Canada’s National Housing Strategy 2.0: What Comes Next?  

When the federal government released its National Housing Strategy (NHS) in 2017, it set out a number of ambitious goals, including removing 530,000 households from housing need and reducing the number of chronically homeless shelter users by 50%. To reach these goals, the NHS focused on a wide range of initiatives with the largest investments in supply-side solutions including a $15.9 billion dollar in the National Housing Co-Investment Fund and a commitment to build 100,000 new housing units. However, the outcomes of these interventions have been slow to reach the households most affected by the affordability crisis — a gap documented by the National Housing Council. Both the number of households in housing need, and homelessness have increased in many communities across the country.  

At the Balanced Supply of Housing, we’ve been studying these trends, and in May of 2026, our community partners and academic researchers met for three days of presentations and discussion. Our spring workshop report brings together some of the key research findings and ideas on policies that may help move the needle as consultation for NHS 2.0 is set to officially open any day. Three themes stood out:  

• rethinking ownership models,  
• treating housing as homes rather than investments, and  
• building a stronger accountability framework to enforce housing rights. 

We take each in turn below. 

Create Opportunities for Community Ownership  

A key theme of discussion throughout the spring workshop was the healing relationships of community and connection that comes with communal forms of ownership. Indigenous organizations and community land trusts spoke of the importance of building more equitable governance structures that prioritize human rights over property rights — specifically, the right to adequate housing recognized under both the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Canada’s own National Housing Strategy Act. These discussions focused on community ownership as an alternative to colonial relationships to land built on private property rights and the right to exclude.  

Many of the BSH’s CLT partners are engaged in this important work and recognize that housing justice is linked to a wide range of justice issues. One policy tool that would directly support this work is the expansion and streamlining of existing rental protection funds. By creating a pre-approval process for non-profit housing providers and providing grants rather than loans, programs like Canada’s Rental Protection Fund can have a significant impact by protecting affordability in perpetuity.  

For Indigenous, By Indigenous housing solutions are also central to the work of decolonization. That’s why one of the key recommendations that came out of the spring workshop was to increase distinction-based funding for Indigenous nations. This funding would go a long way in closing the $135-billion funding gap and support Indigenous-led capacity-building and culturally appropriate housing.

Treat Housing as Homes 

Prioritizing human rights over property rights also means taking a closer look at the impacts of treating housing as an investment rather than people’s homes. Between 2018 and 2022, shelter costs increased nationally by 20.6%. The increase in homelessness in communities across Canada is deeply connected to the loss of affordable housing nationwide. BSH research has consistently found that the financialization of housing contributes to housing insecurity and a loss of affordability. This is especially true for racialized communities — tenants in financialized multi-family rental housing in majority Black neighbourhoods were four times more likely to receive an eviction filing than the average renter in the GTA in 2021. The launch of our Evictions in Canada book at the spring workshop was the culmination of this work and provides an important reference point when considering alternatives to our current system.  

While rental regulation is under provincial jurisdiction, there are minimum standards that could be set by the federal government. For provinces with rent control, above guideline increases (AGI) are an important loop-hole that financialized landlords are using to drive up prices and displace tenants. In a case study that looked at AGI filings by financialized landlords, it was estimated that rents increased by 22% in less than 5-years. Closing this loophole for these landlords would be an important step towards treating housing as homes rather than investments.  

Steps should also be taken to ensure that households can’t be evicted into homelessness. While provinces such as Saskatchewan allow arbitrators to consider alternatives to evictions, these alternatives are often not actioned on by the courts. Proportionality provisions that allow for alternatives to evictions to be considered must be strengthened nationally. The costs of evicting people into homelessness must be considered.  

To help stabilize households at risk of homelessness there’s also a need to re-engineer the Canada Housing Benefit (CHB) and expand the capacity of non-profit providers. These two goals are connected: long-term operating agreements help keep non-profit housing providers viable and are essential to their ability to respond to housing need; it also helps the federal government break from depending on market rental housing where we’ve seen record rent inflation over the last decade. The CHB could be re-engineering to ensure that households maintain the residual income they need to remain housed.  

Next Steps 

NHS 2.0 provides a real opportunity to recalibrate the housing system, but the ideas above only move the needle if they’re paired with clear, trackable commitments. 

While the wide range of policy solutions above provides a good starting point, these efforts must be tied to an accountability framework that ties federal funding to provincial and territorial human-rights-based obligations. A Housing Act that would set enforceable national standards for security of tenure and the delivery of affordable housing, backed by funding conditions similar to how the Canada Health Act ties federal transfers to provincial compliance is essential to the operationalization of these obligations.  

The Balanced Supply of Housing (BSH) is a SSHRC-CMHC funded partnership grant led by Dr. Alexandra Flynn at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, focused on land use, housing financialization, and sustainable housing futures across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.