On November 4, 2025, the federal government tabled Budget 2025: Canada Strong, the first budget under Prime Minister Mark Carney. The budget comes at a time of rising housing insecurity and homelessness, widening income inequality, and job and income loss across the country. At the centre of these intersecting crises are renters and people experiencing homelessness.
While Budget 2025 includes some important, previously announced commitments toward affordable housing development, significant gaps remain that must be filled to meet the current moment. Of critical concern, the budget does not include:
- Immediate support for those in greatest need to find or keep their housing, such as expansions to the Canada Housing Benefit or Reaching Home: Canada’s Homelessness Strategy
- Protections for renters against excessive rents, unfair evictions, disrepair, discrimination, and other urgent issues
- Measures to tackle the financializaton of housing, including limiting the treatment of housing as a tool to maximize profits and substantially increasing the supply of community housing, or
- Commitments to uphold housing as a human right, including clear targets, timelines, monitoring, and reporting mechanisms to ensure government investments lead to deep and long-term housing affordability and security
The budget also reinforces damaging stereotypes about immigration as a driver of the housing crisis, while failing to recognize the key role that the financialization of housing has played in driving up prices, increasing housing insecurity and homelessness, and further marginalizing equity-deserving communities.
Below, we outline what’s missing from Budget 2025 and opportunities for the federal government to make meaningful progress on ending homelessness and housing need, reflecting our pre-budget recommendations.
Building on Build Canada Homes
Previously announced in September 2025, Build Canada Homes is the cornerstone housing commitment in the budget and commits $13 billion over five years to primarily support the development of non-market housing. While these are important commitments, the budget does not allocate any new funding for Build Canada Homes or any other affordable or supportive housing initiatives that would help address the housing and homelessness crisis. Moreover, the budget does not include targets, timelines, or requirements for Build Canada Homes related to affordability, renter protections, and the needs of equity-deserving communities. As such, it fails to demonstrate how Build Canada Homes will achieve its goals of restoring affordability and reducing homelessness. Instead, it continues the pattern of previous budgets in failing to prioritize and maximize investments in the deeply affordable housing needed to address the current crisis.
A recent report from the Federal Housing Advocate shows the need to build or acquire a minimum of 200,000 non-market homes per year over the next 30 years to address housing need and homelessness. Recent research from Maytree shows this could be achieved through a $40 billion annual federal investment. This contrasts dramatically with the $13 billion investment and less than 5,000 homes announced to date through Build Canada Homes (only some of which are targeted for those in greatest need).
Targeting for deep affordability
Following a recent CMHC report, the budget defines housing affordability based on 2019 levels, when households spent roughly 40-45 per cent of their income on housing. This is much higher than the widely accepted 30 per cent affordability standard. To meet this threshold, the budget commits to double homebuilding over the next decade, but it does not set any targets for affordability, housing types or renter protections.
This logic relies on the assumption that new housing supply alone will increase affordability, yet the evidence shows this is not the case. For example, despite a historic increase in rental housing development last year, a recent CMHC report found that new units were too expensive for low- and moderate-income renters, and the increase in supply did little to improve affordability.
To meaningfully address the housing and homelessness crisis, new housing supply must be targeted to those in greatest need. According to data from the Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART), nearly 20 per cent of households in Canada earn 50 per cent or less of the median household income in their area and can afford to spend a maximum of $1,050 on housing costs each month. It is thus critical for new housing supply to have clear and long-term affordability requirements and be paired with provisions for strong renter protections to meet the needs of those most impacted by the crisis. At the same time, existing affordable housing – and the people who live there – must be protected against excessive rent increases, demolitions, and conversions through robust acquisition programs (including deeper investments in the Canada Rental Protection Fund) and strong renter protections.
Protecting renters
The budget commits $51 billion over 10 years in new and existing funding to launch a Build Communities Strong Fund, which includes funding for provinces and territories to build the infrastructure needed for housing such as roads, water, and wastewater systems. To access this new funding, provinces and territories must cost-match federal funding, reduce development charges, and refrain from introducing new taxes related to housing development. However, the budget does not indicate any requirements for this new funding related to building affordable housing, protecting renters, or meeting the needs of equity-deserving communities.
Attaching conditions for provinces and territories to access federal funding is a key lever at the federal government’s disposal to help align housing policies and programs across levels of government and ensure a coordinated approach to ending homelessness and housing need. The federal government previously exercised this power by using the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund as an incentive for provinces and territories to adopt elements of the Renters’ Bill of Rights.
While most Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund agreements have now been signed, we have yet to see commitments from the provinces and territories related to renter protections outlined in the Renters’ Bill of Rights. Moreover, despite including important measures that aim to improve renter protections, the Renters’ Bill of Rights also omits some key provisions, including clear guidelines around rent regulation and eviction prevention.
The Build Communities Strong Fund includes funding previously committed through the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund. As such, strong renter protections, clear and long-term affordability requirements, and commitments to meet the housing needs of equity-deserving communities must be central conditions of funding agreements between the federal government and the provinces and territories.
Meeting the needs of equity-deserving communities
The budget commits some dedicated funding for communities disproportionately impacted by the housing and homelessness crisis, including:
- $2.3 billion for urban, rural, and northern Indigenous housing (previously committed in the 2023 budget), and
- $528.4 million over four years for the Department of Women and Gender Equality, including commitments to eliminate discrimination and advance the rights of women and gender diverse people (though the budget does not indicate dedicated housing investments for women and gender diverse people).
While these are important commitments that could help address the housing needs of Indigenous people, women, and gender diverse people, the budget still falls short of providing enough funding or setting clear targets for housing projects that meet the needs of these and other equity-deserving communities who face disproportionate rates of housing need and homelessness, including people with disabilities, Black and other racialized people, seniors, youth, immigrants, refugees, people living in rural and remote communities, and people experiencing homelessness. For example, Indigenous housing leaders have called for investments to quadruple the supply of Indigenous-led community housing, with estimates ranging from $4.3 billion to $5.6 billion per year over 10 years to meet needs of urban, rural, and northern Indigenous communities.
Moreover, the budget fails to provide opportunities for engagement with people with lived experience of housing precarity and homelessness to support the development, implementation, and evaluation of the government’s housing policies and programs – a key element of a human rights-based approach.
Tackling housing financialization
Budget 2025 also commits to increasing the Canada Mortgage Bond annual issuance limit from $60 billion to $80 billion for multi-unit housing development. This commitment aligns with other government policies that continue to fuel the financialization of housing by treating housing as a commodity rather than a human right. This includes tax loopholes, low interest borrowing, and inadequate regulation that incentivize financial actors to purchase rental housing for the sole purpose of maximizing profits for investors, rather than providing safe, secure, and affordable homes for renters. This leads to excessive rent increases, displacement, and evictions, with disproportionate impacts on equity-deserving communities.
At the same time, governments at all levels continue to rely heavily on the private sector to build new housing, which has failed to produce housing that is affordable to lower income households. While there is some promise in Build Canada Homes’ focus on growing the community housing sector, the budget continues the government’s misguided approach of centralizing the private sector in its housing plans and policies.
Next steps
With few new investments, meagre mention of renters, and no targets to end housing need and homelessness, Budget 2025 fails to meet the current moment. Alongside our sector partners, we continue to urge the federal government to adopt evidence- and rights-based solutions to the housing and homelessness crisis. As we outlined in our pre-budget submission, this includes:
- Providing immediate support to renters and people experiencing homelessness, including by expanding the Canada Housing Benefit and Reaching Home program
- Protecting renters from excessive rents, unfair evictions, and other urgent issues, including by strengthening the Renters’ Bill of Rights and renter protection requirements under federal-provincial-territorial funding agreements
- Building and protecting deeply affordable housing, including by maximizing investments in the community housing sector, setting housing targets for equity-deserving communities, and restricting access to funding to housing projects that ensure long-term affordability, security, and other renter protections
- Combatting the financialization of housing, including by addressing fiscal and regulatory incentives that spur financialization and reducing reliance on the private sector, and
- Upholding housing as a human right, including by setting clear targets, timelines, monitoring, and reporting mechanisms to end homelessness and housing need and providing meaningful engagement opportunities for people with lived experience.