加拿大住房危机：政府费用让购房者难以承受

There is a growing recognition across Canada that the housing crisis demands urgent action. Governments, particularly at the federal and provincial levels, have begun to respond with measures aimed at improving affordability. But they still amount to nibbling at the edges of a much deeper problem: the escalating burden of government-imposed costs (GICs) on new housing. In Ontario, taxes, fees, and levies have become unhinged from reality. For many homebuyers, the price of a new home is no longer driven primarily by land, labour, and materials. Increasingly, it is shaped by the cumulative weight of GICs - which have grown dramatically over the past two decades. The typical house price-to-income ratio in Ontario has roughly doubled, moving from about 3-4 times a typical middle-income household’s annual income in 2000, to 7-9 times in 2022. In the GTA, ratios have more than doubled for every type of housing except apartments since 2005. Development charges (DCs), for example, have evolved from a relatively modest cost into one of the largest components in the price of a new home. In many parts of the GTA, DCs alone now add well over $100,000 to the cost of a typical family home. In Toronto, DCs on a single-detached home surged to roughly $141,000 as of late-2024 — a staggering increase from just over $12,000 in 2010. This trajectory is not merely unsustainable — it is economically counterproductive. Fifteen years ago, a report commissioned by RESCON warned that GICs were already consuming a significant share of new home prices. At the time, the costs accounted for 13% of the price of a single-detached home in Toronto, 18% in Vaughan, and 17% in Mississauga. Today, that share has ballooned. With sharp increases in DCs and sales taxes, direct GICs are now at 36% in Ontario. Think about it for a moment: That means more than one third of the price of a new home is attributable to government policy. The implications are profound. In practical terms, the rise in GICs means…