Economy
Meeting Ottawa’s new housing target will require more than $300 billion in additional financing every year until 2030

From the Fraser Institute
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.
Carbon Tax
The book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read

By Franco Terrazzano
Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote a 500-page book praising carbon taxes.
Well, I just wrote a book smashing through the government’s carbon tax propaganda.
It tells the inside story of the fight against the carbon tax. And it’s THE book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read.
My book is called Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax.
Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax
Every now and then, the underdog wins one.
And it looks like that’s happening in the fight against the carbon tax.
It’s not over yet, but support for the carbon tax is crumbling. Some politicians vow to scrap it. Others hide behind vague plans to repackage it. But virtually everyone recognizes support for the current carbon tax has collapsed.
It wasn’t always this way.
For about a decade now, powerful politicians, government bureaucrats, academics, media elites and even big business have been pushing carbon taxes on the people.
But most of the time, politicians never asked the people if they supported carbon taxes. In other words, carbon taxes, and the resulting higher gas prices and heating bills, were forced on us.
We were told it was good for us. We were told carbon taxes were inevitable. We were told politicians couldn’t win elections without carbon taxes, even though the politicians that imposed them didn’t openly run on them. We were told that we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to leave a healthy environment for our kids and grandkids. We were told we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to be respected in the international community.
In this decade-long fight, it would have been understandable if the people had given up and given in to these claims. It would have been easier to accept what the elites wanted and just pay the damn bill. But against all odds, ordinary Canadians didn’t give up.
Canadians knew you could care about the environment and oppose carbon taxes. Canadians saw what they were paying at the gas station and on their heating bills, and they knew they were worse off, regardless of how many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and academics tried to convince them otherwise. Canadians didn’t need advanced degrees in economics, climate science or politics to understand they were being sold a false bill of goods.
Making it more expensive for a mom in Port Hope to get to work, or grandparents in Toronto to pay their heating bill, or a student in Coquitlam to afford food won’t reduce emissions in China, Russia, India or the United States. It just leaves these Canadians, and many like them, with less money to afford everything else.
Ordinary Canadians understood carbon taxes amount to little more than a way for governments to take more money from us and dictate how we should live our lives. Ordinary Canadians also saw through the unfairness of the carbon tax.
Many of the elites pushing the carbon tax—the media, politicians, taxpayer-funded professors, laptop activists and corporate lobbyists—were well off and wouldn’t feel the brunt of carbon taxes. After all, living in a downtown condo and clamouring for higher carbon taxes doesn’t require much gas, diesel or propane.
But running a business, working in a shop, getting kids to soccer and growing food on the farm does. These are the Canadians the political class forgot about when pushing carbon taxes. These are the Canadians who never gave up. These are the Canadians who took time out of their busy lives to sign petitions, organize and attend rallies, share posts on social media, email politicians and hand out bumper stickers.
Because of these Canadians, the carbon tax could soon be swept onto the ash heap of history. I wrote this book for two reasons.
The first is because these ordinary Canadians deserve it. They worked really hard for a really long time against the odds. When all the power brokers in government told them, “Do what we say—or pay,” they didn’t give up. They deserve to know the time and effort they spent fighting the carbon tax mattered. They deserve all the credit.
Thank you for everything you did.
The second reason I wrote this book is so people know the real story of the carbon tax. The carbon tax was bad from the start and we fought it from the start. By reading this book, you will get the real story about the carbon tax, a story you won’t find anywhere else.
This book is important because if the federal Liberals’ carbon tax is killed, the carbon taxers will try to lay blame for their defeat on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They will try to say that carbon taxes are a good idea, but Trudeau bungled the policy or wasn’t a good enough salesman. They will try to revive the carbon tax and once again make you pay more for gas, groceries, and home heating.
Just like with any failed five-year plan, there is a lingering whiff among the laptop class and the taxpayer-funded desk rulers that this was all a communication problem, that the ideal carbon tax hasn’t been tried yet. I can smell it outside my office building in Ottawa, where I write these words. We can’t let those embers smoulder and start a fire again.
This book shows why the carbon tax is and always will be bad policy for ordinary Canadians.
Franco’s note: You can pre-order a copy of my new book, Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax, here: https://www.amazon.ca/Axing-
2025 Federal Election
Fixing Canada’s immigration system should be next government’s top priority

From the Fraser Institute
Whichever party forms government after the April 28 election must put Canada’s broken immigration system at the top of the to-do list.
This country has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. Were it not for immigration, our population would soon start to decline, just as it’s declining in dozens of other low-fertility countries around the world.
To avoid the social and economic tensions of an aging and declining population, the federal government should re-establish an immigration system that combines a high intake with strictly enforced regulations. Once Canadians see that program in place and working, public support for immigration should return.
Canada’s total fertility rate (the number of children, on average, a woman will have in her lifetime) has been declining, with the odd blip here and there, since the 1960s. In 1972, it fell below the replacement rate of 2.1.
According to Statistics Canada, the country’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.26 in 2023. That puts us in the company of other lowest-low fertility countries such as Italy (1.21), Japan (1.26) and South Korea (0.82).
Those three countries are all losing population. But Canada’s population continues to grow, with immigrants replacing the babies who aren’t born. The problem is that, in the years that followed the COVID-19 lockdowns, the population grew too much.
The Liberal government was unhappy that the pandemic had forced Canada to restrict immigration and concerned about post-pandemic labour shortages. To compensate, Ottawa set a target of 500,000 new permanent residents for 2025, double the already-high intake of about 250,000 a year that had served as a benchmark for the Conservative government of Stephen Harper and the Liberal governments of Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien.
Ottawa also loosened restrictions on temporary foreign worker permits and the admission of foreign students to colleges and universities. Both populations quickly exploded.
Employers preferred hiring workers from overseas rather than paying higher wages for native-born workers. Community colleges swelled their ranks with international students who were also issued work permits. Private colleges—Immigration Minister Marc Miller called them “puppy mills”—sprang up that offered no real education at all.
At the same time, the number of asylum claimants in Canada skyrocketed due to troubles overseas and relaxed entry procedures, reaching a total of 457,285 in 2024.
On January 1 of this year, Statistics Canada estimated that there were more than three million temporary residents in the country, pushing Canada’s population up above 41.5 million.
Their presence worsened housing shortages, suppressed wages and increased unemployment among younger workers. The public became alarmed at the huge influx of foreign residents.
For the first time in a quarter century, according to an Environics poll, a majority of Canadians believed there were too many immigrants coming into Canada.
Some may argue that the solution to Canada’s demographic challenges lie in adopting family-friendly policies that encourage couples to have children. But while governments improve parental supports and filter policies through a family-friendly lens—for example, houses with backyards are more family-friendly than high-rise towers—no government has been able to reverse declining fertility back up to the replacement rate of 2.1.
The steps to repairing Canada’s immigration mess lie in returning to first principles.
According to Statistics Canada, there were about 300,000 international students at postsecondary institutions when the Liberals came to power in 2015. Let’s return to those levels.
The temporary foreign worker program should be toughened up. The government recently implemented stricter Labour Market Impact Assessments, but even stricter rules may be needed to ensure that foreign workers are only brought in when local labour markets cannot meet employer needs, while paying workers a living wage.
New legislation should ensure that only asylum claimants who can demonstrate they are at risk of persecution or other harm in their home country are given refuge in Canada, and that the process for assessing claims is fair, swift and final. If necessary, the government should consider employing the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to protect such legislation from court challenges.
Finally, the government should admit fewer permanent residents under the family reunification stream and more from the economic stream. And the total admitted should be kept to around 1 per cent of the total population. That would still permit an extremely robust intake of about 450,000 new Canadians each year.
Restoring public confidence in Canada’s immigration system will take much longer than it took to undermine that confidence. But there can be no higher priority for the federal government. The country’s demographic future is at stake.
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