At the risk of looking like a corporate shill, I going to say the new green building standards are painfully strict. And while yes, that's ultimately a good thing for the environment, it is a stick in the wheel to fixing the housing crisis.

I don't have the numbers for all of Canada, but in Quebec the private sector supposedly builds about 50 000 to 60 000 homes per year, and to "stabilize prices" - not sure what that means, but I know it doesn't mean reducing prices - would involve building about 150 000 units per year, FOR TEN YEARS. The govt usually pats itself on the back for building a few thousand units in a year, so we're still basically short a hundred thousand units. I get that the govt should just step in a build, but let's be real, it's not going to happen. Even if it wanted to, the workforce would have to be about 3 times the size it currently is, which is another nightmare to deal with.

On a personal level, as a person who works in the industry, I'm not looking forward to the new standards. The new energy-saving stuff often require solutions that involve proprietary systems from large companies that are a pain to work with. Developers aren't really going to be taking a cut anyway, they'll just charge more, or starve the market until it's profitable enough to build again. And then those propriety systems corpos are going to cash in, too.

I wish the govt would just put its pants on and build tons of affordable housing.