Canada stopped building in 1993. Hopewell kept building.

In 1993 the federal government ended its funding for new social housing. For the three decades that followed, Canada's answer to affordability was to subsidise rents in the homes it already had rather than to build more. The stock stood still while the country grew. In September 2025, Ottawa reversed the decision. Build Canada Homes is a Crown corporation that builds again, directly, with a preference for homes made in factories. It will need partners who kept building through the years in between.

The budget that closed the door

The 1993 federal budget ended the federal commitment to fund new non-market housing. Existing projects kept their operating agreements; new ones stopped. Responsibility drifted to the provinces, and the federal role narrowed to subsidising rents and honouring old agreements as they ran down. The decision was fiscal, made in a year of deficits, and it was rarely revisited. Each government after it inherited a smaller and older stock, and a policy that treated demand-side support as the whole answer.

The pattern was not unique to Canada. Across the OECD, public investment in building housing roughly halved as a share of GDP between 2001 and 2018, from 0.17% to 0.07%, while spending on housing allowances rose from 0.26% to 0.31% (OECD Affordable Housing Database). Governments found it easier to write cheques to households than to break ground. Canada followed the pattern further than most, because it had started earlier and stopped more completely.

Thirty flat years

The numbers describe a stock that stood still while need grew. Social housing represents about 3.5% of Canada's dwellings in 2022, against an OECD average of 7.1% (OECD Economic Surveys: Canada, 2025). In 1991 social rental housing was 6.2% of the stock; by 2021 it was about 4.1% (Parliamentary Budget Officer, March 2025; OECD). The absolute count, roughly 600,000 to 700,000 units, barely moved in thirty years. The share fell because the country grew around it.

The official count understates the gap a little: it leaves out some provincial stock, including units under Quebec's Société d'habitation. Even with those added back, the distance to the OECD average does not close. A stable stock is not an adequate one. Buildings from the 1970s and 1980s aged, waiting lists lengthened, and the units that did exist served a population they had never been sized for.

What that leaves households with

The Parliamentary Budget Officer counts 2.4 million Canadian households in core housing need: their home is unaffordable, unsuitable or inadequate, and they cannot find an acceptable alternative locally at what they can afford. On current trends that rises to 2.6 million by 2027 (PBO, December 2025). Those are the households a demand-side policy was meant to protect. Thirty years of rent support did not shrink the number. It kept pace, at best, with a problem that only supply could solve.

The door reopens

On 14 September 2025 the federal government launched Build Canada Homes with an initial $13 billion investment (Government of Canada, September 2025). It is a Crown corporation, and it builds. It acts as a developer and a financier and delivers homes directly, and it states a preference for construction done in factories, where walls, floors and whole modules are made to tight tolerances and assembled on site in a fraction of the time. The programme measures itself on homes delivered and dollars defended, which is the right test. It reverses the 1993 decision with tools that did not exist then.

A parallel clock

In 1990, three years before Ottawa stopped building, Sanders Lee founded Hopewell in Calgary. The firm built through the financial crisis of 2008, through the Alberta oil crash of 2014 to 2016, and through COVID. It has delivered more than 10,000 homes since, along with the industrial and commercial space and the property management that a group of operating companies brings with it (Source: Hopewell Group, 2026). In 2019 it began investing in how building itself changes, through Groundbreak Ventures, its construction-technology affiliate.

That is thirty-five years of building and seven years of investing in the methods that lower what a home costs to build and to run. Nobody at the firm foresaw the policy. The firm was doing the work for its own reasons, in its own markets, when the country decided it wanted the same thing done at national scale. Prepared, not prescient.

Where the clocks meet

The country has re-opened the door it closed in 1993. It needs partners who have built through bad years, who can build in factories, who bring the capital to build at volume, and who will publish what a door costs. Doorway is Hopewell's platform for exactly that work: the provincial construction partners who already build faster and cheaper, the private capital to deliver at scale, and a cost per door reported with its date and its source on every project.

Canada stopped building homes for its people in 1993. Hopewell kept building. Now the country is building again.

How we build