CREA’s Response to Federal Budget 2026
On Thursday, November 5, 2026, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Finance, tabled Budget 2026, Masters of Our Destiny, which centres Canadian sovereignty as a proactive and future-focused economic and cultural strategy alongside its obvious defence implications.
Key themes
The Budget sets out an ambitious vision for a more productive, resilient and economically independent Canada, with strategic investment as the foundation for long-term prosperity. Productivity plays a thematic role throughout, with the previously announced Productivity Mega Deduction aiming to lower upfront costs for businesses. There is a heavy focus on sovereign Canadian investment, with aims to develop 500 MW of artificial intelligence (AI) compute, renew the Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy, and double Canada's electricity generation. The Budget also places emphasis on developing Canada's domestic workforce with programs like the Build Canada Workers Benefit and Team Canada Strong, investing millions in Canadian workers.
Alongside its long-term economic agenda, Budget 2026 includes several new measures aimed at more immediate relief in 2027, including enhanced grocery and essentials benefits, additional support for lower-income workers and refundable tax credits for caregivers. These will provide increased direct financial help to households in the near term. What remains less clear, though, is how the federal government will build on these cost-of-living relief measures to support longer-term affordability for middle-income Canadians, including a viable pathway to attainable ownership for generations of young people.
Sovereignty begins with home
Budget 2026 continues to prioritize non-market housing and Build Canada Homes (BCH) but defines a new ambition to end homelessness within a decade. The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) welcomes this federal leadership, which, as the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness has noted, is the essential first step; success now depends on provinces, territories, and municipalities aligning behind a clear, outcomes-focused strategy. It also reinforces a point that runs through housing policy more broadly: homelessness cannot be ended without fixing the wider housing crisis, necessitating a continuum that works at every stage, from shelter and supportive housing to community and affordable housing to market rental housing and homeownership.
Beyond this, housing appears throughout Budget 2026, in many pieces across many chapters. What follows is a summary of key housing initiatives including those related to CREA’s advocacy on missing middle supply, housing financing, and attainable ownership, with more information and analysis to come.
Major housing initiatives in Budget 2026
Housing affordability and supply
- Homelessness: $11.2 billion over four years beginning in 2027–28, plus $17.8 billion in future years, supporting the government's objective of ending homelessness within a decade.
- Rental assistance: A 10-year renewal of the Canada Housing Benefit, providing continued support to low-income households.
- Build Canada Homes: An additional $13 billion, bringing total capitalization to $45 billion, to triple the pace of non-market housing starts to 24,000 annually.
- Construction productivity: $100 million for municipal e-permitting and artificial intelligence, alongside $500 million to build and expand industrial capacity to accelerate adoption of modern methods of construction.
- Indigenous housing: More than $32 billion over 10 years for First Nations housing and infrastructure, including $12.7 billion specifically for housing.
- Repurposing federal lands: $1.5 billion over four years to prepare federal lands for housing by funding water, wastewater, roads, and other enabling infrastructure.
Mortgage financing and consumer protection
- Missing middle financing: New mortgage insurance flexibility for three- and four-unit developments and expanded private mortgage insurance eligibility for properties containing five to 50 units, effective February 1, 2027.
- Mortgage accessibility: Proposals to increase the optional mortgage insurance price limit from $1 million to $1.5 million and permit qualifying 30-year amortizations for these insured mortgages for first-time buyers or newly built homes.
- Income verification: A proposed Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) service to help mortgage lenders and insurers verify borrower income.
- Consumer protection: Greater transparency in mortgage information and consultations on prepayment penalties.
Additional housing measures
- Foreign Buyers Ban: Extended to January 1, 2029, while exempting new residential properties, distinguishing investment that contributes to new supply from purchases of existing homes.
- Energy affordability: Previously announced $2 billion in support for home energy retrofits and heat pumps.
- Tax administration and instalment payments: Proposed changes to simplify tax compliance and improve cash flow for eligible self-employed individuals, including real estate professionals earning commission income.
CREA will continue to monitor any new developments and keep members informed.
While many of the measures announced in Budget 2026 are a welcome step, they do not yet bridge the gap for middle-class Canadians. Building a stronger country means making room for the people who build it, and getting there will require all levels of government working in tandem to address a wide range of compounding challenges, from regulatory red tape and approval timelines to a lack of standardization and ability to scale.
While Budget 2026 signals that the government is exploring options to accelerate the construction of homes intended for ownership, particularly for young Canadians and families, it offers limited measures to address the structural barriers to attainable homeownership, leaving a gap between the government’s economic ambitions and the opportunities available to Canadians. CREA will continue to advocate for purpose-built financing tools to incentivize the creation of missing middle homes, including an MLI Select – Ownership program, insured financing for individual units in small multiplexes, and modernized underwriting that reflects how Canadians earn and live today.
As we head into 2027, CREA is calling on the Government of Canada to work with provinces and territories to prioritize housing choice across the full continuum. That work must include an explicit commitment to restoring an attainable pathway to homeownership for the middle-class, with a focus on generational fairness for young Canadians who are struggling to buy their first home.
We thank our CREA Board of Directors and PAC representatives for carrying that strong message to Ottawa last month, and to communities across the country over the course of this year, and for their continued advocacy for missing middle housing. With the right framework in place, we are confident that attainable homeownership can be a cornerstone of Canada’s economic future.
