The federal government has thrown billions at Canada's housing shortage. The BC government rewrote its zoning laws. Kelowna hit 110% of its provincially mandated housing target in year one. And yet, the homes that most Canadians actually want to buy, ground-oriented, ownership-track, priced for a family on a normal income, remain out of reach for a significant portion of the population.

There's no shortage of explanations for why. But one keeps showing up in the data, in Senate testimony, in builder surveys, and in the experience of anyone who has tried to develop a property in a Canadian city: the planning and approvals system is among the slowest in the world, and it is adding cost and delay at every stage of the process.

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How Slow Is Slow?

Canada ranks 34th out of 35 OECD member countries for development approval timelines, with an average of 249 days just to receive a decision after submitting a formal application. That figure is based heavily on Toronto data, but other research suggests Toronto is not an outlier within Canada.

In Toronto, approvals average 25 months. In Hamilton, they can stretch beyond 31 months. But the more troubling figure, because it doesn't make headlines the same way, is what happens before any application is filed. According to the Residential Construction Council of Ontario, developers routinely spend two to three years in preliminary discussions with municipalities before they can formally submit. Add in site plan approvals, building permits, and construction, and the Senate's Standing Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy has concluded that it now takes an average of 11 years from a developer's first conversation with municipal officials to the day a family moves in.

Each month of that timeline carries a real cost. Research cited by the Housing Advancement Coalition puts carrying costs during approvals delays at roughly $5,576 per unit per month. In Toronto, a 25-month approval process alone can add more than $100,000 to the cost of a condo before construction has started.

The federal government has acknowledged this in its own housing plan, noting that Canada ranked 37th out of 38 OECD countries for municipal approval timelines in 2020, and that the country is three times slower than the United States.

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The Structural Problem That Spending Won't Fix

This is the policy paradox that a recent op-ed in Next City put plainly, if with a different solution in mind: you can throw billions at housing construction, but if the underlying economics of building don't work, the supply won't materialize. The piece argued the problem was land speculation. That's a real factor. But there's another layer that sits upstream of it: the approval process itself creates so much uncertainty and cost that projects which should pencil out simply don't.

The Senate committee's findings were direct. Affordability won't improve without a dramatic increase in supply. Supply won't increase without removing the structural barriers that prevent homes from being built. And those barriers aren't mostly about zoning on paper, which BC has now largely reformed through Bills 44, 46, and 47. They're about what happens after zoning is in place: discretionary council decisions, late-stage conditions, site-specific rezoning requirements for projects that already conform with official community plans, and approval timelines that make long-range development investment unpredictable.

The Housing Advancement Coalition's letter to the federal and Ontario governments in early 2026 put it this way: projects that conform with provincial housing policy still routinely face extended negotiations and site-specific hurdles that can take years to resolve. Even after approval, late-stage development charges or parkland requirements can alter a project's financial viability after millions of dollars have already been spent on planning.

This is why new construction has stalled in many markets even as demand remains. Builders aren't refusing to build. They're doing the math and finding that between approval timelines, carrying costs, development charges, and construction costs, the numbers don't work at a price buyers can afford.

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What's Actually Getting Better

Not everything is gridlock. Some cities have demonstrated that faster approvals don't require cutting corners or bypassing public input. They just require removing the bureaucratic friction that compounds at every stage.

Between 2022 and 2024, Halifax cut its average approval timeline from 20.8 months to 9.8. Edmonton went from 10.5 months to 3.4. Both cities maintained safety and environmental standards. The difference was process reform: digital intake, delegated staff authority for decisions that don't require council, clearer pre-application guidance, and published timelines that give developers predictability.

BC's legislative reforms since 2023 have made real structural changes at the zoning level. Bill 44 mandated small-scale multi-unit housing permissions on all residential lots. Bill 47 introduced transit-oriented density requirements. The province also launched the Local Government Development Approvals Program, which provides funding to help municipalities modernize how they process applications. A third intake was announced in September 2025.

In Kelowna specifically, the City has taken steps to delegate permit authority for straightforward applications and has been updating its development processing procedures to align with the new provincial requirements. Kelowna's first-year performance under the provincial housing targets, exceeding 110% of the year-one goal and delivering more than a third of its five-year target in twelve months, reflects a local planning environment that is moving faster than most. That's genuine progress. The challenge is that permit issuance has since slipped below the pace needed to sustain that trajectory, and the CHBA-CO's open letter to Kelowna council earlier in 2026 describes a construction sector under significant strain, with small builders leaving the market or sitting on permits.

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The Other Side of the Argument

The op-ed that prompted this article makes a broader claim: that supply-side solutions, no matter how well executed, won't deliver affordability as long as land operates as a speculative asset. It points to community land trusts and the Vienna model of limited-profit social housing as alternatives worth scaling.

Those models have real merit in addressing the affordable and non-market housing end of the spectrum. By 2024, roughly 45 community land trusts were operating across Canada, managing around 10,000 residential units. BC's Rental Protection Fund has preserved more than 2,200 homes since its 2023 launch. These are useful tools.

But they operate at a scale that doesn't touch the mainstream ownership market where most buyers, first-timers, move-up buyers, families looking for a townhouse, are actually shopping. And the data on what drives housing costs in Canada consistently points to approval timelines, development charges, construction costs, and labour shortages as the primary levers that governments can pull to affect the supply of mainstream ownership housing.

The debate about whether Canada should build more or restructure its housing system is a real one, and it isn't going away. But for a buyer trying to get into the market in Kelowna in 2026, the more immediately relevant question is whether the homes they need will exist at a price they can afford. The answer to that depends heavily on whether the approval system becomes less of an obstacle to the builders trying to build them.

CBHR has covered the approvals problem in depth, and it remains one of the more under-discussed drivers of why housing costs what it does. If you want to understand how the current supply environment affects the value and availability of specific property types in the Okanagan, the team at Coldwell Banker Horizon Realty can give you a grounded, practical read on the market.