Lower than what?

A senior software engineer in Toronto averages C$126,000 in base pay. In Atlanta, the same job averages US$158,000.

Now buy a house: 1,500 square feet in the big cities, 2,200 in the tech towns.

Pay: Glassdoor. Median sold price per square foot: Valery for Toronto and Waterloo; Resideline for Atlanta, Dallas and Madison; the Austin Board of Realtors. House size: Census Bureau.

Now flip it. What the Toronto engineer spends on 1,500 square feet buys 5,400 in Atlanta. What the Waterloo engineer spends on 2,200 buys 5,100 in Austin, more than twice the median-sized home sold there in September. The Canadian gets the starter house. The American gets the one with room for the next twenty years.

The mortgage alone takes 54 per cent of the Toronto engineer’s gross pay, against 15 in Atlanta. To close that gap, Toronto prices would have to fall 72 per cent, or wages would have to rise 3 per cent a year for 43 years. That’s a career.

Nobody in Ottawa will tell you that house should cost less, and it isn’t because they can’t read the numbers. The house stopped being a house. It’s the retirement plan, half the banks’ lending and a bigger investment than everything Canadian business spends on machines and ideas. So every party promises supply, and not one will say what a house should cost.

The minister said no

In May 2025, a reporter asked Carney’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, whether home prices need to come down. “No,” he said. “I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable. It’s a huge part of our economy.”

Days later, Mark Carney got the same question. He wouldn’t say yes or no, The Canadian Press reported. More supply, he said, would “make home prices much lower than they otherwise would be.”

Lower than they otherwise would be is not lower. It’s lower than a number nobody will ever see, which makes it the safest promise in politics. It can’t be broken.

Pressed again at a Commons committee in October 2025, Robertson had a new answer: “To be clear, we need to see average prices of housing for Canadians come down. We have to build a lot more non-market housing to bring down that average cost.”

Read it twice. Build enough cheap units at the bottom and the average falls, while every house already standing keeps its price. The engineer in Toronto gets a better statistic.

You can lower the average without lowering a single house.

The house is the pension

Why so careful? Look at what happens to Canadians without one.

Statistics Canada looked at families about to retire, where the main earner is 55 to 64. The ones who rent and have no workplace pension have a median net worth of $11,900. That’s everything they own, at 60, for the typical one of them: less than five months of rent in Toronto.

Own a home but have no pension, and the median is $914,000. Have a pension but no home, $359,000. Have both, $1.4 million. In this country a house beats a pension by more than half a million dollars, and having neither leaves you with almost nothing. For a lot of people about to retire, the house isn’t part of the plan. It is the plan.

So run the plan. Sell the $1-million house, buy a $500,000 condo, live on the $500,000. Now cut both prices by 72 per cent, what it would take for Toronto to match Atlanta. You’re still housed, with $140,000 instead. Every dollar a downsizer expects to pull out of that house is a dollar the next buyer has to borrow, and the next buyer is the engineer.

And the downsizer votes. In the 2021 census, 36.5 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 29 owned their home, against 74.8 per cent at 70 to 74. In the 2025 election, turnout was 59.6 per cent at 25 to 34 and 77.6 per cent at 65 to 74. A hundred voters at retirement age cast 30 per cent more votes than a hundred people trying to buy their first place. No party has to be told which hundred to keep happy.

Half the bank

On October 1, the Bank of Canada’s second-in-command, Carolyn Rogers, gave a speech on housing. “About half of all bank lending is tied to residential real estate,” she said.

Then the line that ought to be taped to every cabinet minister’s desk. In 2000, housing investment was 4.3 per cent of GDP and business investment in machinery, equipment and innovation was 8.3. “Today that relationship is reversed. Canada is investing more in residential housing than in the tools, technology and ideas that grow our economy and increase our standard of living.”

She was plain about the bind. High prices leave households with less room for everything else. Falling prices hit wealth, confidence and growth. “It feels a bit like a trap.”

Follow the engineer’s paycheque. The mortgage goes to RBC, the groceries to Loblaw, the phone bill to a telecom, the taxes to a public payroll. Every one of those sells to Canadians who aren’t going anywhere, and none of them needs the engineer’s employer to win a single customer abroad. An economy built like that is perfectly comfortable with expensive houses. The mortgage is the product.

It also hands the next house to whoever owns the last one. In its 2022 financial review, the Bank found that among investors who pulled equity out of a property before buying another, about a third pulled out enough to cover the entire down payment. The engineer saves that deposit from salary: 23 months of gross pay in Toronto, against six in Atlanta. The investor gets it from a line of credit.

It fell 20 per cent. Nothing broke.

The case for protecting prices is that letting them fall would take households and the banks down with them. Look at 2008, they say.

Look at Canada instead. The typical home here has already fallen 20 per cent from its 2022 peak, the Bank of Canada says. That’s the correction Ottawa is afraid of, already under way. Here’s the damage. Arrears are barely above their 2018 to 2019 average. The borrowers in real trouble, Toronto buyers from 2022 and 2023, hold about 2 per cent of mortgage balances. And “lenders have not seen a broad rise in loan losses.”

Nor is it a few desperate sellers in a frozen market while the speculators wait. In September, Greater Toronto had 8,226 condos for sale and 1,316 sold. Investors who couldn’t sell rented out instead: landlords told CMHC that rents are falling because of “a surge in newly completed condominium apartments rented out, many of which couldn’t be absorbed in the ownership market.” The ones sitting on empty units are a rounding error. Toronto’s vacant home tax counted 5,989 homes declared or deemed vacant in 2024, the latest count, down from 6,944 two years earlier.

So prices fell by a fifth, the banks shrugged, and a starter house in Toronto still costs almost ten years of senior pay. The fall Ottawa is guarding you against isn’t a catastrophe. It’s barely a start.

The only thing it broke was construction.

Then the cranes left

In the first half of this year, the City of Toronto started 156 condominium units. The average over the previous decade was 7,000 a year. CMHC says new condo construction “collapsed amid weak presales, poor investor demand and high resale supply.”

Canada needs 417,000 to 469,000 starts a year to get back to 2019 affordability by 2036, CMHC estimates. On current trends it gets 231,000. CMHC even names the risk: “that Canada does not build enough during today’s market softening.”

So there’s the machine. When prices rise, nobody can buy. When prices fall, nobody builds, because the towers were sold off the plan to investors betting on the rise.

Supply that only shows up when prices go up was never going to bring them down.

Now look at what’s on offer. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives will “permanently scrap the GST on new homes up to $1.3 million.” Carney’s Liberals already took it off for first-time buyers on new homes up to $1 million, and put $13 billion into Build Canada Homes, which will focus “primarily on non-market housing.”

Take the tax off the price so the price can stay. Fund cheap units at the bottom so the average can fall. Both parties cut what it costs to build, and neither will promise that what’s built costs you less. A $1.3-million ceiling is a party telling you what it thinks a home that needs help looks like.

The engineer pays

Put it on one page. A starter house in Toronto costs a senior engineer almost ten years of pay. The retiree selling it needs every dollar, because the house is the pension. The bank needs it, because it’s half the loan book. The builder needs it rising, or the cranes come down. Every party needs it, because the people who own it vote.

Everyone at that table gets paid. The engineer pays.

That isn’t a shortage. It’s a decision about who carries the country’s balance sheet, made in Ottawa without anyone saying so out loud. The only official who has said it is a central banker, who told a room in Victoria the country has to break “the economy’s dependence on rising house prices.” Nobody who has to win a riding has repeated her.

So here is what the engineer gets instead. From Carney, prices “much lower than they otherwise would be.” From his housing minister, a lower average. From Poilievre, no GST on a house up to $1.3 million. Three answers, and not one of them is a price.

Lower than what? Than 9.7 years of pay? Than the 2.7 it takes in Atlanta?

They won’t say. The engineer doesn’t need them to. The table at the top of this page is the job offer, and the recruiter in Atlanta has already done the math.