Improving Canadian Housing: A Pillar of the Innovation Economy

Housing is Canada’s thorniest public policy challenge. While it’s not a topic we normally talk about at Mooseworks, the new federal government’s ambitious housing policy piqued our interest. The Liberal Party proposal would create a new agency, Build Canada Homes, to deploy $25 billion in financing for modular, prefabricated housing, and the government would use the power of public demand (procurement!) to stimulate innovation. This is an exciting concept, and it dovetails with ideas we laid out in our recent report, A Mandate to Innovate, where we called for Canada’s new government to supercharge our traditional industries. If we can leverage our strengths as the world’s forestry superpower and if we can become a leading innovation nation in housing, we can both tackle our own housing shortages and branch out to global markets. Housing policy in particular is important to Canadian innovation for a few reasons: So, if the government can fix the housing crisis, this is good for Canadian

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• Sanjana Shah