Part 1 of 2. Everybody reached for the blame thrower when Carney and Eby announced the $3.2 billion condo deal. I reached for it too.
I saw the headline and my first reaction was the same as yours.
Bailout. No way. Markets should clear. Let the speculators eat the loss they priced themselves into.
I had the blame thrower in my hands before I finished the article. Aimed it right at the developers, where everybody else was aiming.
Then I caught myself.
Because I have actually built these things. A handful of my own development projects, and I’ve consulted on plenty more, the small ones and the big ones. I have stood in front of the pro forma at 11pm wondering how the number got so big.
So before you pull the trigger, let me show you something the headline left out.
The blame thrower only sprays one way
Here is the comfortable lie everyone’s repeating: the big bad developer priced the units too high, got greedy, and now wants the taxpayer to cover the loss.
It feels good. It’s clean. It has one villain.
And it’s lazy.
The developer’s name is on the building. So that’s the name that catches every rock. But the developer was the last hand on the price tag, not the first. By the time a builder sets a number on a door, a whole line of people have already been paid.
The Urban Development Institute estimates government taxes and fees make up around 29% of the cost of a new condo in Vancouver. Twenty-nine cents of every dollar. Gone before the first shovel hits dirt.
Read that again.
A third of the price you’re furious about… was never the developer’s to keep. It was the development cost charges, the levies, the permits, the taxes on the taxes. Metro Vancouver’s own operating spending climbed roughly 71% over a decade while inflation ran 28% and population grew 21%. That gap didn’t fund itself. It got loaded onto every new unit, one fee at a time.
The price tag has a dozen fingerprints on it. It only has one name.
The oldest playbook in the book
There’s an old Ronald Reagan line. The nine most dangerous words in the English language:
“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Watch how this one runs, because it’s the same play every time.
Cause the problem. Pile fee on fee on levy until a unit can’t pencil. Meddle in the market. Agitate it. Pour gasoline on it. Then, when the thing they broke is finally on fire… ride in with $3.2 billion to put out the flames they lit.
And take a bow as the hero.
That’s the Carney Liberals’ housing playbook in one breath. Manufacture the crisis with one hand, sell you the rescue with the other. The same government layering on the charges is now the government cutting a cheque to soften the charges. They didn’t fix the machine. They just got photographed in front of it.
And here’s the tell. Even Carney admitted development charges had “reached a level that were pricing out people.”
The man cutting the cheque just told you the fees were the problem. His government’s fees.
The layers nobody’s naming
Go one floor deeper and it gets worse for the simple story.
Who is actually getting bailed out here? Everyone says “developers.” Has anyone asked whether this fund is quietly catching the banks? Projects that default, mortgages headed to foreclosure, lenders who eat the loss… that’s a domino nobody in the comment section is talking about. Not as sexy as “greedy developer.” A lot more accurate.
And the municipalities? They collected millions in development fees on every one of these stalled projects. Front-loaded, banked, spent. Are they paying a dime of it back now that the math broke? Not one.
So why is the whole country pointing at the one person who builds?
Celebrate the builders. Loudly.
This is the part I will not soften.
We need to celebrate the builders. Embrace them. Encourage them.
The people who take the real risk. Who put real capital into real projects. Who sign the personal guarantee and carry the empty units while the country argues about them online. Who employ the trades and actually put something in the ground.
We need them doing MORE of this, not less.
You do not solve a housing shortage by turning the people who build housing into the villain. You cannot beg entrepreneurs to save the day on Monday and call them parasites on Tuesday. That’s not a policy. That’s a comfortable lie that lets every other layer off the hook.
And here’s the line I keep coming back to:
Canada does not have a housing problem. Canada has an affordable housing problem.
We have cranes everywhere. What we don’t have is units a normal income can carry, because we taxed, levied, and charged 29 cents of affordability out of every dollar before the developer ever opened their mouth.
You can’t fee a unit into the stratosphere and then act shocked when nobody can afford it.
What this means for you tonight
If you’re an operator scaling past a handful of doors, the crowd’s outrage is noise. Your edge is the layer underneath it. Four moves:
- Pull the real stack. Go find the development cost charge schedule for a project type in your market. Read it with your own eyes. See the government’s cut before you ever blame a builder’s margin again.
- Watch what’s actually clearing. 4,376 empty completed condos in Metro Vancouver, up 76% in a year, a third of them over a million. A frozen market is where the operator who understands the math finds the opening. The mob sees a villain. You should see motion.
- Stop outsourcing your outrage to a headline. Ask the layered questions. Who else got paid first. Who’s really being propped up. Who collected the fees and went silent. One real question beats a hundred angry reactions.
- Protect the instinct to build. When the room turns on builders, capital freezes. And frozen capital has never built one affordable home. Defend the people doing the work, even when it’s unpopular. Especially then.
For capital to flow, things have to clear. I believe that to my core. But “let it clear” and “hold every layer accountable” are not opposites. They’re the same sentence. The developer, the bank, the city, and the government that wrote the rules. All of them. Not just the easy name.
There are a lot of layers to this one. Don’t stop at the first floor.
Because there’s a layer under this one that almost nobody is talking about. The one person this whole deal completely forgot. That’s Part 2.
Go deeper than the headline. You’re sharper than the comment section. I know it, even when it’s loud out there.
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire # Encourage #Love
