The cost of buying a home in Alberta is lower, in part, because our municipalities charge lower development fees than comparable cities in other provinces.

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Housing starts nationally are supposed to drop over the next three years, as part of a four-year decline. That’s right — drop.

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The federal government has pledged around $20 billion over the next five years to get to the 500,000 new units per year promised by Mark Carney and the Liberals during the spring election.

Yet this year the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Ottawa’s federal housing agency, estimates there will be just 237,800 housing starts, down from 245,367 in 2024. CMHC last week also forecasted no more than 228,000 housing units — houses, apartments, condos and others — will be built next year and a mere 220,000 in 2027.

For comparison, current totals are less than the 267,000 starts in the pandemic year of 2021-22. And they come nowhere near the level in 1976 (nearly 50 years ago), which holds the record for 273,200 units at a time when our national population was 23.1 million versus 41.3 million today.

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The Liberal government’s promise of 500,000 new homes a year didn’t pop........

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