This series opened with a question. In June 2026, Ottawa and Victoria announced plans to spend up to $1.45 billion to buy roughly 2,200 unsold condominium units and convert them into a rent-to-buy pathway to homeownership. The second column traced the cost: a social housing stock frozen in place while need exploded, and research showing that preventing homelessness is cheaper, more effective, and more humane than managing its consequences.
This final part asks the practical question: if the pattern is structural rather than accidental, what would it actually take to break it?
Who Writes the Rules
Readers of the first column will recall the Global News analysis of ministers’ disclosure forms: none of the 38 members of cabinet rent their principal residence. The analysis simply shows who is selected for leadership in a country where wealth and homeownership are tightly correlated, and that selection shapes perspective.
When tenant advocates asked the government this spring to add binding protections for renters to its signature housing bill, the committee voted down every recommended amendment. Julieta Perucca of the tenant advocacy group The Shift asked directly whether MPs’ own property holdings could be shaping how they legislate, and replied: “I think it’s possible, yes.” Housing researcher Ricardo Tranjan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put it structurally: tenants are underrepresented in city halls, legislatures, and Parliament, so the people writing the rules are rarely the people those rules must protect.
When a government becomes a major buyer of unsold housing, research on subsidised housing demand suggests it can act as a price floor, absorbing inventory that would otherwise put downward pressure on prices. A few thousand units in a market short by hundreds of thousands may be too small to move prices, but officials championing the programme have not addressed the question publicly, which is telling in itself.
Where the Money Goes
While all this unfolds, a different type of infrastructure is attracting a different reception. In Kamloops, Bell launched a 7-megawatt AI computing facility in June 2025, part of a 500-megawatt “AI Fabric” initiative. Two more 26-megawatt centres are planned for 2026 and 2027; a second 7-megawatt facility came online in Merritt early this year; and in March, Bell confirmed a $1.7 billion, 300-megawatt facility in Saskatchewan, which is under construction. Telus is expanding its Kamloops data centre and developing AI factories in Kamloops and Rimouski, Quebec, with federal support. These projects could generate $9 billion in economic activity, and AI Minister Evan Solomon calls Telus’s project “the kind of ambitious infrastructure we need as a country.”
Direct employment is modest at best; calling these mass employment programmes would be generous. They are infrastructure for global tech capital, built on public land, fed by public power grids, announced with ministerial fanfare.
None of this argues against building AI data centres. That is a separate debate altogether. The point is that governments that claim they cannot find money for affordable housing keep finding land, power, political will, and public-private partnerships for infrastructure that serves big capital. Money was never the constraint. Priority was. When Bell wants a data centre, ministers cut ribbons in Kamloops, Merritt, and Saskatchewan. When non-profits want to build homes for the poorest renters, ministers cut budgets, and sometimes they do not even explain why.
Better Solutions Are Available
Vienna offers the best-known version: social housing, home to 60 percent of the city’s population across every income bracket, funded by a dedicated 1 per cent payroll tax that raises roughly 450 million euros a year across Austria. Vienna’s share flows back to the city, along with recycled loan repayments, none of which a single budget vote can zero out.
Denmark offers the one that fits BC better. Denmark’s National Building Fund is financed entirely by tenant rents, sits outside the state budget altogether, and has operated that way for more than fifty years to ensure housing investment does not rise and fall with the political cycle. It even expanded funding during COVID, when state budgets elsewhere were under the most strain. It asks nothing of a national legislature, making it the model for a federal country where provinces cannot levy a nationwide tax.
There are nuances to navigate, of course. The Vienna model rests on a century of consensus; Denmark, on a rent-financed fund that a province could replicate; and neither city faces Metro Vancouver’s land costs or investor-driven presale financing. What transfers cleanly, though, is the mechanism: a dedicated revenue stream protected from annual budgetary discretion. Canada already has domestic precedent for both elements.
Two Possible Fixes
The pattern is simple and hard to miss. When capital is in distress, governments of every stripe find the money and the urgency. When programmes for the poor face cuts, they vanish quietly. British Columbia’s 2026 decisions fit that pattern exactly: a non-profit fund building homes for the poorest renters was suspended without a word of explanation, and financing for unsold condos was found within months.
Breaking that pattern requires two changes, neither of which demands a new ideology. First, fund non-market housing as Ottawa already funds municipal infrastructure, through permanent, indexed agreements that no single budget can zero out.
Second, require the government to disclose, before suspending or reallocating any housing fund, which projects are affected, which income tier is served, and how many units are lost, using the same kind of analysis that federal budget proposals already undergo under the Canadian Gender Budgeting Act.
Neither change would, on its own, fix affordability, but both would make the next quiet cut harder. Whether the condo plan outlasts the Community Housing Fund depends on whether the structure that is writing this policy has any built-in reason to ensure it does. Three months after the announcement, no transaction has been signed. With the legislature now dissolved for a snap election, none will be signed until after Oct. 24.
On October 17, British Columbians vote in municipal elections. A week later, they vote provincially, in a snap election that makes the trade war, not housing, the campaign’s stated subject. Housing is on the ballot all the same. The forest is still thinning. The axe is still voting.
This time you get to vote too. Twice.
Social Justice Watch is a column about structural patterns in public policy based on the author’s research. The author welcomes constructive feedback, factual corrections and substantive counterarguments at [email protected].