague it was impossible to know how many graves they thought they’d found. What was clear is that ground-penetrating radar was being used on known cemeteries. If you go looking in a graveyard, it should not surprise you to find graves.

Not to be outdone, the Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast announced the discovery of 41 additional unmarked graves near the former St. Augustine’s residential school. They had already claimed 40 in 2023, bringing the total to 81. The B.C. Legislature dutifully lowered its flag yet again.

Both B.C. stories shared the same shortcomings. No digging, no human remains, no public release of the actual survey data. Just announcements. Officials said they had uncovered archival material but provided no names, no documents and no proof of deaths or burials.

Meanwhile, in the Northwest Territories, the Dene at Fort Resolution tried a different approach. An Indian Residential School (IRS) had operated there from 1910, but decades earlier the Oblates had run a boarding school on Mission Island a couple of miles away. Unlike a federally funded IRS, it took in Indigenous, Métis and White children drawn north by the fur trade.

The Dene used GPR around Fort Resolution and came up empty. They then brought in cadaver dogs on Mission Island and claimed to have found the graves of five children and two adults. The word “excavation” appeared in news reports, but no one clarified whether that meant probing the surface or actually exhuming remains. And, as in B.C., no scientific or archival evidence was shared publicly.

Even if burials were located on Mission Island, what’s the connection to the residential school? People of all backgrounds lived there for half a century before the IRS opened in Fort Resolution. Deaths and burials were inevitable.

But would missionaries really cart bodies back to an island cemetery once a school existed in town? That strains belief.

It helps no one for First Nations to keep promoting claims with little evidence, and for much of the media to repeat them without scrutiny. The result is predictable: more victimhood narratives on one side, more public doubt on the other. If Ottawa cut off funding for these repeated searches, the claims would quickly dry up. And we’d all be better off.

Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.