The federal government proudly touts the progress seen through a $4.4 billion fund that offered money to municipalities that agreed to zoning reforms and other improvements to accelerate construction of new housing.

It says the money has already directly create permits for over 334,126 new housing units, and will lead to the construction of 750,000 new homes in the next decade.

But an iPolitics analysis of the publicly available progress reports shows missing documentation and outdated data from recipients, raising questions on whether Ottawa is hitting its targets for the program.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is responsible for oversight of the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) and hosts an online progress page to keep tabs on how municipalities are faring. Access to HAF was dependent on applicants agreeing to meet housing permit goals.

An initial glance of the page suggests most municipalities are meeting or exceeding their three-year targets. Poring deeper, however, raises more questions.

Many municipalities last submitted annual reports in 2025 — if they have at all — and it’s not clearly detailed if the new housing is directly attributable to HAF changes or something else.

An assessment of the 77 municipalities that received funding in the large urban stream — there’s a separate pool for small, rural and Indigenous communities and Quebec negotiated directly with the feds — found that Ottawa has pledged $2.9 billion, while recipients have collectively reported 226,781 new housing permits.

While the annual reports attempt to detail how municipalities are working to their targets, they fail to explain if any of the permits are related to HAF improvements.

For example, a report filed by St. Albert, Alberta shows the municipality exceeded its first-year target and needed to add only 658 permits to meet its total housing supply target of 6,523. But the report only breaks down the types of housing added into four categories — multi-units near rapid transit, missing middle housing, other multi-unit housing and affordable housing  — and the total of those categories doesn’t equal the city’s overall target.

This is crucial because the municipalities had to demonstrate that money provided by Ottawa would directly lead to new housing starts. It’s unclear how the CMHC is tracking if the reforms municipalities made under HAF were tied to specific housing permits.

iPolitics first reached out to the CMHC on July 10 for clarity on how the Crown corporation was tracking progress and its rule for determining if a new unit was attributable to HAF reforms. A week later and CMHC hasn’t offered a response to the questions.

Housing expert Mike Moffatt says no one should hold their breath for an answer from CMHC — they just can’t actually gauge the effectiveness of the program.

“There is absolutely no way to link outcomes in terms of housing permits, and HAF actions. None whatsoever,” said Moffatt, the executive in residence at the Smart Prosperity Institute.

“All of those permits could have happened anyway without the HAF.”

A major complication when it comes to making these determinations is the starting line. That’s because those HAF numbers are calculated against a baseline of expected housing growth, meaning the program’s apparent impact depends heavily on whether the original baseline was credible.

A municipality can exceed its permit forecast because federal funding helped it reform its system. It can also exceed its forecast because population growth, interest rates, provincial policy, a major development application or zoning work that began before its HAF agreement changed local activity.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer identified precisely that problem in a July 2025 assessment. It found participating jurisdictions had issued 31 per cent more permits and recorded five per cent more housing starts than their 2018-to-2023 averages, outperforming non-participating jurisdictions.

But the PBO said much of the increase was concentrated in Quebec, Calgary and Edmonton, where important zoning initiatives were already underway or had received legislative approval before the HAF agreements were signed.

Fun with numbers

Another complication comes down to the data itself.

A note on the CMHC website says reporting data timeline depends on if municipalities applied in 2023 or 2024. Those in the 2023 wave were expected to file last year, and those accepted in 2024 had until this past May to file.

In a few rare cases, the data seems to be missing altogether. A progress report from the City of North Vancouver has no permit figures, while there’s no report at all from Maple Ridge or Port Coquitlam — though that may be an error as the report linked to Port Coquitlam actually is the report for neighbouring Coquitlam.

It’s not clear when the next deadline is for the municipalities, but the data lag makes it difficult to gauge progress. While housing starts in Canada increased by 6.5 per cent from 2024 to 2025, it was by no means a uniform increase. In Ontario, housing starts dropped by 13 per cent, and 31 per cent in the Toronto metro area.

In a statement to iPolitics, a spokesperson for Housing Minister Gregor Robertson called HAF an “important program that recognizes and rewards ambitious local governments that are taking meaningful steps to get more homes built, faster.”

Arianna Durgerian said the existing permit numbers are 34,000 higher than expected and noted that local governments must meet their obligations under HAF or risk losing their funding, which would then be made available to other municipalities.

Toronto, Vaughan, Markham and Charlottetown are among the major cities that have already had funding clawed back for failing to honour the terms of their deals, and Calgary could join that group soon after repealing its blanket zoning changes. Cities like Red Deer and Miramichi had their agreements terminated out right.

Stick or carrot? 

When it comes to whose to blame for Canada’s housing affordability crisis, someone will inevitably point the finger at municipalities. They say that cities create too many barriers to construction, from onerous developer fees to labyrinthine zoning rules.

The HAF was presented as a solution by offering up an enticing carrot to municipalities, in millions of dollars of desperately needed funding. Unlike provinces or the federal government, most municipalities in Canada can’t run operating deficits, and can typically only turn to property taxes or user fees to keep the lights on.

But municipalities are probably more sensitive to micro-level issues than other orders of government. A NIMBY complaint about too many apartments in one neighbourhood can morph into a serious threat to an incumbent seeking re-election in a typical low turnout race.

HAF ran into the issue head-first, with Oakville pulling out of a deal due to council objecting to zoning changes and several cities like Toronto, Markham and Calgary reneged on commitments that would make it easier to build high-density housing.

The Conservatives have always framed HAF as a photo-op disguised as a housing program. The official opposition has proposed setting permit targets for municipalities, and letting them figure out of how to get there. If they don’t, the Tories said hold back some infrastructure funding, while giving a bonus to those who exceed targets.

Conservative housing critic Scott Aitchison told iPolitics in the spring that HAF only complicated an already costly and unwieldy approval process by bringing in an Ottawa-knows-best approach.

“It’s adding more bureaucracy, which is fundamentally at its core, the problem in the housing situation,” he said, warning that it could be repeated in the federal government’s new Build Canada Homes agency.

“It’s classic. It’s the Liberal government overly complicating things to try to direct how the world should work.”

Aitchison said the housing crisis is caused by two major factors: costly fees — namely developer charges — and labyrinthine zoning rules.

Developer charges are used to ensure new housing projects cover the cost of their associated infrastructure needs. Municipal zoning laws lay out where certain housing types are permitted.

But with housing costs soaring, Aitchison said municipalities can’t “force all new development to pay for anything related to that new development,” and Ottawa needs to set targets for approvals to ensure zoning rules aren’t slowing down construction.

The bigger picture

Including all streams, agreements under HAF cover 238 municipalities, Indigenous governments and other public bodies admitted through the 2023 and 2024 intakes. 

Among the 177 active agreements from the 2023 intake with first-year results, 109 — about 62 per cent — had completed more than 80 per cent of the initiatives scheduled under their action plans. Another 30 had completed between 50 and 80 per cent, while 38 were below the halfway mark.

Permit activity was also ahead of schedule in many communities. Ninety-three of the 176 recipients with available permitting data, or 53 per cent, met or exceeded their forecast for the reporting period.

Nearly two-thirds had reached at least 80 per cent of their forecast, while about one in five had achieved less than half of it.

But the municipal-level results expose a more complicated picture.

Whitby reached just 37 per cent of its expected permitting level after receiving nearly $25 million. St. Catharines reached 40 per cent after receiving $25.7 million. Richmond Hill was at 53 per cent, Mississauga at 56 per cent and Guelph at 58 per cent.

The gap between action-plan implementation and actual permit performance is one of the clearest weaknesses revealed by the data.

Whitby, St. Catharines, Richmond Hill, Mississauga and Guelph were all reported as having completed more than 80 per cent of their scheduled initiatives, even though each was significantly behind its permit forecast.

Conversely, Markham had completed less than half of its initiatives but had issued permits at 191 per cent of its expected pace.

That does not mean zoning and permitting reforms have no effect. Many changes may take years to influence development applications, permits and construction.

It does, however, mean the first-year data cannot demonstrate a strong relationship between checking off action-plan commitments and immediately increasing housing approvals.

The program’s public tracker also does not provide comparable municipality-level data on construction starts, completions, occupancy, prices or the share of homes that are genuinely affordable.

How do you measure success?

Even after reviewing the data from every HAF agreement, one question remains difficult to answer: how should the program actually be judged?

The federal government measures progress through a mix of zoning reforms, action-plan commitments and housing permits. But those indicators do not always move together, and none of them necessarily translate into completed homes.

“People can’t live in a permit,” said Moffatt, who’s also the founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative at the University of Ottawa.

A building permit is only permission to build. Projects can be delayed, cancelled or become financially unviable before construction ever begins. At the same time, municipalities argue that once they have issued a permit, whether a project moves forward is largely up to developers and market conditions—not city hall.

Moffatt said that disconnect makes it difficult to know whether the program has actually increased housing supply.

“You’re asking exactly the right question,” he said. “It’s just so hard to answer because it wasn’t clear from the outset what the Housing Accelerator Fund was meant to accomplish.”

The program originally focused on encouraging municipalities to legalize fourplexes and other forms of gentle density. Over time, however, individual agreements evolved to include different combinations of zoning reforms, housing targets and permitting goals.

That meant municipalities were not all playing by exactly the same rules.

“The federal government was negotiating all of these deals with cities, and some of them were getting different deals than others,” Moffatt said. “It wasn’t really clear where the emphasis should be.”

It also shows why permits are, at best, an imperfect measure of the program’s ultimate purpose. A permit is permission to build, not a completed home. It can be delayed, revised or never acted on.

“If we’re just basing it on permits, we’d probably say it’s been a failure because permits are declining,” Moffatt said. “But a lot of that has nothing to do with municipalities.”

And because the agreements never clearly spelled out the consequences for failing to meet individual commitments, some municipalities realized they could walk away from politically unpopular reforms without losing much of their funding, Moffatt said.

“If there’s 11 conditions in the deal, what happens if you only meet nine or 10 of them?” he said. “It was never really explicit.”

with files from Sydney Ko

Want to check our work? A PDF of our data table can be found here. An Excel or Google Sheets file can be found here.