After decades of stagnating incomes and steady growth in house prices, Canadians nationwide are finally sounding the alarm bell on the housing crisis. Although this issue has been a source of tremendous stress in Ontario and British Columbia for many years, it wasn’t until this year that the last remaining enclaves of affordability — namely the Prairie provinces — have seen house prices soar too.

To compound the problem, as the income needed to access homeownership skyrockets, rental rates are also on the rise, leading to a bottleneck in the rental market. This leaves a growing number of tenants across Canada vulnerable to the whims of the market and the decisions of their landlords. A recent report produced by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) shows that everywhere in Canada, the rent of one-bedroom units exceeds the rate minimum-wage earners can affordably pay.

For some, the solution to this problem is simple: build enough housing to meet the growing demand. According to Canada’s national housing agency, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), this would mean building roughly six million homes across the country by 2030, including 3.5 million affordable units. Since 2017, Canada’s National Housing Strategy has focused its programs on funding nonmarket housing for Canadians with specialized needs and on incentives for developers to produce a higher number of market rentals per year. In other words, building the 1.2 million units needed by low- and moderate-income Canadians is mostly being left to the free market.