Doug Ford is not fixing housing. He is subsidizing the problem.
By Liam Wilkinson
The reality in Ontario today is that too many people cannot afford a home. Doug Ford’s answer is not to lower the ladder for those who can least afford it. It is to make sure it is pulled even higher.
The Ford government is trying to sell its new HST break as a big affordability win. For average Ontarians, it is the opposite. It directs public money into the very part of the market they are least likely to access, brand new homes, while helping keep prices in general higher than they should be.
The province’s new HST break would run for one year, from April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027. It would offer rebates worth up to $130,000, not just to first-time buyers but to repeat buyers and landlords too, and the government says it would apply to qualifying new homes all the way up to $1.5 million, with partial relief above that.
So let’s be honest about what this is. It is not a serious affordability plan for ordinary Ontarians. It is a taxpayer-funded subsidy for a narrow, wealthier corner of the market. A household struggling to rent, or trying to scrape together a down payment for a resale starter home, does not get a cheaper home out of this. The tax break does not apply to the kind of housing they are most likely to need. What they get instead is a government using public money to support prices and purchasing power further up the chain.
The government’s theory is straightforward enough: help more households buy new homes, boost presales, get projects financed, and let movement at the top of the market filter down through the rest. In that story, a wealthier household buys a new unit, their old home comes onto the market, and pressure gradually eases down the chain.
That logic is not unimaginable. But as a short-lived, costly intervention, it is an economically shaky and deeply unequal way to pursue affordability.
A one-year tax break for buyers of new homes worth up to $1.5 million does not fix land-use rules, approvals, land prices, or the cost structure of development. It may help move some units. It may help some projects clear financing thresholds. But it may also simply funnel public money into the existing pipeline, support developer margins, and prop up prices in a market that already has too much money chasing scarce land.
The public’s money is being used to subsidize transactions most Ontarians will never come close to making, on the basis of a dubious economic proposition. It is the same old trickle-down logic in a hard hat: give affluent buyers a tax break, give developers a lift, and hope somehow the benefits filter down to everyone else.
And then comes the question Ford would rather nobody ask: who actually benefits when the government hands buyers more purchasing power in a weak pre-construction market?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is the same large developers with overpriced inventory to move, courtesy of a government that is simultaneously trying to shield the premier’s and ministers’ offices from the freedom-of-information scrutiny that exposed the politically engineered carveouts for developers at the heart of the Greenbelt scandal.
In other words, the government is placing a bet with taxpayer money. It is betting that if buyers at the top of the market are given more purchasing power, affordability will somehow work its way down to everyone else.
But tax breaks do not automatically make homes cheaper. Quite often, they do the opposite. When governments give buyers more money in a market already constrained by land, approvals, and weak supply responsiveness, sellers and developers do not have to lower prices. Buyers simply show up with more purchasing power and bid more. We have seen versions of this before in Canada through years of cheap credit, and researchers in other countries have found that homebuyer subsidies can end up being reflected in higher prices instead of lower effective costs for households. The Bank of Canada has warned that when housing supply is less responsive, more demand can mean higher prices instead of greater affordability.
And that is the real problem with Ford’s bet: the house is not the renter, the young family, or the first-time buyer. The house is the developer. And in Ontario housing, the house keeps winning.
That is the real scandal here. Ontario is not merely failing to address the roots of the crisis. It is actively deepening the political habit that created it. Every time governments pump more money, more credit, and more purchasing power into housing, they help keep land prices inflated. They prop up the market. They delay correction. They preserve the status quo for those who already own the scarce asset everyone else is forced to compete for.
Because the biggest problem in our housing market is not that there is too little money chasing homes. It is that there is too much.
A serious housing agenda would start by going after the real source of inflated housing costs: land. It would legalize more homes on more land. It would stop landowners from pocketing socially created land values while everyone else pays more. It would stop treating inflated property prices as a political success story. And it would tax land values instead of subsidizing inflated purchase prices.
Doug Ford’s HST break is not a housing plan. It is another taxpayer-funded defence of the very system that made housing unaffordable in the first place.
