In the midst of a campaign season last year that featured Mike Myers, hockey jerseys, and a bunch of Canadian flags, you might have missed one of Carney’s most revealing quotes right before it wrapped up:
It’s no surprise that the quote hasn’t attracted more analysis. It’s pretty much the most boring thing an aspiring Prime Minister can say on the campaign trail. But it’s the only way to understand how this government was supposed to work.
So, what does it actually mean? And has it held up?
Econometrics is the closest thing economics has to a science. Instead of relying on vibes, you collect data and carefully evaluate how well policies worked out, or didn’t.
In theory, the numbers you see at the end of every spending announcement are a form of econometrics. Not the most accurate form, but still. Just last month, Ottawa announced the largest shipbuilding contract in Québec’s history, allegedly “creating nearly 5,000 good jobs in the construction phase alone.” Now, you might be impressed by the government’s ability to create so many good jobs without a single bad one, but I guess you allow for some margin for error when you spend $11 billion.
That framing was silly, but the number wasn’t pulled out of thin air. An analyst fed the proposed budget into a model, and that model spat out an estimate of how many jobs it would create. Good econometrics also uses models, but it requires a lot more transparency about the whole process.
For example, every five years the Bank of Canada releases an official review of its Monetary Policy Framework. The final document is just a high-level summary, but it’s detailed and technical enough to make your eyes glaze over almost instantly. The Bank spends the years in between those reviews empirically testing the leading alternatives against their own approach, and then releases the results publicly.
When you say you’re going to govern in econometrics, that’s the type of approach I’d expect. Especially from a former Bank of Canada Governor, who spent years overseeing that same process. New policies grounded in data and transparency, so the public can actually follow along and see what holds up over time.
So, is that how he’s governed?
In March 2026, Carney launched one of his government’s biggest housing policies yet, with an $8.8 billion deal to reduce development charges in Ontario. British Columbia got its own $3.2 billion version of the deal in June. There’s no mystery about why those two were picked. They have the highest charges by far.
Development charges are the fees that municipalities charge on new housing. They were initially designed to pay for the new infrastructure that housing needs, but that’s not always how they work in practice.
BC’s program isn’t finalized yet, but Ontario’s is already in progress. Their program funds infrastructure in municipalities that cut charges by at least 30% and keep them down for three years. The bet is that lower charges will help jumpstart housing construction, or “get more homes built faster,” as the federal Minister of Finance put it.
It’s hard to argue with speculative results like that. But something about the whole rollout bugged me… Where were the numbers we got used to earlier? The March announcement had them for everything else:
8,000 additional housing starts and up to 21,000 jobs from the HST rebate
75,000 homes enabled by the Waterfront East transit line
What about the development charge cuts? How many good jobs or good homes would they create?
Maybe those initial government estimates were always meaningless anyways. But weren’t they an important part of our fancy new Government by Econometrics?
No Dataset
Cutting development charges to get more homes built faster sounds great, but it isn’t econometrics if nobody has the data. And nobody really does. Which makes the data analysis, and the whole econometrics part, a little tricky.
CMHC, the federal Crown corporation and self-described “foundation of Canada’s housing system,” published its first development charge dataset last December. The initial extract covered just 30 municipalities. They’ve added ten more since then, but it’s still a spreadsheet of current rates with different units and no standardized way to compare cities now or over time.
CMHC’s Chief Economist has publicly complained that the data was so messy for some cities it was “unusable,” with different categories, units, and bylaw formats. And he’s not wrong. The data is extremely messy. But the mess is part of the failure too. Development charge data is only “unusable” because the charges were left to grow unchecked for over a decade.
It’s not like they snuck up on anyone either. CMHC first surveyed them back in 1996! Follow-ups came in 2002, 2006, and 2009, and then the series just stopped. CMHC also commissioned econometric research on development charges back in 1999. But that research didn’t even use the survey data CMHC had collected a few years earlier. It just picked some hypothetical fee levels, added them to home prices, and assumed every dollar got passed straight through to buyers.
If the charges were already worth surveying and modelling decades ago, why did CMHC wait until last year to start tracking them again?
Maybe I’m being too harsh. A dataset to evaluate a $12 billion investment is handy, but is it really necessary? They could have just relied on existing research.
The issue is that there isn’t much to rely on. At least not for the question Ottawa’s invested in. Study after study looks at what the charges do to home prices. Hardly any look at construction. CMHC’s own literature review last year didn’t either. Their focus was on who ends up paying, not what gets built.
In Canada, there’s even less to work with. The last time CMHC published econometrics on the charges was that 1999 study, with no real data. Everything since then has been sporadic fee surveys, cost breakdowns, and one viability model in June that assumed the effect rather than measuring it1. Just like the 1999 study.
Nobody has tested what these charges do to construction in Canada because, until now, there was no data to do it with.
Making It Up as We Go
If the data gap were the only issue, you could just call it bad luck. The kind that always seems to haunt people who keep making the same mistakes. But it’s not just that. Take a look at how the program has been run so far:
It was announced in March, but Ontario didn’t publish the actual terms until the day applications opened in June. That gave municipalities eighteen days to decide whether to give up a core piece of revenue for three years.
The fund originally set a portion aside for municipalities without any development charges, to avoid punishing the places that never relied on them. But the carve-out’s size and design didn’t show up until August, nearly two months after initial applications closed. The rollout even confused the minister who announced it. He told reporters the $1 billion was “over and above” the original $8.8 billion fund, but his office had to correct him.
Governments announce programs and then sort out the details later all the time. It’s practically a tradition. But Carney promised us something different.
Decision-Based Evidence-Making
I wish I could tell you that this development charge program was an outlier, but it’s not. Especially in housing.
In 2022, the Auditor General found that CMHC and Infrastructure Canada had spent roughly $5.9 billion between them under the National Housing Strategy without knowing what they got for it. Infrastructure Canada couldn’t say whether chronic homelessness had gone up or down, and CMHC couldn’t say who its money was helping. It was worse than just a lack of data:
“Despite being the lead for the National Housing Strategy and overseeing the majority of its funding, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation took the position that it was not directly accountable for addressing chronic homelessness. Infrastructure Canada was also of the view that while it contributed to reducing chronic homelessness, it was not solely accountable for achieving the strategy’s target of reducing chronic homelessness. This meant that despite being a federally established target, there was minimal federal accountability for its achievement.”
That audit came out before Carney took over as PM, but he’s the one who promised to break the pattern. In some ways, he did.
In 2022, the problem was a target nobody would own. Now there isn’t even a target.
Ottawa and the provinces have put a combined $12 billion on the table to reduce development charges, with no research to justify it, no data to track it, and no public plan to evaluate how it all works out.
If this is econometrics, I must have slept through all my classes.
Govern in Econometrics
Carney promised us something different. When he said those three incredibly boring words on the campaign trail, economists everywhere dared to dream of something better. But that technocratic utopia hasn’t materialized yet. At least not in housing.
If we actually want this country to change, we have to start with the way we make policy. Especially the boring stuff: how we collect data, set goals, and judge the results. Anyone can do that kind of groundbreaking work after a policy’s launched. What makes it valuable and unique is planning it out in public before the policy starts.
We don’t get to do business as usual anymore. We no longer have the privilege of letting problems fester for years. Now that our lovely next-door neighbour has turned trade policy into a weapon, Canada needs to channel its existential angst into something more than fiery speeches.
Maybe Carney was a fool to promise anything different. This country still governs in poetry after all. But boy oh boy, how beautiful it sounds.
CMHC's Housing Development Viability Analyzer counts how many hypothetical projects clear a profitability line before and after a fee cut, then treats every project that becomes viable as built. CMHC hasn't published the model's methodology.