Doug Ford Claims There Are ‘More Cranes’ Building Homes Than Ever Before. Actually, The Number of New Home Builds Has Decreased Under Ford.

In the final Ontario leaders’ debate that took place February 17, Ontario PC Leader Doug Ford faced heavy criticism from his opponents about the cost of housing and his government’s inability to build more housing for the province. 

Doug Ford had a simple message to those who cast doubt on his record on housing – “look outside.”

“…All you have to do is look outside the door, there’s more cranes,” Ford said during the debate. 

“There’s more cranes going up in Toronto, right in your own backyard.”

Ford went on to say that there are more cranes in Toronto than New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle and a few other cities combined. 

According to the RLB Crane Index (Q3 2024), Toronto does have many more cranes than any other city in North America with 83 in the core area and 43 of these cranes being used for residential projects. 

However, despite the number of cranes in the sky, housing starts in Ontario have actually decreased every year for the last three years.

A “housing start” refers to breaking ground on the construction of a new home. It is a metric tracked by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to determine how many new homes are being added to the housing supply in an area. 

There were 74,326 housing starts in Ontario in 2024 –that’s 25,000 fewer than the peak in 2021.

Housing was named a “top priority” by the Ford government. In his 2022 re-election campaign,  Ford pledged to address housing unaffordability by building 1.5 million new homes over the next ten years. 

Despite this, the provincial government has not been on track to reach that goal even once since making it a priority.

The Ford government claims it reached its housing target in 2023, but a closer look at the numbers suggests otherwise. 

The province tracks three numbers in order to see if it reached its housing target for the year: annual home construction starts, additional residential units (conversion of non-residential space into homes), as well as new and upgraded beds in long-term care homes. 

New long-term care beds accounted for 9835 units in the tracker and has led to critics saying the province is inflating its housing numbers. 

The number of housing starts in 2023 listed on the provincial tracker is also 1,011 units higher than the data available from Statistics Canada. A note on the tracker page addresses this discrepancy: 

“Statistics reflect post-review adjustment and may not align with CMHC data as published in its 2023 and 2024 surveys.”

“Over a two-year period, however, statistics across both organizations will align.” 

Ontario’s 2024 Fall Economic Statement projected that the province would also fail to meet their housing goals in 2025, 2026 and 2027. 

The projections in the fall statement were lower for all years compared to the projections included in the Ontario Budget earlier in 2024. Neither set of projections would meet Ontario’s previously stated housing targets.

Sources: Ontario Fall Statement Brief, The Trillium

When asked by leaders’ debate moderator David Common why, despite all of Ford’s talk about building new homes, developers were not “doing all that much building,” Ford replied: “You have to have people who can afford a home and you do that by employing them, not taxing them.”

According to Statistics Canada, the province’s unemployment rate in January (adjusted seasonally) was 7.6%, the highest it has been since 2021, and the second highest out of all provinces only behind Newfoundland. This is 1.5% higher than January 2024. 

Election day for Ontario is February 27.