Canada’s $13 billion Build Canada Homes corporation risks failing on housing affordability if it stays laser-focused on mass timber and other modular construction methodologies without addressing the structural barriers limiting Canadian housing supply. That is according to Matt Spoke, a Toronto-based entrepreneur, real estate developer and Macdonald-Laurier Institute contributor, who set out the critique in a Canadian Affairs op-ed published yesterday.
Whilst Spoke called preferring Canadian suppliers a sound objective, provided it does not raise the cost of building, he pointed to restrictive land-use rules, slow approvals, high municipal taxes, building-code barriers and limited private capital as the factors driving the country’s housing crisis. “Canada’s core housing constraints are more structural than they are a consequence of construction methodology,” Spoke wrote.
Spoke’s critique follows September’s formal launch of BCH with a CA$13 billion budget and a mandate to use as much mass timber and factory-built modular construction as possible, as Wood Central reported at the time. The corporation is being established under the proposed Build Canada Homes Act (Bill C-20), with Prime Minister Mark Carney targeting timeline cuts of up to 50 per cent and cost cuts of up to 20 per cent through modern methods of construction.
Although conceding that BCH can prove a critical part of Ottawa’s broader housing toolkit, Spoke argued the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation already shapes housing finance and underwriting rules, with the Housing Accelerator Fund designed to push municipalities toward faster approvals. He described the agency’s plan to build on federal land as a partial contribution rather than a complete answer, noting that the available sites are limited in number and often poorly located.
Spoke also welcomed the appointment of former Toronto city councillor Ana Bailão as BCH’s inaugural chief executive, describing it as an encouraging early sign and citing her grasp of the municipal approval bottlenecks central to the housing crisis. His first formal recommendation was a public transparency dashboard that records annual housing starts, average unit costs, and a clear accounting of how much private capital is deployed for each federal dollar.
If BCH is to play a major role in “deeply affordable” and “supportive” housing categories, Spoke argued the agency must treat cost discipline as a moral imperative and keep per-unit costs at or below market levels, warning that layered policy requirements can drive costs above market and reduce total new homes. He suggested BCH could instead acquire unsold completed condos at a discount and partner with municipalities or non-profits to manage them.
It comes as Canadian mass timber and modular capacity continue to expand ahead of BCH demand, with Element5 doubling its St. Thomas plant output to 100,000 cubic metres last year and Atlas Engineered Products securing CA$4 million in federal robotics funding for a Clinton truss facility last month, as Wood Central reported. The expansion has been underwritten in part by Carney’s broader CA$1.2 billion forestry package, with CA$700 million in loan guarantees made available through the Business Development Bank of Canada and a further CA$500 million directed at product and market diversification programmes.
Spoke closed by setting three metrics in the lived reality of young Canadians: whether rents stabilise, whether entry-level home ownership becomes attainable again and whether the next generation can plan a life in Canada without housing as a permanent constraint. Without those outcomes, he argued, Carney’s CA$13 billion programme would have failed on its central test.
