Housing starts in 2025 are down compared to last year, with large provinces like Ontario and British Columbia standing out as poor performers.
According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 67,022 residential housing starts were reported from January to April 2025, down from 68,107 housing starts during the same period.
While some provinces saw their housing starts rise substantially, two of Canada’s biggest provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, saw significant regression.
Builders in Ontario managed to start 23,434 residential housing projects from January to April in 2024, but have only started 16,115 housing projects during the same time in 2025, marking a 31.2 per cent decline from last year.
The collapse of housing starts in Toronto was a major driver of the poor results, as 15,202 housing starts last year plummeted to 7,362 housing starts in 2025, a 51.6 per cent drop.
Other laggards include Guelph, whose housing starts plunged 90 per cent, Oshawa’s 74 per cent drop, and Windsor’s 69 per cent drop.
Ontario had already suffered a 12 per cent drop in housing starts from 2023 to 2024 during these four months.
In British Columbia, the province managed 15,212 housing starts in 2024 from January to April, but saw a 22.1 per cent decline in 2025, down to 11,839 housing starts.
Vancouver saw a large drop of 24.8 per cent in housing starts on the year from 10,540 to 7,919 while Victoria’s starts dropped 29.5 per cent from 1,422 to 1,003.
Nanaimo’s housing starts have plunged 78 per cent on the year while Kelowna’s starts have dropped 30 per cent from 1,052 to 740.
In August 2023, Ontario Premier Doug Ford promised to build 1.5 million new homes by 2031, but is set to fall far short of the goal at current homebuilding rates.
In April 2024, former prime minister Justin Trudeau made a similar promise to build nearly 3.9 million homes by 2031. However, as there were only 227,697 housing starts in 2024, Canada is on track to building 1.82 million homes by 2031, less than half of the promised amount.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has promised to double the rate of home development to 500,000 per year by 2030 creating a government entity to build homes called Build Canada Homes and cutting the GST for first-time homebuyers up to $1 million.