The headline
The pipeline
Permits become starts, starts become units under construction, and eventually completions. This is the whole page in one chart.
Flows are unadjusted monthly counts (CMHC). The lower panel is the stock of homes under construction — the pipeline's backlog. Permitted units (new dwelling units on residential permits) are only published from 2018. Provincial caveat: CMHC stopped publishing province-level completions and under-construction after 2022 — those two series end there for provinces and Canada, while starts continue. Metro-area views carry all stages to the current month.
What's being built
Housing starts by dwelling type — the decades-long shift from single-detached to apartments.
Homeowner = freehold, built for the owner; condo = built for individual sale; rental = purpose-built rental. Complete calendar years only. Source: CMHC via StatCan 34-10-0148 (centres 10,000+).
Residential vs non-residential
Where permit dollars are going — homes, or industrial / commercial / institutional space. Permit series begin in 2018.
Seasonally adjusted, current dollars.
Industrial / commercial / institutional, seasonally adjusted, current dollars.
What it costs
Two different questions: how the residential building dollar splits between putting up new homes and working on the ones we have, and what the work itself costs to buy.
Across the country
Every province on the same per-capita footing, trailing 12 months.
Metro areas
The major CMAs side by side. Click a column to sort; click a row to switch the whole page to that metro.
Starts and under-construction from CMHC (34-10-0154); permit value and investment are trailing-12-month sums (34-10-0292/0293, unadjusted where noted). Ottawa-Gatineau combines the Ontario and Quebec parts. Rental vacancy is the apartment (6+ units) vacancy rate from CMHC's annual October survey (34-10-0127) — a different vintage from the monthly columns beside it, so read it as context rather than as this month's figure.
Inside one city
Every chart above counts a whole metro area. These come straight from the city's own permit desk — the only address-level data on the page. A metro can hold more than one city with its own permit desk — Mississauga sits inside the Toronto CMA alongside the City of Toronto itself, so both appear together here.
These cards are the summary: nine cities, all floored at 2017 so they line up with each other and with the metro figures above. The Permits Explorer carries the record itself — each city back to its own first month (Montreal to 1990, Calgary to 1999), a density map of where the building actually happens, the firms that file the most permits, and how long approval and construction take. It needs no geography selection: all nine cities are on it at once.
The rate cycle
Housing starts against the cost of money. Same time axis, separate scales — hover to read both.
Overnight rate: Bank of Canada target (from 2009). 5-year rate: CMHC conventional mortgage lending rate. Rates are national; starts follow the selected geography.
Net new supply
Permits create dwelling units — but some are lost to demolition and conversion. The gap is what the housing stock actually gains.
All building types, unadjusted, trailing-12-month sums. "Lost" counts units removed via demolition or conversion permits. Series begin 2018.
Can we build it?
Construction employment vs the under-construction backlog — when the lines diverge, each worker is carrying more homes.
Employment: Labour Force Survey, NAICS Construction, seasonally adjusted — all construction, not only residential.
How green is what we build
Every chart above counts homes. This one asks what they're like to heat — the same country, the same years, measured instead of counted.
Sources not used, that we could add
This page already draws on ~15 StatCan tables, nine municipal permit APIs and three hand-curated program sources. Here's what we looked at and left out, and why.
- CMHC Rental Market Survey — vacancy and rent detail beyond the one CMA vacancy column already pulled from 34-10-0127; could deepen the "did it sell" / rental side of the pipeline.
- StatCan Capital and Repair Expenditures Survey — private/public and residential/non-residential capital-spending intentions, a forward-looking complement to the backward-looking permits/starts data already on the page. Not yet evaluated for table structure or geography.
- Provincial building-code adoption tracking (which province has adopted which NBC tier, and when) — would let "How green is what we build" connect EnerGuide outcomes to actual code-in-force dates. No known machine-readable source; would likely need hand-transcription like the CHBA/Greener Homes figures.
- CMHC Housing Market Insight / Assessment reports — qualitative regional commentary, the same "cite-only" pattern already used for CHBA's Housing Market Index. No bulk API; would need per-report transcription.
- Provincial new-home warranty programs (Tarion/ON, RESCON, HCRA, GBC-BC, ANBQ-QC) — could add defect/claim rates by building type. Licensing and redistribution rights unchecked; would need clearing before any commitment, per our data-honesty rules.
- StatCan Labour Force Survey, construction detail — deeper skilled-trades wage/vacancy cuts than 14-10-0442 already provides. Likely redundant with what's shipped unless trades-level granularity is specifically wanted.
- Additional municipal permit desks (e.g. Quebec City, Surrey, Hamilton) — same integration pattern as the nine cities already on Permits Explorer. Each is its own bespoke ETL effort; scoped to that page, not this one.
Of these, a building-code adoption tracker and the CMHC Rental Market Survey (deeper than the one vacancy column already pulled) are the most directly useful extensions of sections already on this page — everything else is either redundant with what's shipped or blocked on licensing/access.