By Ryan Thorpe 

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation rubberstamped $30.8 million in bonuses in 2024, according to government records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

That pushes total bonuses at the CMHC up to $132 million since the beginning of 2020.

“Why are Canada’s housing bureaucrats showering themselves with bonuses when countless Canadians can’t afford homes?” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Canadians need more homes, not more highly paid pencil pushers rubberstamping bonuses for each other.”

A total of 2,398 CMHC staff (91 per cent of its employees) took $30.8 million in bonuses in 2024 – for an average of $12,865 each.

The records show that 12 CMHC executives took a combined $1 million in bonuses last year – for an average of $83,859 each.

The CMHC also issued 2,190 pay raises to staff in 2024, costing taxpayers $9.3 million. No employees took a pay cut, according to the records.

The CMHC has repeatedly claimed it’s “driven by one goal: housing affordability for all.”

In 2024, the Royal Bank of Canada said it was the “toughest time ever to afford a home.”

Last year, polling from Ipsos found 72 per cent of Canadians who do not own a home say “they have given up on ever owning” one.

Eighty per cent of respondents to that poll also said home ownership in Canada is now “only for the rich.”

The Canadian Real Estate Association, in its latest housing outlook report, predicted the average home price will “climb by 4.7 per cent on an annual basis to $722,221 in 2025.”

“The CMHC’s c-suite deserve pink slips more than huge bonuses,” Terrazzano said. “The federal government must stop rewarding failure with taxpayer-funded bonuses.”

Undeserved bonuses are a longstanding tradition in Ottawa.

The federal government has awarded $1.5 billion in bonuses since 2015, despite the fact that “less than 50 per cent of [performance] targets are consistently met within the same year,” according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

From the Fraser Institute

By Steven Globerman

Canada Needs to Save Much More to Finance an Ambitious Investment Agenda

To meet Ottawa’s ambitious new housing construction targets in order to restore affordability, the country needs more than $300 billion in additional financing every year from 2025 to 2030, finds a new report published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

“To increase home building and restore business investment in key areas like technology to previous levels, Canada needs to become much more attractive to investors, both from within Canada and around the world,” said Steven Globerman, Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of Canada Needs to Save Much More to Finance an Ambitious Investment Agenda.

To restore housing affordability, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a Crown Corporation of the federal government, has estimated that about 3.5 million additional housing units need to be built by 2030 given expected construction rates.

The study finds that for the federal government to meet this housing construction goal, an estimated $331 to $364 billion in additional financing is needed annually from 2025-2030.

If business investment in key areas such as communications and IT are to return to previous levels, another roughly $13 billion is needed annually.

In total, this means Canada needs an additional $343 to $377 billion in financing annually over the next five years. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to increasing the current Canadian savings rate by 50 per cent.

One option to mitigate the need for a drastic increase in the domestic savings rate is to attract more foreign investment, but that will require substantial policy reforms to make Canada a more attractive environment for foreign investors.

“It is very likely that the ambitious targets that have been set for homebuilding and business investment won’t be met, but even so, encouraging increased investment and higher domestic savings is a worthy policy pursuit,” Globerman said.

• Both the Canadian government and policymakers from various organizations including the Bank of Canada have called for ambitious programs to increase capital investment in Canada, particularly investment focused on residential housing and productivity-enhancing business assets.
• The ambitious domestic investment agenda will require a substantial increase in domestic savings in order to finance the necessary increased capital expenditure. The requisite increase has been largely ignored, to date, in policy proposals and surrounding discussion of those proposals.
• The financial capital required to fund major investments in residential housing and even modest increases in business investment will require an increase in the domestic savings rate of as much as 50 percent. Alternatively, much larger inflows of long-term foreign capital investments into Canada beyond what has been realized over the past few decades will be required.
• Such large increases in the domestic savings rate and in foreign capital inflows would require unrealistic and unsustainably high real interest rates. The implication is that the federal government’s investment goals, especially with regard to increasing the supply of residential housing, are unrealizable over the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, implementing policies to encourage increased domestic savings and channeling those savings into high priority investment activities should be a public policy imperative.

Read The Full Report

Steven Globerman

Senior Fellow and Addington Chair in Measurement, Fraser Institute