The Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON) is asking all levels of government to take steps to make home building more affordable, including lowering taxes, fees, levies and development charges on new housing and speeding up approval times for developments.

RESCON president Richard Lyall, along with senior staff and board members from the association, met with Ontario’s Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra recently to discuss a variety of challenges facing the homebuilding sector, including high taxes and slow approval times – both of which the council says are impacting the price of new housing, and seriously affecting housing supply.

“We appreciate the actions that Minister Calandra and the provincial government have taken to date to encourage more homebuilding, which includes eliminating the HST on new purpose-built rentals, however we continue to face a perfect storm of high taxes, endless bureaucracy, particularly at the municipal level of government, and an approvals system that is slow, dysfunctional and killing the housing market, especially for first-time buyers,” says Lyall. “We have a devastating housing affordability and supply crisis yet are still in the dark ages across many municipalities when it comes to residential development approvals. We can and must do better.”

At the meeting, RESCON officials noted that new home sales are lacklusture, and the homebuilding industry is facing serious financial challenges. New development application submissions have slumped and starts for 2025 are sparse, it says. The financial realities of the new housing market are not workable and regulations and policies are only adding to the inability to build.

Taxes on new housing in the Greater Toronto Area, for example, are the highest in North America and have combined with other factors to eliminate homebuyers – especially first-timers – from the market. In Toronto, development charges alone for single detached homes have increased nearly 2,000 percent in 20 years.

Additionally, recent figures show the construction of new homes is not keeping pace with population growth and housing affordability continues to get worse.

A report by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis found that 31 percent of the cost of a new home is due to taxes, fees and levies, with the federal government accounting for the largest chunk of the taxes.

RESCON says it takes far too long to get a housing project approved in Toronto. Red tape and bureaucracy are increasing, making it difficult for builders to build homes that people can afford. Meanwhile, it says, other regulatory issues are standing in the way of new housing being built, such as municipalities pressing ahead with unrealistic green building standards beyond what is prescribed in the Ontario Building Code.

“Immediate action is needed to lower taxes and fees, speed up the approvals process and create conditions conducive to building homes,” said Lyall. “Development charges in particular have become a cash cow that municipal governments now rely on to fund infrastructure and other amenities. While municipalities rely on the levies, a big chunk is not being spent. Instead, it is going into reserve funds. The levies must be reduced to a more manageable level so the savings can be passed on to homebuyers.”