You may have seen a new report from Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer—the same office that’s supposed to keep the government honest. It’s called “Household Formation and the Housing Stock: Estimating the Housing Gap in 2035.” Sounds technical? It is. Deliberately so. Because what it’s really doing is papering over one of the greatest policy-driven disasters in modern Canadian history.

You can read it—22 pages of graphs, footnotes, and soft-spoken bureaucratic lingo. But I’ll save you the time.

Here’s what it says:

Canada needs 3.2 million new homes by 2035 just to balance supply and demand. That’s 290,000 new homes a year. Every year. For 11 years straight.

From Immigration Surge to Housing Shortage

Let’s be clear: this didn’t just happen. This wasn’t an asteroid. This wasn’t climate change. This was government failure—Trudeau’s Liberals flooded the country with immigration without a plan to house anyone.

And now? Now they’re pretending to be surprised.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer just told us flat out: Canada will be short 690,000 homes by 2035 unless we add 3.2 million new units—that’s 290,000 completions per year, every year for the next 11 years.

But here’s the kicker: in 2024 alone, household formation hit 482,000 new households—the highest on record. And what did the housing stock grow by that same year? Just 276,000 units. That’s a gap of more than 200,000 homes in a single year.

Why? Demand outpaced Supply due to the Liberal policy on Immigration. In 2023, Canada brought in over 1 million newcomers when you count permanent residents, international students, and temporary foreign workers combined. But we didn’t build for them. We didn’t even try. Instead, Liberals told us to stop worrying—that the math would “work itself out.”

This is what happens when you run a country on slogans instead of arithmetic. The Liberals act like math is racist, like pointing out the obvious—that more people require more homes—is somehow offensive.

But the math doesn’t care about your feelings:

• 1 million people in.
• 276,000 homes built.
• 482,000 households formed.

You don’t need a PhD in economics to see the problem.

Meanwhile, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) the federal housing agency staffed by bureaucrats says we actually need 5.3 million new homes by 2035 to restore affordability. That’s 478,000 completions per year. For context, the all-time Canadian record is 276,000 in 2024. In other words, they’re demanding we build almost double the best year in Canadian history every single year, for a decade.

And here’s the part no one in Ottawa wants to say out loud: even the Parliamentary Budget Officer admits the current pace is smoke and mirrors. Yes, completions will look strong for the next three years a little sugar high averaging about 256,000 a year. But after that? It falls right back to normal, around 227,000 units annually.

And if you actually want to close the gap? If you want to make up for the 690,000 homes Canadians will be short by 2035? The math is brutal: we’d need 290,000 completions every single year. Not once. Not twice. For eleven years straight. That means outperforming 2024’s all-time record the best year in Canadian history every single year until 2035.

And how do they want to do it? By deliberately overbuilding until the vacancy rate hits 13%. Their idea of “affordability” is to flood the country with so many empty units that prices collapse. They actually admit this would mean abnormally high levels of unoccupied housing units and households with second homes.

This isn’t serious policy. This is what happens when the only tool in your toolbox is a spreadsheet. Instead of asking the obvious question—maybe stop importing more people than you can possibly house—they double down on fantasy construction targets they’ve never hit and never will.

So the supply-and-demand math works out like this: Liberals open the floodgates on immigration, CMHC panics, and then Ottawa tells you the “solution” is to build ghost condos no one lives in.

Final Thoughts

Let’s remember who Mark Carney is. He’s not a carpenter. He’s not even an economist in the traditional sense. He’s a Davos guy, a former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor with deep ties to Wall Street, Bay Street, and the World Economic Forum.

And now this is the man presiding over the very same government that created this crisis. Nothing has changed. No one has been fired. It’s the same Prime Minister’s Office, the same Liberal MPs, the same Ottawa swamp that told you for years everything was under control. They opened the immigration floodgates without building homes, they inflated demand, and now they stand around pretending to be shocked at the results.

And here’s the proof: the Parliamentary Budget Officer spells it out in black and white this government has completely decoupled housing from affordability.

“Our estimate is not linked to a targeted measure of affordability.”

What does that tell you? It tells you the people in charge of housing policy in Canada don’t even pretend to care if you can afford a home. Affordability isn’t even on the whiteboard.

And here’s the part that’s so insulting: they have the numbers. They know exactly how many people they’re letting into the country. They set the immigration levels themselves. In fact, by 2027, Ottawa projects non-permanent residents will make up 5.3% of Canada’s population. That’s millions of people—on top of permanent resident intake, on top of natural population growth.

They know how many households will form. They know how many housing completions are projected—227,000 a year on average through 2035. And they know how many are required to even come close to balance—290,000 a year.

So what’s the plan? The Liberals say they’re going to “double housing construction.” Sounds great, except the PBO wouldn’t even bother modeling it. Why? Because it isn’t credible. They treated it as a press release, not a policy.

Think about that: Canada’s independent budget watchdog looked at the government’s big campaign promise and said, essentially, “We’re not wasting time pretending this will happen.” That’s how unserious it is.

Meanwhile, you the ordinary Canadian are told it’s normal if you can’t afford a home to raise a family. Normal if you’re stuck in your parents’ basement until you’re 40. Normal if your dream of owning a modest house has been outsourced to hedge funds, pension managers, or foreign buyers.

The Liberals know the math. They have the data. They’re the ones opening the front door to record levels of newcomers while refusing to build at scale. They’re the ones who could slow intake to match supply but won’t. Because in their view, it’s perfectly fine if you never own anything.

And that’s the real scandal here. This isn’t some bureaucratic mistake. This isn’t a rounding error. Canada’s housing crisis is deliberate Liberal policy, dressed up as incompetence. The same Liberal MPs, the same Prime Minister’s Office, the same swamp creatures have been running this file for years, and they’re never held accountable. No one gets fired. No one takes responsibility.

So let’s stop pretending they’ll suddenly have a change of heart. They won’t. The only way these Liberals will ever change their tune is if Canadians vote them out and throw them out of power. Period.