Rob Flack, Ontario’s municipal affairs and housing minister, has an unenviable job: overseeing the portfolio the current government is fumbling most obviously, even by its own lights. Premier Doug Ford has now tasked successive housing ministers with trying to resuscitate the province’s falling housing starts as a necessary (if not necessarily sufficient) response to the housing crisis. And for several years in a row now, housing starts have trended stubbornly downwards.
Numbers from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation tell the dismal tale: in calendar year 2025, Ontario’s housing starts fell to just 62,561, fully a third lower than they were just three years earlier. This is very much a made-in-Ontario problem, since other provinces are building at a brisk pace. Quebec and Nova Scotia are both building well. Perhaps most embarrassingly for the Ford government, the Prairie provinces (with a cumulative population of just 5 million) are building nearly as many homes as all of Ontario, despite this province having nearly twice as many people in need of four walls and a roof.
So Flack’s not wrong when he says, as he did in Toronto on Tuesday, that “we’re in a housing crisis; we’re not getting a lot built.” The catch is that he said those words in the context of the government’s latest turn on inclusionary zoning, having abandoned and then revived the policy to create dedicated affordable housing in new developments. The province allowed those planning rules a few years ago but will now be consulting the public about whether to pause those rules until at least 2027.
Flack also wasn’t wrong a day earlier when he said, at the ROMA conference in downtown Toronto, that municipal development charges are too high and are one of the big reasons housing starts are collapsing in Ontario. Here, too, the context is important: Flack was signalling that the province is going to get more serious about moving municipalities away from development charges and toward “municipal service corporations” to provide water and sewer services, taking the costs of development off the traditional municipal fiscal base and hopefully providing less contentious financing for the expansion of vital municipal infrastructure. Flack told assembled delegates to expect more news on this front in the next big housing bill when the legislature returns later this spring (later than it was previously supposed to, because I guess it’s a housing crisis but not that much of a crisis).
Flack isn’t wrong about needing to get more homes built in Ontario. He’s not wrong about development charges being an obstacle to getting those homes built. He’s not wrong that municipal services corporations are a model worth encouraging for more cities and towns around Ontario. And I’m not even certain he’s wrong to press pause on municipal inclusionary-zoning rules given the current context. What’s maddening about all of this is that people have been telling the government all of this for literal years while the premier’s office wasted time fixated on either blowing up the Greenbelt (and earning itself a criminal investigation in the process) or, failing that, timid incrementalism that has done next to nothing.
This is not hyperbole. Development charges? The 2022 report from the government’s handpicked Housing Affordability Task Force emphasized how much they were distorting the housing market even then, and the situation has only gotten worse. The task force made a number of recommendations to waive or otherwise relieve the cost burden they cause. Municipal services corporations? Task force recommendation 44. Inclusionary zoning? The task force covered the pros and cons in its Appendix B. There is nothing new under the sun here: the government was warned by the people it charged with studying the issue both what was needed to turn the province’s housing sector around and what the risks of inaction were.
Four years later, and the government has largely chosen inaction, when it hasn’t opted for outright bad actions (see Greenbelt, above). Things have gotten so bad at a basic structural level in Ontario’s housing sector that the premier concedes last year’s combined federal and provincial HST cuts have largely failed to staunch the bleeding.
Now, even if Flack is able to bring forward a bill getting serious about development charges and prodding municipalities forward on service corporations, there’s no way the policy could be implemented in time for the coming construction season. So success wouldn’t show up in new housing starts until next year — meaning we’re looking at another year of crisis, another year of workers leaving Ontario for other jurisdictions where they can put their skills to work, and another year of lost opportunities.
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