The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize was awarded by the Broadbent Institute to economist Dr. Isabella Weber—for critical research on economic shocks and inflation that equip Canadian progressives with policy alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy decisions, and help to empower workers. The award was announced on Friday, April 12th at the 2024 Progress Summit by Broadbent Institute Executive Director Jen Hassum.

The Broadbent Institute’s 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture, delivered by the recipient of the Prize, will take place at a keynote event at Toronto Metropolitan University on Thursday, May 30th at 7pm EDT. Early-bird tickets are now available.

Isabella Weber has become a leading voice on policy responses to inflation and has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization. For her public policy work she has been profiled in the New Yorker, recognized as one of TIME100 Next, Bloomberg's 50 Ones to Watch, Germany's 100 women of 2022 and Capital 40 under 40.

Isabella’s first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize, the International Studies Association Best Interdisciplinary Book Award and the Keynes Price and has been recommended on best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, ProMarket and Folha de S.Paulo among others. The book has been translated into German, Portuguese and Persian.

Her writings have appeared in the Washington Post, The Guardian, Project Syndicate and Süddeutsche Zeitung. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Keynesian Economics, the Review of Political Economy and on the advisory board of Environment and Planning A and a member of the Program Committee of the International Economics Association World Congress. Previously she was a tenured Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.

New Report by the Broadbent Institute finds that 80% of BC Lower Mainland and Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area Residents Say Government Should Return to Building Non-Market Housing.

TORONTO - A new report published by the Broadbent Institute entitled, “Dreams and Realities on the Home Front: Canadians’ Call for Government Action on Housing Affordability” found that a strong majority of surveyed residents of BC’s lower mainland and the GTHA want to see their government return to building non-market housing. The report, which was co-published with Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Canada, looks at the housing challenges faced by Canadians in the country’s most expensive housing regions.

Key findings show that Canadians are feeling the effects of housing financialization. While most generally blame financial actors for housing affordability, many also point fingers at the federal government’s inaction. The report also found that three-quarters of all non-homeowners surveyed could not imagine purchasing a home in the next five years, while over eighty percent said they still hoped to own their home at some point. Half of all respondents said they had known someone who experienced homelessness.

Despite these stark realities, Canadians surveyed see a clear path forward through government intervention. While most blame federal and provincial governments for worsening the housing crisis through inaction, the pervading sentiment points to, “an appetite for more government intervention in building affordable, non-market housing.”

Read our key findings and download the full report.

The Broadbent Institute, founded in 2011, is Canada’s leading progressive policy and training organization. Our work is guided by the Broadbent Principles for Canadian Social Democracy – we believe all people have equal worth and equal rights, and that we all benefit from living in an increasingly equal society. We are committed to realizing the promise of Canada as a diverse, just, and inclusive society.

The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) is the oldest political foundation in Germany with a rich tradition in social democracy dating back to its foundation in 1925. The foundation owes its formation and its mission to the political legacy of its namesake Friedrich Ebert, the first democratically elected German President. FES established a Liaison Officer in Canada in 2008, in coordination with the US FES Office in Washington DC.

Key Findings

Overall, a strong majority of respondents from both the BC Lower Mainland and the GTHA want to see the federal government get back into building housing (80%), with 41% wanting the Government of Canada to get back into building more non-market housing, and 39% looking for a “mixed” approach to let developers build more market housing with non-market housing.

Housing affordability is a concern for most respondents (81%)-it’s either a top concern (24%) or within their top five concerns (57%).

More than a third of respondents in the Lower Mainland and the GTHA (37%) say that they cannot afford their current housing situation if the cost of their monthly rent or mortgage payments increased by 10% in the next year.

Most (57%) think they are spending over 30% of their before-tax househoAAld income on their rent or mortgage and half (52%) have at some point felt at risk of losing their home or becoming housing insecure.

80% of renters hope to own their home at some point, but most think it's unlikely (23%) or very unlikely (56%) that they could purchase a home in the next five years.

Most think that foreign investors (48%) are the most responsible for housing becoming more expensive, followed by the federal government (39%), real-estate developers (32%) and corporate landlords (31%).

More than half of respondents thought the following policies would really or might help them:

• Instructing the Bank of Canada to consider lowering interest rates (68%)
• Giving people the option of more easily moving to different lenders when they re-negotiate their mortgage (63%)
• Offering incentives to developers to build affordable, non-market rental housing (60%)
• Using government-owned land to develop affordable rental units with rent caps (57%)

Introduction

Housing has been a priority concern for Canadians, particularly those living in the most unaffordable urban centres across the country, for years before the COVID-19 pandemic led to economic shocks and inflationary pressures across the economy, sending rent and house prices sky-high. Since 2023, housing affordability has become one of the hottest political issues in Canada - as more and more Canadians struggle to find a place to call home, political parties are defining themselves around their response to this pressing issue.

Housing is a social good, like public healthcare, and is recognized as a human right in Canada under the federal government’s 2019 National Housing Strategy Act. Despite this, since major federal funding cuts in the 1990s, the federal government itself had largely divested itself from housing, contributing to today’s crisis.

Chart 1  — The federal government has stepped away from investments in affordable housing since the 1990s, only now increasing in recent years

Chart by Brian Clifford; Data from CMHC “Canadian Housing Statistics, 1955-2012” and CMHC Progress Report on Housing Investments

The disappearances over decades of public investment in affordable housing supply and the financialization of housing–where mortgages and homes are treated as assets for financial investment–are major factors contributing to the present affordability crisis.

While federal Conservative leader, and former housing minister, Pierre Poilievre claims that the government should get out of home-building as the solution to the crisis, the reality is that the federal government has already been absent for decades.

Where markets fail, it is up to governments to ensure that no one is left behind and to meet the government’s commitment to housing as a human right.

Today, housing affordability is the most pressing political issue in Canada. According to Leger’s August 2023 survey on The Housing Crisis in Canada, a clear 95% of Canadians think increasing rental costs and the lack of affordable rental homes in Canada is a serious problem.

Chart 2 — In 2023, a record share of income would have been required to pay for the monthly homeownership expenses of a condominium apartment in the GTA

(median household before-tax income in the region as % of condominium median market price)

Source: CMHC Rental Market Report—January 2024, CMHC calculations based on data from CMHC, Statistics Canada and the Bank of Canada.

In late 2023, Leger found that 66% of Canadians surveyed think the federal government should allocate more funds to its housing strategy. According to Abacus Data in October 2023, 90% of young Canadians believe the government should prioritize ensuring housing is affordable.

It’s a stark reality that ordinary Canadians face today. According to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) January 2024 Rental Market Report, in the BC Lower Mainland region the average two-bedroom purpose built rental unit grew in rental price by 8.6% from the previous year to $2,181 while the vacancy rate was 0.9%. Vacancy rates were even lower for the most affordable units, where households already spend a greater share of their income on rent. Similar trends appear in Toronto, where purpose-built rental market prices increased by 8.7% and housing expenses have dramatically eaten into the proportion of household income.

Governments can address this issue by getting back into housing, but how exactly should they be getting back into housing? In the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area (GTHA) and BC Lower Mainland, two of the most unaffordable housing markets in the country, the government of British Columbia and the new Mayoral administration in the City of Toronto have begun bold initiatives over the past year, bringing in programs that lead to decommodification, increased supply, and housing protections for working-class families.

With these recent announcements, backed by federal government support to increase their impact, provincial and municipal administrations are certainly getting government back into housing. But what exactly are the current affordability pressures faced by ordinary Canadians living in the two most expensive housing regions in the country? How are people thinking about these pressures, and what are their aspirations and worries around housing? And what are the government housing policies that, in their view, are needed to relieve those pressures?

This survey looks at BC Lower Mainland and the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area, where housing prices have increased dramatically in the most expensive regions for housing in Canada, and where governments are looking to get back into the business of building housing and acting on affordability. It reveals key findings demonstrating the uneven effects of the housing crisis, and what policy changes are seen as needed and effective by those experiencing some of the most severe housing affordability challenges in Canada.

'Dreams and Realities on the Home Front: Canadians’ Call for Government Action on Housing Affordability' is a joint research project between the Broadbent Institute and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Canada.

The survey was conducted in the field by Viewpoints Research. See the full report for methodology, results and analysis.

Statement on Passing of Rhys Kesselman

The Broadbent Institute is heartbroken to learn of the passing of Broadbent Institute Policy Fellow, Professor Rhys Kesselman, on Sunday, February 25th, following a short illness. A major Canadian public thinker on taxation policy, Dr. Kesselman used his expertise to demonstrate how public finance can be used for social good. With the Broadbent Institute, he authored reports that examined the shortcomings of Tax-Free Savings Accounts during their implementation by the Stephen Harper government, and most recently spoke to the Institute on why capital gains taxation needed to go further in the 2023 federal budget. His notable work on basic income in Canada has added to the analysis and debate needed to push forward on improving the wellbeing for all. Canada has lost a rare giant in public policy, who advocated for change alongside critical scholarship on how to make a good and more just society.