Canada must build big

For 32 years, the CN Tower was the tallest freestanding structure in the world. This was a point of pride for many Canadians, and the CN Tower remains a symbol of Canadian ambition, a symbol of how our nation can think big, build big, and create something iconic.

That’s the kind of thinking we need now, and on a much bigger scale.

Canada faces a severe housing affordability crisis, and though reduced immigration levels are starting to ease some of the price pressure, we have a long way to go. There is an absurdity to all of this. In a nation with immense amounts of raw materials and where cold weather often incentivizes density, we have fallen short of making housing affordable for our population.

This needs to change.

And that starts with changing our mindset.

Thinking big, building big

Look at the image above, and together, let’s imagine a Canada where we build giant structures way up into the sky, a Canada where our cities inspire awe around the world, and where we look back at this moment of unaffordable housing and wonder how we ever let it get to that point.

And consider the following:

Canada has a unique combination of natural resources, a well-educated population, and areas of significant density. In fact, despite our landmass, a large portion of our population lives close together in large cities, and we are quite urbanized. Along with our cold weather, this means that building large vertical structures, connected to mass transit and interconnected internal walkways and skybridges (like in parts of Toronto, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and other Canadian cities) should be almost a no-brainer. We can be the world leader in constructing ambitious, beautiful, inspiring, and functional buildings that contain residential, commercial, and civic elements.

While such a vision will appeal to some, others will understandably recoil from it, wanting to live a more suburban lifestyle. Yet, were Canada to become a leader in the construction of the inspiring and functional buildings discussed above, that would bring down the price of all types of housing across the board. It’s not an ‘either-or prospect’; it’s a ‘yes and’ prospect.

Of course, this kind of vertical ambition does not build itself. Yet, the policies required to help unlock it are not complicated, just consistently avoided.

Policies that unlock scale

The barriers to ambitious building are rarely physical. Instead, they are legislative, bureaucratic, and financial. With that in mind, three changes would move the needle significantly:

First, federal and provincial governments should create a dedicated vertical construction stream within infrastructure funding, one that ties density bonuses and expedited permitting to projects that meet height, mixed-use, and transit-connectivity thresholds. Significant building height should be incentivized. Cities that zone upward and approve fast should be rewarded.

Second, municipal governments need to eliminate or dramatically reduce development charges and approval timelines for large mixed-use towers that include a mandated percentage of affordable units. Right now, the cost of regulatory friction is baked into the price of every unit. Streamlining that process does not require sacrificing standards. It requires treating ambitious construction as a civic priority rather than a bureaucratic inconvenience. If we want people to build, it has to be easier to build.

Third, Ottawa should establish a Canadian Construction Innovation Fund, a public-private partnership vehicle modelled loosely on how we once financed transformational infrastructure, that backs prefabrication technology, cold-climate construction methods, and the skybridge and internal walkway integration that makes dense vertical living genuinely comfortable in our climate. Canada’s winters, and the challenges they pose, are an argument for getting very good at something no one else has fully mastered.

Building for the long arc

There is a deeper argument underneath all of this:

Canada has always been, at its best, a place where people from everywhere could arrive and build something lasting. That promise has to be renewed in physical form. If we can’t house our people affordably, we are sending a message to our people that their future is limited. We cannot afford that message, in any sense of the word.

The buildings we construct now and in the coming years will be inherited by the next generation of Canadians. If we build small, we bequeath smallness. But if we build with ambition, with beauty, with structures designed to endure and to serve, we leave behind something that says this country and this civilization took itself seriously. The CN Tower was built in a different era, but the instinct behind it was right. The question now is whether we can recover that instinct and apply it not to one landmark, but to entire skylines, entire communities, and entire cities designed to welcome people in and give them room to build something that endures.

This is a civilizational commitment, and it’s a commitment Canada is more than capable of making.

Spencer Fernando

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