Something curious happened in Ottawa last month. The Senate released a report on Canada's housing crisis, and if you read between the lines, the witness list tells you almost everything you need to know about where this is headed.

The Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy published "Out of Reach: Unlocking Canada's Housing Affordability Crisis" on January 20. The report calls for cutting taxes on developers, reducing municipal fees, and speeding up approvals. Senators found a "troubling paradox" in the market: home prices remain stubbornly unaffordable even as construction and land costs have eased.

But here's the thing. When you invite mainly real estate developers, private equity firms, and industry consultants to testify about housing affordability, you tend to get answers that sound a lot like a developer wishlist.

Professor Patrick Condon isn't buying it. The UBC professor emeritus recently sent a letter to the committee that pulls no punches. His core argument? When you only ask industry representatives about a social issue like housing, you inevitably get anti-social responses.

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The Witness List Reads Like an Industry Convention

The committee heard from KingSett Capital, one of Canada's largest private equity real estate firms. They heard from BILD, the Building Industry and Land Development Association. They consulted with the Missing Middle Initiative and Altus Group, research organizations that have produced numerous reports arguing for tax cuts and reduced development fees.

These aren't neutral observers. The Missing Middle Initiative, despite positioning itself as a think tank focused on middle-class housing, has become a primary source of data for industry groups like BILD and the Ontario Home Builders' Association. Altus Group produces economic analyses that consistently warn of job losses if governments don't cut development charges and eliminate the GST on new homes.

The pattern is clear: industry-funded research becomes the basis for policy recommendations that benefit the industry.

Condon points out that these voices are "steeped in libertarian supply-side dogma tied to networks like the Koch-funded Atlas and Fraser Institute." He's not wrong to notice the ideological thread. The YIMBY movement, which heavily influences current housing discourse, has roots that intertwine free-market deregulation with tech industry funding and libertarian think tanks.

When Sonja Trauss founded the original YIMBY group in San Francisco, she wrote for the Libertarian Party: "I don't want subsidized, supervised affordable housing. I want to consume housing the way I consume all other products." Her early funding came from tech executives. The movement that grew from this has become a strange coalition, from free-market libertarians to progressive urbanists, all united around the idea that building more will solve everything.

It hasn't worked out that way.

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Vancouver: The Supply-Side Experiment That Failed

Condon uses Vancouver as his primary evidence, and the numbers are striking. Between 1960 and 2020, Vancouver's housing stock grew 200% while population rose only 78%. The city added more housing per capita than any other North American center city.

And what happened to affordability? It got worse. Much worse. Vancouver now has North America's highest housing costs.

"We've been adding supply since the 1980s and prices have tripled in that time," Condon told UBC Applied Science. The relationship between supply and price that economists promise? It didn't materialize.

Why not? Because housing in major cities isn't operating like a normal commodity anymore. It's become an investment vehicle for global capital. When you add luxury supply in Vancouver or Toronto, you're not necessarily housing local residents. You're creating assets that attract speculative investment, which then drives up land values across the entire city.

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The Land Price Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here's what really happens when cities upzone and allow more density: landowners expect to be paid for that increased development potential. If a city gives a developer permission to build twice as many units on a lot, the landowner wants double the price for the land.

This isn't theory. It's how the market actually works.

Condon explains: "If the city gives the developer permission to build a taller building with multiple units on the lot, the landowner expects the developer to pay multiple times the original price of the parcel. So while more units are built, the cost of land increases."

To recoup those inflated land costs, developers must charge market rates. And in cities where housing has become an investment commodity, market rates keep climbing regardless of how much you build.

The Senate report doesn't seriously address land speculation or financialization. It doesn't grapple with the fact that in places like Vancouver, adding high-end supply had "the perverse effect of raising the cost of all housing," as Condon noted in a 2017 interview.

Instead, the recommendations focus almost entirely on making it cheaper and easier for developers to build market-rate housing. Cut the GST. Reduce development charges. Speed up approvals. These aren't bad ideas in isolation, but they're incomplete solutions to a complex problem.

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What Gets Left Out

The committee's report does mention non-market housing. It suggests expanding federal support for co-ops and non-profits. But these recommendations feel like footnotes compared to the primary focus on developer incentives.

Canada's non-market housing sector represents just 3.5% of total housing stock, among the lowest in the OECD. Housing co-ops, when properly funded, provide housing that's 25% to 33% more affordable than comparable market rentals. They create mixed-income communities and long-term affordability because they're not driven by profit maximization.

Yet the federal Co-operative Housing Development Program, launched in 2022 with $1.5 billion in funding, is a fraction of what would be needed to meaningfully shift the housing equation.

The missing voices in the Senate hearings are people like Armine Yalnizyan and the signatories to HousingReset.ca, who argue for stronger public intervention, value capture policies, and protected affordable housing stock. These perspectives challenge the market-first ideology that dominates current policy.

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The Timing Is Strategic

The Senate report dropped in late January, perfectly positioned to influence the Spring 2026 Federal Budget. If its recommendations become policy, we're looking at developer GST rebates, mandated fee cuts, and streamlined approvals nationwide.

Condon warns this could trigger a "land-lift" in cities like Vancouver, where speculators would immediately price federal tax savings into land acquisitions. This drives up raw land costs and makes it even harder for non-market providers to compete.

It's the same dynamic we've seen play out repeatedly: policies designed to help affordability get captured by land speculation and developer profits. The benefits don't trickle down to renters or first-time buyers. They get absorbed into higher land values.

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The Uncomfortable Truth About Supply and Demand

The housing debate often gets framed as supply skeptics versus supply advocates. But that's a false binary. Condon isn't saying supply doesn't matter. He's saying supply alone won't fix this because the market is broken.

When home prices remain unaffordable even as construction and land costs ease, something else is driving prices. That something is land speculation, financialization, and the treatment of housing as an investment commodity rather than a social good.

Research shows that even the most optimistic supply-side forecasts produce modest impacts. One 2019 study of New York City found that every 10% increase in housing stock yields just a 1% decrease in nearby rents. That's not nothing, but it's nowhere near enough to restore affordability in cities where rents need to drop by half for workers to afford them.

The supply-side argument also ignores what type of housing gets built. RBC Economics found that ownership costs in Vancouver still represent nearly 68% of an average household's income, even after recent price declines. Building more $800,000 condos doesn't help families earning $60,000.

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What Would Actually Help

Condon's letter to the Senate points toward different solutions. He advocates for value capture policies that prevent land speculation from absorbing all the benefits of upzoning. He supports massive expansion of non-market housing like co-ops. He wants to see land trusts that take property permanently out of speculative markets.

These ideas aren't radical. They're how many successful housing systems around the world work. Singapore's Housing Development Board owns and manages housing for roughly 80% of residents. Vienna's social housing provides permanently affordable homes for the majority of residents.

Canada had robust non-market housing programs from the 1970s through early 1990s. These created over 67,000 co-op units that remain affordable today. We stopped funding these programs not because they failed, but because of ideological shifts toward market-based solutions.

The Senate report could have asked: what if we brought that back? What if we matched every dollar of developer tax cuts with funding for non-market housing? What if we required meaningful affordability as a condition of accessing public subsidies?

Instead, it delivers what you'd expect when the guest list is dominated by people who profit from the status quo.

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The Bottom Line

Look, nobody's saying developers are villains or that we don't need more housing. We clearly need more housing. The issue is who controls the conversation and whose interests drive policy.

When federal housing policy gets "captured" by industry interests, as Condon argues, we end up with solutions that serve capital first and people second. We get tax cuts for luxury condo developers but crumbs for co-op housing. We get streamlined approvals for market-rate towers but no serious plan to prevent displacement.

The Senate heard from KingSett Capital and BILD. Did they hear from tenants facing renovictions? From families priced out of their neighborhoods? From housing co-op members who can explain how their model creates lasting affordability?

Professor Condon closes his letter by urging the committee to "seek broader input, especially from advocates for stronger federal support for non-market housing like co-ops, to ensure policies serve the public good, not private capital."

That's not asking for much. Just a housing policy that remembers housing is supposed to be for people, not portfolios.

The question is whether anyone in Ottawa is actually listening.