I have, over the past several years, successfully lost and kept off a lot of weight. This is entirely irrelevant in terms of provincial politics, except for this: of the many things I’ve learned since I started, one of the most basic is the necessity of choosing the correct target and measuring your progress honestly. I wanted to lose weight, so I made sure I had an accurate bathroom scale, and I made sure I used it consistently. This wasn’t always fun, and I can’t guarantee that what worked for me will work for other people — this is not a health column, and I’m not a doctor. But, for me, the alternative to measuring my progress accurately was… not measuring my progress accurately, which didn’t seem like a path for success.
This point came to mind Tuesday morning as Global News reported that the Ontario government is going to include student housing and retirement homes in its 1.5 million-homes target for 2031. This comes after the government had already moved to include long-term-care beds in its estimates. Nobody disputes that these are all forms of housing, although in the case of LTC beds, it’s the kind of housing the government can send you to against your will. The problem is that the original 1.5 million target said nothing about them — if we’re going to start adding to the numerator in our fraction of completed housing, honesty and basic arithmetic suggest we should be modifying the denominator, too.
The most charitable interpretation of what’s going on here is that the government is falling prey to the planner’s fallacy: the belief that if it just measures everything precisely and correctly, it can determine exactly how to meet the correct need for housing in Ontario. The fact that Doug Ford got his start in politics in part by railing against socialism (bike lanes) but is embracing his inner central planner when it comes to housing would be very funny if it weren’t for the human consequences of the housing crisis.
We are not, however, obliged to be so open-minded that our brains fall out of our heads. The government isn’t modifying its housing data to more accurately reflect reality; it’s inflating its numbers for the same reason a desperate undergrad starts fussing with font sizes and margin widths on their essay in the wee hours of the morning before the paper is due (or so I’ve been told).
Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie, speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning, called the government’s numbers-fudging “false and disingenuous,” adding that it’s not simply a raw unit count that the government should be aiming for — there’s a broader goal behind the housing target, as she sees it.
“The point of building affordable housing is to have a place to raise families,” Crombie said. “You can’t do that in a dorm room, and you can’t do that in a long-term-care bed.”
Crombie might be accused of conveniently picking a metric that allows her the easiest attack line, except for one thing: on Monday evening, TVO Today was provided with the text of a speech she’ll be delivering to the Ontario Home Builders’ Association later on Tuesday. In it, she makes the same argument for why housing is so important — so, before the government’s latest round of grade inflation was public.
“We need abundant housing options so we can meet the needs of every family,” the prepared text of the speech reads. “I see the urgency for affordable homes firsthand as my kids look to buy their first homes, and as my mother tries to age in her own condo.”
Crombie may still be complicating matters more than she needs to: Who counts as a family, and what does that term include — and exclude? Those are all fair questions to ask of someone aspiring to be the premier.
Conservatives, particularly those who are avowed fans of the market and trust it to deliver the abundance Crombie talks about, have a rebuttal at the ready, or they ought to: Prices are a signal, and the places with the highest housing prices are the places where we should be building the most. We’ll know the housing shortage is easing when prices (including rents) begin to fall. It’s a clean and simple worldview, and translating it into action doesn’t require policymakers to ask fussy questions about the composition of families and who’s able to afford what.
It would be a coherent argument for a conservative who believed in markets. Ford, though, is busy prescribing the exact number of new homes each of Ontario’s largest municipalities needs to start building, weighing in on precisely the right heights and unit counts of said new homes, dragging his feet on the kind of legal reforms that would allow the housing market to function more responsively, and debasing the value of his own government’s housing statistics.
Beyond the dichotomy of planners and free markets, there’s a simpler point. There were plenty of times over the past few years that I looked down at the scale with disappointment. I could have lied to myself about what the numbers meant or otherwise tried to explain away the inevitable reversals that come with that kind of change in lifestyle — and I would have failed to address what almost certainly would have led to severe chronic health impacts later in life.
Ontario’s housing sector is already in the “severe chronic condition” part of the lifecycle, and we desperately need to be honest and clear-eyed about the changes that are required. That’s impossible to do if our government is more invested in explaining away disappointing numbers.
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