Statscan numbers

[Surrealplaces]

Housing starts for January. Nothing out of the ordinary. Ottawa, being really low for the past couple of years is surprising considering its growth has been decent.

City	SFH	semi	row	apartment	total
Vancouver	146	134	137	2332	2749
Toronto	152	4	171	1985	2312
Calgary	415	196	219	1230	2060
Montreal	78	14	58	1273	1423
Edmonton	204	42	263	473	982
Ott/Gat	105	12	73	352	543

 

[Surrealplaces]

February numbers. Kind of a weird month with Calgary, Toronto and Montreal the bottom three. It's been almost 3 years since Ottawa/Gat had a month with more housing starts than Calgary. Calgary has been building a crazy amount the last two years. Maybe we're in for a slowdown?

City	SFH	semi	row	apartment	total
Vancouver	137	134	390	1580	2241
Edmonton	425	86	198	788	1497
Ott/Gat	110	20	186	1036	1352
Calgary	424	106	161	641	1332
Toronto	110	0	99	863	1072
Montreal	56	18	55	882	1011

 

[darwink]

I am not sure how’d you exactly count it, but it would be interesting to track time to completion.

Like, maybe one cause of the housing crisis is people’s impression of how much housing being built is wrong due to projects taking three times as long in certain places.

 

[trtcttc]

February numbers. Kind of a weird month with Calgary, Toronto and Montreal the bottom three. It's been almost 3 years since Ottawa/Gat had a month with more housing starts than Calgary. Calgary has been building a crazy amount the last two years. Maybe we're in for a slowdown?

City	SFH	semi	row	apartment	total
Vancouver	137	134	390	1580	2241
Edmonton	425	86	198	788	1497
Ott/Gat	110	20	186	1036	1352
Calgary	424	106	161	641	1332
Toronto	110	0	99	863	1072
Montreal	56	18	55	882	1011

CMHC Housing starts go by back above grade. So between these columns the timing is really quite different. The SFH/Semi probably started in the last 2 months, Row maybe 3-4 month, and apartments could be over a year. Imperia started digging in summer 2024 and just got back above grade.
The Toronto apartment start is going to fall off a cliff as there's been very few starts the last couple of years, and the numbers that were there previously are from buildings that started digging in 2022/2023.

Calgary market in general has definitely slowed. SFH starts will start coming down. Right now it's a lot of communities finishing up. Often when they launch a phase, they'll finish that phase even if things aren't selling super well, but they'll wait to launch the next phase.

 

[CBBarnett]

Quarterly Population estimates are out, first year in history of Canada that the population declined. Stats Can article and data here - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260318/dq260318b-eng.htm?HPA=1&indid=4098-1&indgeo=0

Alberta was the only province to see population growth at all, and it was only 7,000 in Q4 of 2025. Net immigration growth was effectively zero, slight growth from interprovincial and natural growth. Outside of the pandemic years it was the slowest quarter of growth since 2010.

Calgary and Alberta are very growth-oriented places, but I think some people are in for a bit of recalibration on what growth trends look like going forward if we continue an unwinding of non-permanent worker programs and have a reduced focus on immigration overall. If the trend continues, it will start showing up more obviously how little population growth comes from the other sources. Even a booming city like Calgary that attracts more than it's share of growth, can only grow by so much when the pie is vastly smaller.

Of course, there's lots of pros/cons with population growth - my reflection is more on how it will start to feel and show up in everything when such a dramatic slow-down really starts to work it's way into housing and demand for all kinds of stuff. Something to watch!

 

[Albertasaurus]

Every province and territory except for Alberta and Nunavut lost population. Its kind of crazy to imagine places like Toronto and Vancouver, that have always been pretty fast growing cities for as long as I can remember, are now most likely experiencing population decline.

 

[DougB]

Population decline is a good trend. Canada needs to dramatically increase its productivity and fewer people should translate into more private sector capital investment and less overall investment in low productivity segments like government services and housing. Toronto and Vancouver likely need to shed a few hundred thousand people each to know their housing prices down closer to the long term trend

 

[trtcttc]

Focusing on the decline is missing what happened the previous few years, a never before seen population increase. The decrease in the context of a decade, we're still one of the fastest growing countries in the world. I don't actually think the economic impact would be very significant. It takes a number of years for new arrivals to settle, maximize their productivity and consumption. That likely has not happened with the most recent arrivals, and their per capital GDP and consumption are likely lower than the per capita figures. It's also being more selective in our immigration, that you select those with higher productivity.

 

[darwink]

Calgary and Alberta are very growth-oriented places, but I think some people are in for a bit of recalibration on what growth trends look like going forward if we continue an unwinding of non-permanent worker programs and have a reduced focus on immigration overall. If the trend continues, it will start showing up more obviously how little population growth comes from the other sources. Even a booming city like Calgary that attracts more than it's share of growth, can only grow by so much when the pie is vastly smaller.

2 more years of flat. From the Parliamentary Budget Officer:

Spoiler: Text Table

Year	Change in NPR population	Change in permanent population	Population growth (per cent)
2015	-9000	310000	0.8
2016	89000	353000	1.2
2017	138000	350000	1.3
2018	155000	380000	1.5
2019	190000	401000	1.6
2020	-96000	226000	0.3
2021	77000	430000	1.3
2022	539000	397000	2.4
2023	789000	434000	3.1
2024	397000	453000	2.1
2025	-382000	362000	0.0
2026	-385000	391000	0.0
2027	-289000	428000	0.3
2028	15000	325000	0.8
2029	15000	321000	0.8
2030	15000	316000	0.8