If Homes Are No Longer the Yardstick, What Did Housing Executives Earn Bonuses For?

A housing crisis is not the time for Ottawa to soften the scoreboard while executives collect performance pay.

Canadians were promised a housing machine. They were told Build Canada Homes would help “supercharge” construction, use federal land, deploy $13 billion in initial capital and contribute to a national effort to double housing construction. In a country where rent and mortgage costs have become a generational crisis, that promise was not supposed to be symbolic. It was supposed to produce homes.

That is why the newest reporting deserves scrutiny. Juno News, citing Blacklock’s Reporter, says Housing Minister Gregor Robertson’s department is moving away from housing unit counts as the central measure of success for Build Canada Homes. The reported departmental wording says the framework is designed to move beyond measuring outputs such as housing counts. If accurate, that is a remarkable shift: a housing program being judged less directly by the number of homes.

There can be legitimate supporting measures in housing policy. Affordability depth, speed of approvals, supportive-housing outcomes, construction productivity and public-land use all matter. But none of them replaces the basic receipt: how many homes were started, completed, occupied, and kept affordable for how long. A government that changes the yardstick after selling Canadians scale and urgency invites a simple conservative question: are they measuring results, or managing expectations?

The performance-pay records make the question sharper. Treasury Board’s official 2024-25 executive performance table lists Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada at $2,134,907 in total executive performance pay. That includes $2,063,681 in at-risk pay and $71,226 in bonuses. The same table lists 109 executives receiving at-risk pay only, 10 receiving bonuses in addition to at-risk pay, two receiving no at-risk pay, and 121 executives in total.

Performance pay is not automatically improper. Treasury Board says it is tied to annual performance commitments, organizational objectives, individual objectives and leadership competencies. Fine. Then publish the housing-specific commitments. If executives were rewarded during an affordability crisis, Canadians deserve to know whether those rewards were tied to completed homes, faster approvals, lower per-unit costs, affordability terms, or internal process targets invisible to the public.

This is the danger of Ottawa’s culture of announcement first, receipts later. Politicians get credit for big housing language. Bureaucracies get credit for frameworks, partnerships and activity. Families get the actual test: keys in doors, rents they can afford, and homes built where people need them.

Build Canada Homes should not be allowed to become a black box where outputs are softened and bonuses are explained only in aggregate. Publish the annual unit targets, starts, completions, occupancy dates, cost per unit, affordability rules, executive performance criteria and bonus approvals. If the government is delivering, the ledger will prove it. If it is not, Canadians should not have to wait for another crisis-year press release to find out.