Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

Business

Solving the Housing Affordability Crisis With This One Cool Trick

Published

10 minute read

The Audit

 

 

David Clinton

The Audit has a growing library of posts addressing the housing crisis. I’m particularly proud of my Solving Canada’s Housing Crisis because of how it presents a broad range of practical approaches that have been proposed and attempted across many countries and economies. But the truth is that the affordability end of the problem could be easily and quickly solved right here at home without the need for clever and expensive innovation.

As you’ll soon see, local and provincial governments – if they were so inspired – could drop the purchase price on new homes by 20 percent. Before breakfast.

The Audit is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s all about taxes and fees. This post will focus mostly on taxes and fees as they apply to new construction of relatively expensive detached homes. But the basic ideas will apply to all homes – and will also impact rentals.

Here are some estimated numbers to chew on. Scenarios based on varying permutations and combinations will produce different results, but I think this example will be a good illustration.

Let’s say that a developer purchases a single residential plot in Toronto for $1.4 million. In mature midtown neighborhoods, that figure is hardly uncommon. The plan is to build an attractive single family home and then sell it on the retail market.

Here are some estimates of the costs our developer will currently face:

  • Construction costs on a 2,000 sq. ft. home (@ $350/sq. ft.): $700,000
  • Land transfer taxes on the initial land purchase: $35,000
  • Development fees: $100,000
  • Permits and zoning/site approvals: $40,000

Total direct development costs would therefore come to $875,000. Of course, that’s besides the $1.4 million purchase price for the land which would bring our new running total to $2,275,000.

We’ll also need to account for the costs of regulatory delays. Waiting for permits, approvals, and environmental assessments can easily add a full year to the project. Since nothing can begin until the developer has legal title to the property, he’ll likely be paying interest for a mortgage representing 80 percent of the purchase price (i.e., $1,120,000). Even assuming a reasonable rate, that’ll add another $60,000 in carrying charges. Which will bring us to $2,335,000.

And don’t forget lawyers and consultants. They also have families to feed! Professional guidance for navigating through the permit and assessment system can easily cost a developer another $25,000.

That’s not an exhaustive list, by the way. To keep things simple, I left out Toronto’s Parkland Dedication Fee which, for residential developments, can range from 5 to 20 percent of the land value. And the Education Development Charges imposed by school boards was also ignored.

So assuming everything goes smoothly – something that’s far from given – that’ll give us a total development cost of $2,360,000. To ensure compensation for the time, work, investments, and considerable risks involved, our developer is unlikely to want to sell the home for less than $2,700,000.

But various governments are still holding their hands out. When the buyers sign an agreement of purchase, they’ll be on the hook for land transfer taxes and – since it’s a new house – HST. Ontario and Toronto will want about four percent ($108,000) for the transfer (even though they both just cashed in on the very same transfer tax for the very same land at the start of the process). And, even taking into account both the federal and Ontario rebates, getting the keys to the front door will require handing over another $327,000 for HST.

Here’s how development fee schedules currently look in Toronto:

And here’s a breakdown of the land transfer taxes assessed against anyone buying land:

In our hypothetical case, those fees would give us a total, all-in purchase price of $3,135,000. How much of that is due to government involvement (including associated legal and interest fees)? Around $695,000.

That’s $695,000 our buyers will pay – over and above the actual costs of land and construction. Or, in other words, a 22 percent markup.

Let’s put this a different way. If the cost of the median home in Canada dropped by 22 percent, then around 1.5 million extra Canadian households could enter the market. Congratulations, you’ve solved the housing affordability crisis. (Although supply problems will still need some serious work.)

Now it’s probably not realistic to expect politicians in places like the Ontario Legislature and Toronto City Council to give up that kind of income. But just lowering their intake by 50 or even 25 percent – and reducing the costs and pain points of acquiring permits – could make a serious difference. Not only would it lower home sale prices, but it would lower the barriers to entry for new home construction.

Share

Just what were all those taxes worth to governments? Let’s begin with the City of Toronto. Their 2023 Financial Report tells us that land transfer taxes generated $944 million, permits and zoning applications delivered $137 million, and development fees accounted for $1.45 billion. Total city revenues in 2023 were $16.325 billion.

We’re told that all that money was spent on:

  • Roads and transit systems
  • Water and wastewater systems
  • Fire and emergency services
  • Parks and recreation facilities
  • Libraries

Well, we do need those things right? We can’t expect the city to just eliminate fire and emergency services.

Wait. Hang on. I seem to recall being told that revenue from my property tax bill covered those services. Yes! My property tax did fund those things. Not 100 percent of those things, but a lot.

Specifically, Toronto property tax revenues cover 65 percent of the municipal costs for roads and transit systems, 85 percent of fire and emergency services, 75 percent of parks and recreation facilities, and 95 percent of library costs (even though very few people use public libraries any more).

Granted, property tax revenue covered only five percent of water and wastewater systems, but that’s because another 40 percent came from user fees (i.e., utility bills).

So revenues from land transfer taxes, developer fees, and permitting aren’t an insignificant portion of City income, but they’re hardly the linchpin propping the whole thing up either. City Council could respond to losing that income by increasing property taxes. Or – and I’m just throwing around random ideas here – they could reduce their spending.

Now what about the province? I couldn’t get a good sense of how much of their HST revenue comes specifically from new home sales, but Ontario’s 2023–24 consolidated financial statements tell us that provincial land transfer taxes brought in $3.538 billion. That would be around 1.7% of total government revenues. Again, a bit more than a rounding error.

Politics is about finding balances through trade offs. Sure, maintaining program spending while minimizing deficits is an ongoing and real challenge for governments. On the other hand, they all say they’re concerned about the housing crisis. Foregoing just one to five percent of revenues should, given the political payoffs and bragging rights that could follow, probably be an easy pill to swallow.

A few weeks ago I reached out to the City of Toronto Housing Secretariat and the Province of Ontario’s Municipal Affairs and Housing for their thoughts. I received no response.

The Audit is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

2025 Federal Election

Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

Published on

CAE Logo Dan McTeague

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”

The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!

Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.

But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the  environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”

Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.

No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.

Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.

Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.

But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.

Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.

Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.

The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.

EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.

Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.

And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.

So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”

A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.

These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.

But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

Continue Reading

2025 Federal Election

Three cheers for Poilievre’s alcohol tax cut

Published on

By Franco Terrazzano

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation applauds Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre’s commitment to end and reverse the alcohol escalator tax.

“Poilievre just promised major alcohol tax cuts and taxpayers will cheers to that,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Poilievre’s tax cut will save Canadians money every time they have a cold one with a buddy or enjoy a glass of Pinot with their better half and it will give Canadians brewers, distillers and wineries a fighting chance against tariffs.”

Today, federal alcohol taxes increased by two per cent, costing taxpayers about $40 million this year, according to Beer Canada.

Poilievre announced a Conservative government “will axe the escalator tax on wine, beer and spirits back to 2017 levels, ending the automatic annual tax increases.”

The alcohol escalator tax has automatically increased excise taxes on beer, wine and spirits every year, without a vote in Parliament, since 2017. The alcohol escalator tax has cost taxpayers more than $900 million since being imposed, according to Beer Canada.

Taxes from multiple levels of government account for about half of the price of alcohol.

Meanwhile, tariffs are hitting the industry hard. Brewers have described the tariffs as “Armageddon for craft brewing.”

“Automatic tax hikes are undemocratic, uncompetitive and unaffordable and they need to stop,” Terrazzano said. “If politicians think Canadians aren’t paying enough tax, they should at least have the spine to vote on the tax increase.

“Poilievre is right to end the escalator tax and all party leaders should commit to making life more affordable for Canadian consumers and businesses by ending the undemocratic alcohol tax hikes.”

Continue Reading

Trending

X