Task Force Needs Outside Help: WHOPPER WATCH

Published 04/23/2025 · Updated 04/23/2025

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“First, the group consists mostly of Ottawa home builders and others from their industry. In other words, people who know something about actual house building. Second, it’s at the municipal level, the one most familiar with development. As a general rule, the farther a government is from city government, the less useful is its approach for housing.”

Citizen columnist Randall Denley on the rationale behind the Housing Innovation Task Force

How long have the City of Ottawa and the housing industry had to solve the housing crisis?

Five years? Ten years? At least as long as there has been a housing crisis. When did the housing crisis begin? The length of a lifetime certainly because $24,000 homes in Mississauga were costly in the 1960s when workers were making $100 a week. In fact, there’s been a housing crisis since pioneers were clearing land and using the logs to build their homes. Those 19th-century hammers, saws, screws and nails were pricey when you had no income at all.

Breaking news: houses have always been expensive. Always have been. Always will be.

After this amount of time in the midst of a rolling crisis, how are housing starts doing? They’re pretty much flat.

So Denley’s “… people who know something about actual house building …” might have failed. Ottawa’s foremost cheerleader for the local housing barons is serving up thin gruel.

The new task force, with only industry and builders on it (no public), is interested in promoting its own agenda. You can’t blame them. This dog hunts.

And as Ottawa’s best lobbyist group, developers just want to promote themselves through the task force. Hard to know how they need the city’s help with the unrivalled success they’ve had in getting most everything they want. You know, high-rises on city land at Lansdowne and half-a-billion dollars to boot for their privately operated stadium and Tewin, so far away from urban Ottawa it is somewhere in the middle east.

Seeing that the housing industry could probably use a few new ideas to make homes affordable, putting a couple of public members on the task force could at least give the impression of some democracy and innovation. Maybe even some new ideas. Surely the housing industry and Mayor Mark Sutcliffe could find a couple of pliant souls for the task force who know how to say “yes.” But no. Closed shop.

This just in, developers know how to build homes. They know better than anyone else, no doubt. So somewhere between a patch of dirt in Barrhaven and a fully built single-family home, there might be some disposable costs in the price. After all, the development industry appears to be doing OK while many of the rest of us aren’t. You know, tariff inflation and a wonky stock market.

Maybe the industry could find a way to lower costs, between zero for dirt and hundreds of thousands for a completed house, that doesn’t involve foisting the costs on the city and thus on the public. That might just be them … lets see, developers.

And maybe if you opened the membership door for some outside thoughts on the task force, it might let some fresh air in.

Furthermore, the housing industry, the city and Denley haven’t found a solution for the housing crisis. They’ve had time. The task force just lets developers and the city recycle ideas that haven’t worked in the past and won’t work in the future. But developers have done pretty well with the current setup.

Maybe if you let a couple of people from outside this conclave to bring in some fresh thought, that could help.

But that wouldn’t be cozy would it?

Ken Gray

Journalist Ken Gray has worked at five major Canadian newspapers. He is an educator, broadcaster and at present is the editor and founder of the 16-year-old pioneering internet publication, The Bulldog.