This text was translated from Portuguese using Google Translate’s AI system (not edited).
Canada is trying to change the way it addresses its housing crisis. In September 2025, the federal government launched Build Canada Homes (BCH), a program aimed at increasing the construction of affordable housing, financing housing projects, and stimulating a new construction industry based on faster, more modern, and efficient methods. The initiative, with an initial investment of billions of dollars, intends to focus primarily on non-commercial housing, including projects from non-profit organizations, cooperatives, Indigenous organizations, and groups serving low- and middle-income people.
Leading the program is Ana Bailão, a former Toronto city councilor and former deputy mayor, who assumed the role of the first CEO of Build Canada Homes. Her experience includes years working directly with urban planning, affordable housing, real estate development, and partnerships between governments and community organizations.
The Build Canada Homes (BCH) Proposal
BCH aims not only to finance housing but also to build it directly, utilize public land, attract private capital, and encourage modern construction methods such as modular systems, prefabricated structures, and factory production. The intention is to create predictable demand that allows the Canadian industry to gain scale and, consequently, reduce construction time and costs.
Due to its size, the BCH raises important questions.
One of the main challenges of the BCH is its scale. Canada doesn’t just need a few thousand new units: it needs to significantly increase the supply of housing across the country. The government itself recognizes that the crisis results from a combination of supply shortages, high costs, low productivity, and construction difficulties.
Another question is whether new construction technologies will be sufficient to significantly reduce prices. Modular and prefabricated construction can accelerate processes and reduce costs, and the government is betting heavily on this transformation. However, the final price of a home also depends on factors such as land, financing, infrastructure, labor, regulations, and approval processes. The challenge, therefore, is much greater than simply building houses faster.
There is also a debate about what the role of the federal government should be. Build Canada Homes represents a significant shift: Ottawa is no longer just a funder, but is now also acting as a developer, investor, and project coordinator.
The model seeks to combine public land, flexible financing, and public-private partnerships to accelerate development.
More than a thousand new rental units
For proponents of the initiative, this change is necessary because the traditional model has failed to produce enough affordable housing. For critics, however, the question remains whether a new federal structure will be able to execute projects more quickly and efficiently than municipal governments, community organizations, and companies already operating in the sector.
BCH focuses much of its efforts on rental housing, community housing, cooperatives, and units for vulnerable people. This addresses an urgent need, but does not automatically solve the problem for middle-class families who want to buy their first home.
The government states that BCH has already advanced agreements and projects representing thousands of new homes, including initiatives on federal land and partnerships with municipalities and provinces. In Ottawa, for example, the program has announced projects exceeding one thousand new affordable rental units.
Ultimately, the success of Build Canada Homes will be measured less by the size of its budget or the innovation of its methods and more by a key question: how many people will actually be able to find suitable housing they can afford?
This is the great test that awaits Ana Bailão—and one of the most important experiments in current Canadian housing policy.
Visit the official Build Canada Homes website: www.bch-mc.ca/about
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