Ford Government’s Own Notes Admit Ontario Will Miss 1.5-Million-Home Target

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Ontario’s housing promise was designed to be impossible to ignore: 1.5 million new homes by 2031, enough to reshape communities and bring affordability closer within reach. Internal ministry notes obtained by Global News now suggest the Ford government recognized by fall 2024 that the target would not be met. That acknowledgment matters because it came while the province still presented the goal as active and achievable. The documents do not erase the market forces battering construction, from high financing costs to collapsing condominium presales. They do, however, expose a widening gap between public messaging and the government’s own assessment. With official forecasts now showing construction running far below the required pace, the debate is no longer simply about whether Ontario is behind. It is about when the government knew, what it did after learning that, and whether residents received an honest picture.

The Note Changes the Political Story

The most consequential wording is brief. Handwritten Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing notes obtained by Global News include the line, “1.5 million homes not reach target, more context.” Another passage cautions against promising to build homes faster. The notes were created between October and December 2024 while officials worked on legislation that was later shelved before Ontario’s early 2025 election. Read together, they appear to show that the possibility of failure was not merely being raised by critics or outside analysts; it was circulating inside the ministry responsible for delivering the pledge.

That distinction changes the accountability question. Governments routinely maintain ambitious targets even when progress slips, arguing that the goal continues to guide policy. An internal conclusion that the target will not be reached is different. It suggests officials had moved from warning about risk to planning communications around an expected miss. The ministry did not provide a detailed response to Global News, while the premier pointed to recent improvement and difficult economic conditions. Those explanations may describe the current market, but they do not answer why the internal assessment was not clearly shared when it was made.

The Promise Was Supposed to Be a Measuring Stick

The 1.5-million figure was not invented as a casual campaign slogan. Ontario’s Housing Affordability Task Force recommended it in February 2022, calling the goal ambitious but achievable. The panel argued that Ontario was already short of homes compared with other G7 countries and needed a dramatic increase in construction to keep pace with population growth. The Progressive Conservatives then adopted the target during the 2022 election campaign, placing a clear number and deadline at the centre of their housing agenda.

Separate research from the Smart Prosperity Institute also concluded that Ontario required roughly 1.506 million net new homes between 2021 and 2031. Its estimate combined a pre-existing shortage of about 471,500 homes with nearly 1.035 million additional homes needed for projected population growth. Almost half of that demand was expected in Toronto, Peel and York. That research does not prove every unit could realistically be delivered on schedule, but it shows why the target mattered. It was intended to measure the scale of the shortage, not simply provide a headline that could be softened once construction became difficult.

Ontario Was Behind Before the Internal Admission

The province’s own expanded accounting shows how quickly the gap developed. Ontario counted 107,216 new homes toward the goal in 2022 and 109,011 in 2023. In 2024, the total fell to 94,908 against an annual target of 125,000, meaning the province reached just under 76 per cent of that year’s goal. Across the first three years, Ontario counted 311,135 homes—about 20.7 per cent of the 1.5-million commitment after 30 per cent of the ten-year period had elapsed.

The direction was even more troubling than the cumulative shortfall. The annual targets were supposed to rise as reforms took effect and industry capacity expanded. Instead, the province’s broad housing count declined in 2024, while the required pace was moving sharply higher. After the first three years, nearly 1.19 million homes remained to be counted over seven years, an average of almost 170,000 annually. That was already far above Ontario’s recent performance. By the time ministry officials were writing their notes in late 2024, the arithmetic was not a distant warning. It was visible in the government’s own tracker.

The Definition of a Home Kept Expanding

Ontario’s progress numbers are broader than conventional housing-start statistics. The provincial tracker initially included housing starts, additional residential units such as basement or laneway suites, and long-term-care beds. Beginning with 2024 data, it also counted postsecondary student beds and suites in licensed congregate retirement homes. These forms of accommodation all serve genuine needs, but they are not interchangeable. A long-term-care bed, a dorm room and a newly started family apartment provide different types of housing and cannot all be treated as equivalent without explanation.

The 2024 breakdown illustrates the difference. Of the 94,908 units counted toward the target, 73,617 were housing starts. The rest included 14,381 additional residential units, 2,278 long-term-care beds, 2,807 student beds and 1,825 retirement-home suites. In other words, more than one-fifth of the reported progress came from categories outside standard housing starts. Broader measurement can present a fuller picture of accommodation being created, but changing the definition after a target is announced makes year-to-year accountability harder. It also risks giving the public the impression that more conventional homes are entering the market than the construction data actually show.

The 2026 Budget Makes the Gap Impossible to Ignore

Ontario’s latest budget contains the clearest official evidence that the original schedule is out of reach. The province recorded about 65,400 housing starts in 2025 and projects 64,800 in 2026, followed by 70,300 in 2027, 76,800 in 2028 and 80,500 in 2029. Even the final year in that forecast remains far below the roughly 175,000 homes Ontario’s ramped-up schedule expected annually from 2026 onward.

The 2026 projection equals only about 37 per cent of a 175,000-unit pace. Additional suites, care beds, student residences and retirement units could lift the province’s broader count, but recent experience suggests they would not come close to filling a gap of more than 110,000 units in a single year. The budget’s forecast is especially important because it is not an opposition estimate or an industry warning. It is the government’s own planning assumption. Once official economic projections show construction remaining below half the required pace, describing the target as merely challenging no longer captures the scale of the problem.

A Better Start to 2026 Is Still Nowhere Near Enough

There is some positive momentum in the latest data. Ontario recorded 26,084 housing starts in population centres of 10,000 or more from January through May 2026, an 18 per cent increase from the same period in 2025. The province’s six-month trend reached an annualized 71,535 units in May, up three per cent from April. Those gains matter to builders and workers after a punishing 2025, and they show that the market is not frozen everywhere.

Yet the comparison with the provincial target remains stark. After five months—roughly 42 per cent of the year—Ontario had achieved about 15 per cent of its 175,000-home goal using conventional starts. May itself produced 5,661 starts, three per cent fewer than a year earlier, while Toronto’s monthly starts fell 12 per cent year over year. Even if the stronger year-to-date pace continues, Ontario would still finish far below the target. A rebound from an unusually weak base can sound dramatic in percentage terms without changing the long-term conclusion.

The Construction Slump Has Real Economic Causes

Ontario’s failure cannot be explained by one policy or one level of government. CMHC expects provincial housing starts to fall near two-decade lows in 2026, citing high construction costs, weaker demand and rising inventories of unsold units. Toronto’s condominium market is a central problem: pre-construction sales fell to multi-decade lows in 2025, making it harder for developers to reach the sales thresholds lenders require before financing towers. Projects are being delayed or cancelled, while builders focus on completing developments already underway.

The Ford government can also point to trade uncertainty, borrowing costs, labour pressures and expensive infrastructure as forces beyond Queen’s Park’s direct control. Those are legitimate headwinds, and housing cannot be produced by government order alone. Still, the internal notes date to the fall of 2024, before the latest Canada–U.S. tariff conflict became the province’s dominant economic explanation. That timing weakens any attempt to frame the expected miss as solely the product of newer external shocks. Market conditions explain part of the failure; they do not remove responsibility for setting, managing and honestly reporting the target.

Municipalities Carry Targets Without Controlling Every Lever

Ontario assigned housing targets to its 50 largest municipalities and created the $1.2-billion Building Faster Fund, which rewards communities that reach at least 80 per cent of their annual goals. That approach produced visible winners. Toronto exceeded its 2023 target and received $114 million, while smaller communities such as Sarnia and Chatham-Kent have recently been rewarded for surpassing their 2025 targets by wide margins. Local approval reform and faster permitting can clearly make a difference.

Municipalities, however, do not control interest rates, construction financing, provincial planning law or federal population policy. They must also fund the roads, water systems, sewers, transit and public services that make new neighbourhoods possible. Ontario and Ottawa are now offering infrastructure funding to municipalities that cut development charges by 30 to 50 per cent for at least three years. Lower fees may improve project economics, but cities must consider how lost revenue will be replaced if infrastructure is still to be built. Treating municipal targets as the main scoreboard can therefore obscure how much housing delivery depends on coordinated decisions across all three levels of government.

Missing the Target Has a Human Cost

The target’s collapse is not only a problem for government communications. Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office estimates that 1.045 million households were in need of subsidized housing in 2024–25. About 815,000 either received no provincial housing support or received too little to make their shelter costs affordable. By 2027–28, the FAO projects the number of households needing subsidized housing will rise to 1.132 million, with rents and mortgage payments growing faster than household incomes.

More market supply alone will not solve every part of that crisis. Many low-income households need rent-geared-to-income units, supplements or deeply affordable homes that private construction will not automatically provide. Even so, a persistent shortage across the wider market intensifies competition for older rentals, pushes families farther from jobs and leaves fewer options when relationships, health or employment circumstances change. For a young couple delaying children, a senior waiting for an accessible unit or a worker commuting hours from a cheaper community, the missed target is not an abstract statistic. It represents choices that remain unavailable.

Ontario Now Needs a Public Reset, Not a Softer Slogan

A credible response would begin with a transparent accounting of what Ontario can still build by 2031. The province should publish an updated cumulative forecast, restore regular reporting on its housing tracker and separate conventional starts, completions, additional suites, care beds, student residences and retirement units. Each category is valuable, but residents should be able to see exactly what is being delivered and how it compares with the promise made in 2022.

The government must also decide whether 1.5 million remains an operational target, a statement of need or a discarded campaign commitment. Calling it “soft” while continuing to invoke the housing crisis leaves municipalities, builders and the public without a dependable benchmark. Targets can be missed without becoming meaningless; what destroys their value is quietly accepting failure while avoiding a clear revision. The internal notes suggest Ontario officials understood the problem earlier than they publicly admitted. The next test is whether the government treats that disclosure as a communications headache—or as a reason to rebuild trust around measurable, realistic housing goals.

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