Article contentWhat would success look like? By 2026: a single on-line permit portal and harmonized code. By 2027: a good number of home-grown factories running two shifts and shipping thousands of modules. By 2028: verified per unit costs at least 10 per cent below site-built equivalents. Anything less and the pre-fab push will land on the same scrap heap as past made-in-Ottawa industrial crusades.
That's also the takeaway from a new report from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC), released Tuesday, which shows that 55% of pre-construction condo units in Toronto went unsold by the end of the first quarter. That figure is only slightly b
June 12, 2025
Mark Carney’s Liberals have tabled the biggest federal housing intervention since CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, was born in 1946: up to $25 billion in low-cost loans plus $1 billion in equity for firms doing modular and other factory-built housing, all bundled into a new Crown agency called Build Canada Homes (BCH). Add an aggressive target to double national completions to 500,000 units a year within a decade, and Ottawa is betting hard that moving construction from mud-soaked job sites to climate-controlled assembly lines will finally tame the affordability crisis.
But good instincts won’t save a policy that ignores how manufacturing does or doesn’t scale. In Sweden, where nearly half of new homes are modular, factories reached profitability only after two decades of continuous output. In Canada, the sector still has just a low single-digit market share, and even industry veterans concede that pre-fab will remain more expensive on most projects until volumes rise. It’s hardly the overnight bargain voters are being sold.
The good news, however, is that the pitfalls are predictable and avoidable. Our “national” building code is anything but. Door-width rules change at provincial borders, and snow-load formulas vary by municipality. An assembly line designed for Ontario stalls the moment a B.C. buyer orders a tweak. Unless governments and the industry fast-track a single, harmonized code, BCH could spend billions subsidizing bespoke production lines that never hit efficient rates of output.
Conservatives argue the Liberals’ plan is pre-fab fiction, an attempt to cover up their failure to cut provincial and municipal red tape in the first place. They’re not entirely wrong: Pouring billions into loans without first clearing regulatory bottlenecks risks financing a warehouse of unsold Lego homes.