Canada’s housing crisis is not an accident— the ruling class engineered it. It is the result of chronic underfunding, real-estate investors, corporate landlords, and decades of political decisions that put profits ahead of people. It is a class war.
Foreign investors and speculators have been allowed to run wild while families get pushed out of the communities they built. Young people are locked out of homeownership. Renters are being gouged, while corporate landlords are hoarding homes, buying up entire neighbourhoods and driving up rents. The ruling class has made housing a stock market for the rich, instead of a basic human right.
Canada once mobilized entire industries during wartime to build ships, vehicles, and equipment at unprecedented speed. We can do it again.
Rob Ashton’s plan: Operation Build Communities, Not Corporate Empires, will launch that same scale of national mobilization to build homes for people.
It will stop the profiteering, start building the homes people actually need and put workers to work.
This is how we win Canada’s housing war:
- Triple the Number of Public, Non-Profit, and Co-Op Homes
- Triple the construction of public, co-op, and non-profit homes — homes that stay affordable forever because they’re kept out of the speculative market — and grow Canada’s non-market housing supply to 20% by 2040.
- Bring more private land into public ownership for the construction of non-profit, affordable homes. Prioritize the land close to rapid public transit.
- Use public funds to build homes ordinary people can actually afford — not luxury units for investors.
- Standardize modular, prefab, and mass‑timber methods to lower costs.
- Modernize zoning to allow duplexes, triplexes, and gentle density in every community.
- Invest in housing in Indigenous communities and in an Indigenous Housing Strategy for urban, rural, and northern communities.
This is mass production for the public goods, not for profit.
- Put Canadians to Work With Canadian Materials
This housing plan is also a jobs plan.- Use Canadian steel, cement, lumber, and manufactured products.
- Tie all federal housing dollars to prevailing wages, apprenticeship requirements, and strong labour standards.
- Establish regional prefab plants to create local jobs.
- Train tens of thousands of young workers for careers in the skilled trades and restore the Apprenticeship Completion Grant and the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant.
Homes built by Canadian workers, with Canadian materials, for Canadian families.
- Crack Down on Corporate Landlords
Corporate landlords and speculators are buying entire neighbourhoods, hiking rents, and evicting people for profit. Rob will shut that down:- Ban big corporate landlords from buying affordable apartment buildings and starter homes when they hit the market.
- Support non-profits, co-ops, and community housing providers to acquire those buildings instead — keeping them affordable forever.
- End federal subsidies, tax breaks, and CMHC backing for any landlord that renovicts, price-gouges, or abuses tenants.
- Ban rent-fixing algorithms and other AI tools landlords use to coordinate rent hikes.
- Protect Renters With Real Rules — Not Loopholes
Rob’s plan finally gives renters a fighting chance:- Real rent control that stops rent-gouging.
- End renovictions and fixed-term lease tricks used to force people out.
- Enforce national standards to stop harassment, illegal evictions, and abusive practices by landlords.
- Support for tenant unions and legal aid.
If you pay your rent on time and follow the rules, you shouldn’t be one eviction notice away from losing your home. We will use federal transfers and programs to incentivize municipalities, Provinces and Territories to put in place strong regulations to protect renters.
- A Fair Shot for First-Time Homebuyers
Young people working full-time should be able to buy a home. The ruling class made this impossible. Rob will:- Ban hedge funds and rich investors from acquiring single-family homes.
- Build dedicated starter homes only for first-time buyers, not investors.
- Support different pathways to ownership – using land trusts and equity coops.
- Offer low-interest first-term mortgages through CHMC. Homes are for families, not investment portfolios.
- Ending Homelessness by 2035
Everyone deserves a safe place to live. Rob’s plan confronts homelessness with dignity and real solutions, not half-measures.- Replenish the Rapid Housing Initiative and Reaching Home to build more rent-geared-to-income and supportive homes through non-profit and Indigenous providers.
- Create a National Encampments Response Plan that upholds the right to housing, invests in permanent alternatives to encampments, and addresses the over-representation of Indigenous people in homelessness.
- Launch a Homelessness Prevention & Housing Benefit to help 50,000 people in critical need get into stable homes.
- Put federal dollars behind community-led, permanent solutions, so every person in every community has a place to call home.
Our plan is a national mission to build affordable homes while putting Canadians to work, protect families from corporate greed, and restore housing as a human right.
This is Canada’s housing war—and we are are going to win it.
