Ontario

Ford has really ramped up the showmanship lately, calling for a bike lane witch hunt and making magical announcements about beer, highway tunnels and $200 cheques. Much of it, it seems, is being done in the service of getting us to look away from the reality of how things are going in Ford’s Ontario.

In particular, he’d really like us to pay no attention to the housing policy failure behind the curtain. But by the numbers, Ford’s failure on housing should be way too big to hide.

A report released last week by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation revealed that housing starts in Ontario are down 18 per cent so far this year. That stat, which measures the number of new housing units that saw construction get started, should set off loud alarm bells. Because housing, more than any other issue, has been Ford’s signature issue — the subject of lots of legislation. He’s styled himself as a builder-in-chief who will “get it done.”

This isn’t a case of Ontario’s large population skewing the numbers, either. For his excellent Data Shows newsletter, analyst Tom Parkin recently crunched the per-capita numbers for housing starts and found Ontario ranked eighth out of Canada’s 10 provinces. According to Parkin’s numbers, with just 34 new starts for every 100,000 people, Ontario’s rate of per-capita building was well below that of provincial peers like Manitoba (47), Quebec (47.8), B.C. (58.8) and Alberta (89.9).

With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that the province has dim hopes of hitting its much-ballyhooed goal of building 1.5 million homes by the end of 2031.