The election is over, and Prime Minister Carney has some big plans! Some came directly from Pierre Poilievre’s binder, but “hey, who’s complaining?” Apparently, it’s OK if you have none of your own. He is even parroting a likeness to one of President Trump’s sayings promoting modular homes by Carney with: “We are going to build, Baby, build.” I’m still wondering how President Trump got on our ballot in the first place.
A main promise in the 2025 snap election was to build millions more homes over a decade that homebuilders can’t achieve. He plans to accomplish this by building modular homes. The cost of a prefab or modular home in Canada has typically widely varied but generally ranges higher than onsite building due to the cost of the overall investment in a plant, the equipment and operational costs. Generally speaking, it is cheaper to build onsite! Carney didn’t address the cost of a serviced lot and a concrete basement so that remains an unknown for now. While there is a quicker turnaround in factory-built homes, buyers won’t have the opportunity to personalize their homes.
One key question about these Carney homes is will they be built by the government, as there are few, if any, fully modular homebuilders left in Canada? My father worked with the Jim Pattison Group 45 years ago in their mobile/modular home division and closed it because it wasn’t economically viable. However, the cost won’t be an issue in this case as Carney is allocating $25 billion of your taxpayer dollars to the project. His plan is to utilize federally owned lands to build on, but it is not yet known
where these locations will be. Nor is it clear whether these will be affordable homes for purchase or all affordable rentals. Another question is whether the cost of bureaucrats required to manage this project is included in the $25B, or will that be a different expense item? This year’s debt had earlier been projected to reach $62.2 billion by the end of 2025, but the Carney government openly projected it will now be more like $67.7 billion. Rather than talk about this housing venture in terms of debt, he prefers to refer to it as an investment asset.
There are no plans yet on how he will pay for this new spending besides diverting some dollars away from other programs and services in a real effort to lower the debt. If they are for sale and affordable for the lower-income buyers, will the terms be subsidized? Similarly, if they are for rent, will the rentals be subsidized, and how will that affect the budget, your taxes, or are we printing more money? Will ongoing maintenance of these homes be the responsibility of the federal government or the provinces in which they are located? And will this end up as a plus or a negative to our annual operating debt?
It is always easy to make promises when no full answers are given. But we taxpayers still have lots of questions.
