Canada's first National Housing Strategy (NHS) launched in 2017. The National Housing Strategy Act was enacted two years later; it added new standards, such as the requirement for the federal government to maintain a strategy that takes into account a human rights-based approach to housing, improves outcomes for people in the greatest need, and furthers the progressive realization of the right to adequate housing. That version of the NHS continues to March 2028, though many of the programs launched under the NHS have already expired. The federal government is now beginning the work of deciding what comes next.
This is not a routine program renewal. It is a rare opportunity to set the objectives that will define Canada's housing system for the next decade, and to fix a systemic dysfunction that the first National Housing Strategy did not address: too little of Canada's housing stock is mission-driven, non-market, community housing.
Check out our position statement to hear why non-market community housing should anchor Canada’s housing system and be why growing the sector must be a central objective of the next version of the National Housing Strategy.