Federal Budget Fails to Support Homeownership for the Next Generation
November 6, 2025 – Kelowna, B.C. – The Canadian Home Builders’ Association – Central Okanagan (CHBA-CO) is raising deep concerns about the 2025 Federal Budget and the lack of meaningful action to restore housing affordability or support the next generation of homeowners.
Unlike the 2024 Budget—known as “the Housing Budget” for its focus on affordability and ownership—this first budget under Prime Minister Mark Carney walks away from that momentum. Instead, it leans heavily on Build Canada Homes, a government-driven program that may help a handful of low-income households, but does nothing for middle-income Canadians trying to buy a home or the builders ready to build them.
Despite repeated calls from the homebuilding industry nationwide, this budget introduces no new measures to increase the supply of market-rate housing or help Canadians achieve homeownership. “The federal government continues to claim it’s tackling the housing crisis while leaving out the very people who can fix it,” said Cassidy deVeer, Executive Officer of CHBA-CO. “Builders in the Okanagan were hoping for action that would get projects moving, restore affordability, and give families a fighting chance. Instead, this budget gives us recycled headlines and no solutions.”
The government once again pointed to the GST rebate for first-time buyers—an announcement made months ago that still has not received Royal Assent through Bill C-4. The delay has left both buyers and builders in limbo, freezing new-home sales through most of 2025. Even once passed, the rebate will only help a small fraction of buyers and provides no relief for homeowners adding secondary suites or carriage homes—the very types of attainable housing most needed in the Okanagan. “Expanding the GST rebate to all buyers and to renovations that create new units would have been an immediate and impactful step,” deVeer added. “Instead, this budget re-announced old news and called it progress.”
CHBA-CO is also sounding the alarm on the government’s flagship program, Build Canada Homes, which comes with billions in federal funding and a shockingly small number of promised units. “The amount of money being poured into Build Canada Homes compared to the number of homes it will actually deliver is frankly shocking,” said deVeer. “This is not a housing strategy, it’s a photo op. It does nothing for the Central Okanagan, which has no federal land available for development aside from the old army barracks in Vernon.”
Local data underscore the depth of the slowdown. In Kelowna, total building-permit values have dropped more than 80 percent, from roughly $279 million in September 2023 to $45 million in September 2024. In West Kelowna, permits are down over 70 percent year-to-date, marking the steepest decline in more than a decade. These declines reflect stalled projects, shrinking payrolls, and mounting concern about layoffs across the Okanagan’s residential construction sector.
Even as the federal government sidelines homeownership, Canadians themselves have not. CHBA’s 2024 Homebuyer Preference Survey found that 80 percent of Canadians still aspire to own a home, including three-quarters of renters who hope to buy within the next decade. CMHC’s Housing Aspirations Report echoed the same finding: homeownership remains the top housing goal for every age and income group. “Canadians haven’t given up on homeownership, but it feels like their government has,” deVeer said. “Affordability will never return if Ottawa continues to ignore market-rate housing.”
CHBA-CO acknowledges a few small positives in the budget including the proposed Build Communities Strong Fund that ties infrastructure funding to reductions in Development Cost Charges, the elimination of the Underused Housing Tax, and the new Productivity Super-Deduction to encourage investment in housing innovation. However, none of these measures come close to addressing the scale of the affordability crisis or the economic slowdown facing local builders.
CHBA-CO joins CHBA National in calling on the federal government to immediately pass Bill C-4 and expand the GST rebate to all new-home buyers and qualifying renovations; ensure Build Communities Strong funding delivers measurable DCC reductions; and re-establish market-rate homeownership as a national priority, because Canadians still want to own their own homes.
Media Contact: Cassidy deVeer Executive Officer, CHBA-CO cassidy@chbaco.com