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Opinion: Affordability is still a big problem despite Carney’s claims

Yes, indicators are moving in the right direction, but food and housing are still up and living standards are at best flat

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Thanks to recent floor crossings and byelection wins in Ontario and Quebec, Prime Minister Mark Carney has secured a majority government, which gives him more room to implement his agenda. On the campaign trail last year and during his first year in office he often talked about the high cost of living. And recent polling confirms that, depending on their province, between 55 and 79 per cent of Canadians cite it as a top concern, too.

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So it may have come as a surprise to many Canadians when, during a recent joust on the House of Commons floor with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, the prime minister said that “affordability’s the best it’s been in over a decade” while pointing to wage growth and declining housing rents. There seems to be a disconnect here. So what do the data say?

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To begin with housing, which is a big share of any household’s budget: according to a recent study, in 2014 a Canadian family with median after-tax income had to save the equivalent of 14.1 months of income on average for a 20 per cent down payment on a typical home. In 2023, the latest year for which data are available, that was up to 22 months — a 56 per cent increase.

During the same period, the average mortgage payment for a typical home across Canada increased from 29.9 per cent of median family after-tax income to 56.6 per cent. And median rent across Canada’s largest cities increased from 19.8 per cent of median after-tax family income to 23.5 per cent. In other words, while it varies across cities, overall housing affordability clearly declined across Canada over the past decade.

True, there has been some recent improvement as home prices have stabilized and even declined nationally since 2023. But prices today are still well above where they were a decade ago, and a slowdown in homebuilding could eventually negate any improvement in overall affordability.

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As for grocery prices, in recent years both food prices and prices in general have gone up a lot. But food prices have outpaced general inflation. From 2014 to 2025, they rose 44.1 per cent compared to 28.8 per cent for all other consumer prices. Last year, year-over-year grocery price inflation more than doubled, from 2.5 per cent in the first quarter to 5.1 per cent in the fourth.

Data on food bank visits suggest many Canadians have been unable to keep up with the rise in grocery prices. From 2014 to 2019, the number of food bank visits in March of each year declined slightly from more than 1.2 million to fewer than 1.1 million. But then from 2019 to 2025 (the latest year for which data are available), they doubled to nearly 2.2 million visits — far exceeding the rate of population growth (which was just 11.3 per cent) from March 2019 to March 2025.

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Finally, because our ability to afford the cost of living depends not only on prices but also on how much we earn, it’s worth examining data on incomes (broadly measured by per-person GDP). At the end of last year, per-person GDP in Canada was $60,184 in inflation-adjusted dollars. That’s only 3.5 per cent higher than its value at the end of 2014 ($58,162) and it’s 1.2 per cent lower than in mid-2022 (when it was $60,933). For perspective, from the end of 2003 to the end of 2014, per-person GDP grew by 11.7 per cent.

The numbers look even worse when compared with other industrialized countries. At the end of 2025 real per-person GDP in the United States was 21.7 per cent higher than at the end of 2014, and 6.8 per cent higher than in mid-2022. Over the past decade, income growth in many other countries (including the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Japan) has also outpaced income growth in Canada.

Prime Minister Carney says affordability is better now than it has been in recent years. But Canadians still face unaffordable housing, higher grocery prices and stagnant incomes. Affordability clearly remains a major problem and the prime minister — now of a majority government — should recognize that reality.

Grady Munro is a senior policy analyst at the Fraser Institute.

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