By Michèle Biss

OTTAWA (August 13, 2025): In 2019, the federal government passed the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA)—Canada’s first official law recognizing housing as a fundamental human right for all. Yet in the 6 years since, it still hasn’t adequately addressed one of the major barriers preventing housing from becoming more affordable: the financialization of housing.

Time and time again, experts have proven that financialization is a key driver to Canada’s housing crisis, contributing to skyrocketing rents, increased eviction and renoviction rates, displacement, discrimination, and poor maintenance.  Despite this, Canada for decades has allowed housing to be treated as a financial asset and tool for maximizing profit at the expense of the human rights of renters and those seeking rental housing (including people experiencing homelessness).

Today, the scale of financialization is overwhelming.

Between 2016 and 2021, Canada lost 230,000 affordable housing units.

In the City of Ottawa, it is projected that the community loses 7 affordable housing units for every 1 built.

In 2018, close to 600 residents in the Herongate community of Ottawa were displaced and evicted because of financialization.  Of those who lost their homes, 93% were people of colour. This was a devastating decision, which tenants said was to make way for a “predominantly affluent, adult-oriented, white community”. And our governments did nothing to prevent it.

The truth is that the private market cannot bring down the cost of housing or protect the human rights of renters on their own. A company’s priority is to its shareholders, and this doesn’t always align with the goals of solving Canada’s  housing crisis and maintaining affordable housing. Governments need to step in and play a much larger role in bringing down costs, protecting renters, and creating more affordable housing. They can do this through targeted investments and human rights-based housing policies.

And while much of the jurisdiction for renters fall to provinces and territories, there is still much that Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney, and Housing and Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson can do. The good news is that the 2019 legislation created human rights-based access-to-justice mechanisms—including the Federal Housing Advocate and review panels—that allow renters and other rights-holders to help create systemic change.  

In 2023, a review panel was struck on the issue of financialization (under the authority of the NHSA) with three members of the National Housing Council. They reviewed evidence and heard testimony from hundreds of policy experts, human rights advocates, and rights holders from across the county. By the end, they had received nearly 200 written submissions and hosted 8 oral hearings. By 2024, the panel members released their final recommendations.  The federal government responded to these recommendations, as they were required to by law. But so far, their words haven’t been matched by actions to protect renters.  

Prime Minister Carney has made housing a key commitment in the mandate of his government, and Minister Robertson has a key opportunity to commit to a vision of Canada with a fair housing system. One in which housing is treated not as a commodity, but as the human right that it is.

If the federal government is serious about ending Canada’s housing and homelessness crisis, it would create a plan within its first 100 days to implement the recommendations from the financialization review panel. This is what that could look like:

• Data: announce a plan to understand what’s really happening to tenants and those seeking tenancies. This includes a public database of the names and locations of investors and companies who own residential real estate.
• Tenant rights funding: increase funding to the Department of Justice’s Tenant Protection Fund for tenant rights organizing and for rights holders to engage in right to housing justice mechanisms.
• Community housing: build more social/public, cooperative, and non-profit housing, including community land trusts, that is truly affordable and universally accessible.
• Human rights investments: align investment practices with human rights principles. And announce a plan to review and revise government policies that drive financialization, such as lack of private-sector regulation, taxation loopholes, and low-interest borrowing.
• National rent and vacancy control: outline a plan to evaluate and implement a strategy on rent regulation – including national rent control and vacancy control.

Over 235,000 people in Canada are facing homelessness, with even more facing (or having faced) eviction, unaffordable housing, or systemic barriers to housing.

It’s time for our federal government (and all levels of government) to adopt a human rights approach to housing and genuinely tackle the financialization of housing. The NHSA recognizes the right to adequate housing for all. These are not just aspirational words on paper, but a concrete human right affirmed in international law.

This opinion was written by Michèle Biss, the Executive Director of the National Right to Housing Network—a broad-based, grassroots civil society network established to fully realize the right to adequate housing in Canada.

For more information, contact:

Jessica Tan
Communications Lead
Phone: 613-621-4575
Email: jessica@housingrights.ca