Premier Doug Ford unveiled his new cabinet on Wednesday and as expected there were relatively few changes to the expansively-defined inner circle of the premier’s lieutenants. The most notable promotion was Paul Calandra’s, who moves into the education ministry and will now handle the government’s second-largest portfolio (by budget allocation). It’s not exactly a plum job for anyone in a Progressive Conservative government — the party has a fractious relationship with teachers’ unions, and the three-year contracts negotiated by Stephen Lecce in 2023 will start expiring… next year. Calandra will have some work cut out for him.
His promotion left a hole at the ministry of municipal affairs and housing, which has been filled by Rob Flack, most recently the minister of agriculture, food, and agribusiness but previously an associate minister of housing. So he’s not coming to the file cold. Graydon Smith — who spent his election campaign accusing the Green Party’s Matt Richter of trying to Manhattanize Muskoka, and was successfully re-elected — will be his associate minister.
Their jobs are likely to be if anything more difficult and acrimonious than Calandra’s new gig. The housing crisis in Ontario shows only the barest signs of abating, and the Ford government’s prior 18 months had relatively little to show in terms of effective new housing policy. Flack will need to figure out something that the premier’s office is willing to support that can move the needle on housing prices relatively quickly.
The good news, such as it is, is that rents are falling in most major Ontario cities, including five per cent drops in both Toronto and Hamilton. Overall Ontario rents are down 4.2 per cent year-over-year according to Urbanation. Sale prices for homes are down slightly less, at 3.3 per cent lower than this time last year. Both are to some degree attributable to the federal government’s decision to massively restrict immigration flows.
The bad news is that rents and sale prices are still substantially higher than they were even five years ago, those levels are incredibly burdensome to Ontario families (materially contributing to the homelessness crisis in our cities) and there’s no particular reason to believe that current economic storm clouds will lead to lower prices: neither the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic substantially dented demand for new homes in Ontario’s job centres.
The province is still nominally committed to getting 1.5 million new homes built to address the housing shortage. That goal is receding farther away from plausibility every day. Housing starts in Ontario were already down in 2024, even as most other provinces substantially increased their rate of new home construction. Which is to say, this really is an Ontario problem. The early results from the first months of 2025 have somehow managed to be even worse, with Ontario’s housing starts down 36 per cent year-over-year and Toronto’s down 68 per cent.
In short: the housing situation was already very bad, and whatever relief might come from a modest reduction in some prices is likely to be short-lived when the collapse in new construction manifests in a renewed housing shortage. In September of last year developers warned that new development applications were in danger of falling off a cliff, and at a certain point it actually is time to start panicking.
One of the only genuine benefits of the recently-concluded election is that for at least a little while the Tories are as far as they’re ever going to be from the next election campaign, and they’ve got some room to do something big and contentious if they want. The problem is that the policy that can survive the gauntlet of the premier’s office, cabinet, and the Progressive Conservative caucus while also meeting the actual needs of the moment is frankly a mystery. Ford shot down any serious discussion of substantial changes to planning law that might have accelerated new homebuilding in his last government, even as that same government also expanded financial support for municipalities to build the infrastructure that new homes need.
That money is welcome but unlikely to be adequate. The irony is probably lost on the PC caucus (not least as they celebrate the end of the carbon tax) but the problem is not unlike climate change: the longer the government waits for a serious solution, the more difficult and painful it’s going to be.
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