An Economic and Industrial Roadmap for Delivering Canada’s Housing Moonshot
Proposed By
Scott Kaplanis
Managing Director, GroundBreak Ventures
From Crisis to Catalyst: Turning Housing into Canada’s Next Great Industry
Canada’s housing crisis has reached a breaking point. We need over 4 million new homes by 2035, which means more than doubling our country’s peak homebuilding rate. But this isn’t just a construction challenge. It’s an economic transformation opportunity.
For decades, we’ve treated housing as a social issue to be subsidized, regulated, and debated — rather than as a sector to be modernized and scaled. What if we flipped that thinking? What if Canada treated housing like we once treated autos or aerospace — as a strategic industry worth building into a global powerhouse?
That’s the idea behind our Canadian Housing Innovation Strategy: to make Canada the most innovative housing, construction and advanced manufacturing ecosystem in the G7 — not just solving our crisis, but exporting the solutions.
Housing as an Economic Engine
Our housing system is full of structural inefficiencies: fragmented supply chains, low productivity, outdated permitting, and a shrinking workforce. Innovation isn’t a luxury; it’s the only way we’ll bend the cost curve and build at the speed and scale that our housing crisis requires.
Across the country, hundreds of Canadian innovators are already tackling the challenge — developing robotics for homebuilding, AI-driven permitting systems, modular and prefab methods and factories, next-generation materials, and so much more. But they remain undercapitalized, disconnected, and often unsupported by the policy environment.
We see an opportunity to create the conditions for these companies, technologies, and ideas to scale and transform how we build.
A Blueprint for Transformation
| Pillar | Core Focus | Recommendations at a Glance |
|---|---|---|
| i. Capitalize the Innovators | Unlock capital for startups and SMEs driving prefabrication, digital, and low-carbon solutions. | Create a federal venture fund, targeted R&D support, and tax incentives to mobilize private capital and accelerate commercialization. |
| ii. Incentivize Adoption | Reduce cost and risk for developers and builders to adopt proven and emerging technologies. | Introduce pilot reimbursement programs, modular housing procurement commitments, construction insurance, and modernized permitting. |
| iii. Modernize the Workforce | Equip the next generation of builders with skills for industrialized, tech-enabled construction. | Expand training funds, modernize apprenticeships, and launch a national service corps for housing construction. |
| iv. Catalyze the Ecosystem | Build a coordinated, visible national platform for housing innovation. | Establish the Housing Innovation Hub in Toronto as the ecosystem anchor and expand the mandate of the Centre for Housing Innovation. |
Why Does This Matter?
Building more homes faster isn’t just about affordability, it’s about national competitiveness. Every dollar spent on housing innovation creates ripple effects across construction, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, and other critical sectors.
By turning housing into a platform for industrial renewal, Canada can:
Create tens of thousands of future-proof jobs;
Expand domestic manufacturing of building systems and materials;
Reduce emissions from one of our most carbon-intensive industries; and
Build exportable expertise in housing technology for global markets.
Canada has the talent, the resources, and the capital. What’s missing is coordination and conviction — the belief that we can solve this crisis not just with subsidies, but with systems change.
We can turn housing from a source of national anxiety into a driver of national renewal — an industry that builds prosperity while putting a roof over every Canadian’s head.
If we seize this moment, the next decade could be remembered not just for overcoming a crisis, but for creating an industry that reshaped how the world builds homes.
