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For the fourth straight month, Canadian housing investment fell in June, down 4.5 percent from May to $12.1 billion. It’s not just homes that have been hit by the crisis, according to data released Aug. 18 by Statistics Canada. Non-residential construction, which includes everything from office space to factories, also edged down 0.2 percent, falling to $5.9 billion month-on-month.
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The agency found an overall decline of 5.2 percent, reducing total investment to $55.7 billion. That decline was entirely due to an 8.2 percent decline in home construction, which took the value in that sector to $37.9 billion.
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Results for the full second quarter were also poor, with the release identifying single-family and multi-family housing as the primary cause of the decline.
“Single-family home investment fell 10.5 percent to $19.7 billion in the second quarter, the sharpest decline since the second quarter of 2020,” the release said. “Multifamily construction declined for the third straight quarter, down 5.7 percent to $18.2 billion.”
Non-residential investment showed a glimmer of resilience during the quarter, rising 1.8 percent to $17.8 billion. This is the tenth consecutive quarterly increase in this segment. Within that category, investment in industrial buildings increased 5.6 percent to $3.7 billion. Commercial construction also experienced an upswing, growing by 1.7 percent to $9.8 billion.
In June 2022, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) ruled that Canada must accelerate the pace of construction to build 3.5 million additional new homes by 2030 to address affordability issues. Currently, the country is building 200,000 to 300,000 new units annually and would need to more than double that number to meet the CMHC target, but recent data shows that residential construction is instead declining.