The NDP has torn up their Supply and Confidence Agreement with the governing Liberals – an agreement that included some specific deliverables on affordable housing. The minority Liberals are at risk of losing government, as an eager Conservative Party looks for every opportunity to prompt a federal election. Many MPs on Parliament Hill have shifted their focus to political games, rather than real outcomes for Canadian households struggling with housing unaffordability.

Housing affordability is a top issue across the country, in ways we haven’t seen before. A big part of the answer is increasing the supply of non-profit and co-operative community housing. However, the window to make real changes before the next federal election is shrinking.

Our members tell us that our advocacy work is one of the things value most about CHRA. We at CHRA are proud to have worked with our members and allies to achieve success over the past two years.

CHRA is a consistent national voice for the community housing sector and the federal government is getting the message. As a result of CHRA advocacy, the federal government has committed almost $8 billion specifically for community housing over the last two years.

Just over two years ago, our membership produced CHRA’s Blueprint for Housing. You gave us the Blueprint, and we’ve been working hard ever since to get the job done:

• $1.5 billion was allocated for acquisitions through to the Canada Rental Protection Fund. CHRA and its Canadian Housing Acquisition Fund partners are advocating for the government to work with us to implement this vital initiative.The establishment of this fund was a key recommendation from our Blueprint for Housing.
• Through the  Public Lands for Homes plan, the government will unlock underused public land for housing, accelerating availability and creating a mapping tool to track potential sites. The unlocking of public lands for housing was also a  Blueprint  recommendation.
• The Government of Canada allocated $20 million to modernize housing data collection – also a recommendation included in the Blueprint.
• $1 billion was allocated to CMHC to launch a new Rapid Housing stream under the Affordable Housing Fund to build more deeply affordable housing, supportive housing, and shelters. This new funding stream focuses on supportive housing and is in addition to the separate $1 billion top-up announced in the 2023 Fall Economic Statement – both part of CHRA’s advocacy efforts.
• The federal government is removing GST from new rental apartment construction projects – something that CHRA has long advocated for.

As the window for new initiatives under the current government starts to close, CHRA is focusing on implementation and follow-through of some past wins and some sustaining initiatives. We outlined our Fall 2024 priorities in a recent letter to Minister Fraser:

1. End the delay on urban, rural, and northern Indigenous housing. Concentrated advocacy work by the Indigenous Caucus at CHRA successfully secured initial commitments of $4.3 billion. Unfortunately, most of the funds have been blocked in a delayed RFP process. We are no longer just calling for more funding, we're calling for an immediate release of the next tranche of $280 million to the National Indigenous Housing Collaborative Inc. (NICHI). NICHI was created specifically for this purpose, by Indigenous housing leaders – let’s end the delay.
2. Prioritize Community Housing in the Public Lands for Homes Plan: In the summer of 2023, when Sean Fraser was appointed Minister of Infrastructure, our very first conversation with him highlighted the power of unlocking federal land for affordable housing development. We’ve since seen the initial roll-out of the Public Lands for Homes plan. We are working hard to make sure this plan prioritizes community housing, and Indigenous-led community housing.
3. Accelerate the roll-out of the Rental Protection Fund. We were pleased to see a $1.47 billion commitment in Budget 2024, but the $470 million in grant funding was spread out over 5 years. This grant funding must be front-loaded so we can leverage the federal commitment to attract investment from other sources, such as philanthropic foundations and other levels of government. In December 2024, the government plans to release a call for Expressions of Interest to manage the fund. We and our partners in the Canadian Housing Acquisition Fund have every intention of ensuring that the Fund is led and managed by the community housing sector.
4. Invest in a Canada Community Housing Sector Growth Fund. We want to more than double the share of community housing and quadruple the supply of Indigenous-led community housing. Doing so will involve not just investment in construction, but also investment in people and capacity. CHRA, NICHI, the Network for the Advancement of Black Communities (NABC), and the Community Housing Transformation Centre (CHTC) have proposed a Canada Community Housing Growth Fund to strengthen and grow the community housing sector by investing in training, capacity-building, knowledge transfer, and professionalization. The fund will give the sector a greater number of non-profits development-ready and prepared for growth, all with an equity lens that gives priority to Indigenous-led and Black-led initiatives.
5. Provide Stabilized Pre-Development Funding. If you’ve been building, you know that it can cost over $100 000 to get to the stage where you’re ready to apply for CMHC funding and financing. CMHC’s Seed Funding can offer some help with pre-development funding – only when these grants are available. The seed grants are not consistently accessible throughout each year. We need a stable source of pre-development funding to maintain a strong and steady pipeline of community housing development projects.
6. Extend the Timelines of National Housing Strategy Programs. Most National Housing Strategy programs end in less than 3.5 years. That’s a brief period in real estate development. Greater certainty and predictability are needed, so we’re calling on the federal government to extend programs like the Affordable Housing Fund and the Federal Community Housing Initiative (FCHI) to at least 2035.

After some tentative steps in the preceding decade, the federal government jumped back into community housing with both feet with the launch of the National Housing Strategy. Now, it seems likely that the current Liberal government will be gone before next summer, casting some uncertainty over what comes next. The housing affordability crisis is a product of decades of bad decisions and neglect from all levels of government, and it will take more than a decade to fix it. The current system failure touches nearly every household in the country; nearly every community is impacted. With rising levels of homelessness, supply that can’t meet demand, and unaffordable housing creating a drag on the economy, increasing the supply of community housing is a crucial part of the answer. CHRA, our Board, and our members will be part of the solution, no matter who forms a federal government in the next decade.