Seeing Beyond the Averages At the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (CANCEA), our mandate is to provide independent, objective, and decision-grade insights. Traditional economic models often rely on top-down historical averages, which can obscure the reality of how people and markets actually behave. By utilizing our ONEMODEL™ platform—a living simulation that reconstructs the behavioural dynamics of the Canadian economy from the ground up-we are uniquely positioned to identify structural economic shifts long before they appear in lagging administrative data.
Our latest analysis reveals a sobering reality: Ontario’s residential construction sector is not experiencing a routine cyclical slowdown. It has entered a severe material market dislocation. The fundamental mechanics connecting buyers, sellers, and builders have been deeply disrupted, freezing projects and threatening the long-term capacity of the industry.
Demand-Side Paralysis: The Mortgage Renewal Shock To understand the depth of this dislocation, we must first look at the behavioural realities freezing the demand side of the market. Buyers are facing a looming psychological and financial wall: the impending peak of mortgage renewals. As households brace for this transition, consumer behaviour has fundamentally shifted. For instance, our models highlight that borrowers holding variable-rate mortgages with fixed payments can expect a staggering 30% to 50% increase in their payment obligations upon renewal. This impending shock has deeply anchored buyer pessimism, keeping prospective purchasers sidelined and creating a massive unobserved queue of demand.
A Contracting Pipeline: The Five-Year and Ten-Year Toll Faced with this paralyzed demand and misaligned supply-side costs, ONEMODEL™ projects a severe contraction in the new housing market industry of over 30% over the next several years.
When comparing our forward-looking projections to the previous 10-year average, we anticipate a sharp supply deficit over the next five years, specifically:
- 37% fewer housing starts
- 33.7% fewer housing completions
The failure to build carries a massive macroeconomic cost. If this dislocation is left unremedied, the cumulative impacts over the next decade—measured against a population-adjusted moving average trend line of the previous 10 years—will be profound:
- GDP: An average real-terms reduction of $15.7 billion annually.
- Employment: At the peak of the contraction, the broader economy will experience 130,000 fewer jobs (representing total employment headcount, rather than strictly full-time equivalents).
- Wages: $90.1 billion in lost wages over the 10-year period.
- Profits: A $49.2 billion negative impact on corporate profits over the decade.
- Social Value: Beyond traditional economic metrics, CANCEA uniquely measures the human experience. We project $76.2 billion in lost Social Value over the decade, reflecting a quantifiable deterioration in affordability, stability, and quality of life for Ontarians.
The Hidden Labour Crisis and Workforce Behaviour Before a home can be built, the capacity to build it must exist. Beneath the macroeconomic data lies a severe, behaviourally driven capacity crisis within the residential construction workforce.
Crucially, ONEMODEL™ recognizes that labour is not a static stock; it is a behavioural flow dependent on the frequency of construction events. Between active projects, human capital decays. We are seeing two specific behavioural shifts in the workforce that threaten permanent capacity loss:
- The Broken Apprenticeship Pipeline: Younger workers (under 35) bear 60% of the projected displacement. As the interval between projects expands, apprentices lose their supervised hours and are forced to seek immediate income elsewhere, fundamentally breaking the pipeline of future journeypersons.
- The Loss of Institutional Memory: Older, highly skilled workers (55 and over) represent 26% of the displacement. Faced with extended wait times, their behavioural calculus shifts, accelerating early retirements. This represents an unrecoverable loss of specialist memory, including site superintendents and estimators.
Shifting Developer Behaviour and the Forecasting Blind Spot Independent of the current market dislocation, CANCEA has also been tracking a separate, underlying behavioural shift on the supply side. Driven by rules that have changed over the past couple of years, we are quietly anticipating a fundamental shift in developer behaviour to begin emerging from the data in approximately two years.
While we are not detailing the specific strategic drivers of this behaviour here, the critical and measurable outcome will be the behaviourally driven decoupling of the ratio of building permits to actual housing starts. The historical relationship between securing a permit and breaking ground is breaking down. Consequently, any economic or policy model that currently relies on building permits to forecast the number of future housing starts is now functionally obsolete and must be significantly revised.
The Impending Demographic Wave: The “Empty Bedrooms” Wrinkle Adding an unprecedented layer of complexity to this entire scenario is a massive, long-term demographic shift. In our 2015 housing report, Understanding the Forces Driving the Shelter Affordability Issue: A Linked-path Assessment, we introduced the audience to the concept of “empty bedrooms” to illustrate the vast scale of underutilized housing space in Ontario held primarily by aging demographics. To put this into perspective, in 2015, the amount of empty bedrooms in the system was equivalent to 27 years’ worth of average new construction (meaning it would take the industry 27 years to build that exact number of bedrooms).
At the time, we projected that the demographic unwinding of these empty bedrooms—as older households naturally transition and downsize—would begin to occur around 2028 and continue for a period of 10 to 14 years. We are now rapidly approaching the threshold of this massive structural transition. Entering this period with a paralyzed new-home supply pipeline, obsolete forecasting models, and a permanently scarred labour force will introduce historic volatility into the housing market.
Evaluating Solutions: The Need for a Counter-Cyclical Bridge As a strictly independent research organization, CANCEA evaluates policy levers without bias or predetermined outcomes. In a recent analysis commissioned by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario (RCCAO) to assess the impact of sales-tax relief on new homes, ONEMODEL™ demonstrated a stark distinction between policy interventions.
While an indefinite tax cut would act as an inefficient lever creating a permanent structural fiscal deficit, a temporary, three-year sales-tax holiday acts as a vital counter-cyclical bridge. This time-limited measure creates the behavioural urgency needed to pull forward latent demand, achieves statistical tax neutrality across all levels of government, and critically, compresses the time between project starts—saving the apprenticeship pipeline and preserving the workforce capacity required for the coming decade.
To navigate this complex landscape, decision-makers must look beyond historical averages. ONEMODEL™ provides the uncompromising, bottom-up clarity required to manage risk, anticipate behavioural shifts, and enact meaningful, evidence-based policy.
Read the full report: Navigating Ontario’s Housing Market Dislocation: Structural Breaks, Behavioural Shifts, and Evidence-Based Solutions
