By Dean Brown.

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Good day,

Halloween is just around the corner, so this week I went looking for Canada’s ghost homes.

And the number sounds almost absurd.

Statistics Canada says 7.5% of Canadian dwellings were classified as unoccupied in 2021.

With more than 16 million dwellings in the country, that works out to something on the order of a million homes without a usual resident.

In the middle of a housing crisis, the obvious question is:

There is a problem with that question.

“Unoccupied” does not mean “perfectly usable home being deliberately kept empty.”

And once you understand that distinction, Canada’s housing problem looks very different.

Statistics Canada’s Housing Economic Account found 7.5% of dwellings were unoccupied nationally in 2021.

But the provincial differences are enormous.

Newfoundland and Labrador was at 16.5%.

P.E.I. was 13.1%.

Saskatchewan was 12%.

Ontario was 6.9%.

Quebec was only 6.6%.

See Statistics Canada’s provincial breakdown

That pattern alone should make us skeptical of the idea that this is simply millions of Toronto and Vancouver investor condos sitting dark.

Newfoundland and Labrador had more than twice Quebec’s unoccupied rate.

Something more complicated is going on.

Yes, this is the most important distinction in the story.

A dwelling can have no usual resident for plenty of reasons.

Someone may have died.

It may be between owners or tenants.

It may be undergoing a major renovation.

It may have just been completed.

The owner may temporarily be in long-term care.

It may be a second home.

Or yes, somebody may genuinely be keeping it empty.

That is why you cannot take the national 7.5% figure and say:

They couldn’t.

The national statistic is measuring something much broader than homes sitting empty and ready for tenants.

Municipal vacancy taxes use much narrower definitions.

Toronto’s system covers roughly 820,000 residential properties.

The city reported 5,989 declared or deemed vacant properties in 2024, down from 6,944 in 2022.

Toronto estimates its residential vacancy rate at roughly 1% to 1.2%.

Vancouver’s latest Empty Homes Tax data identified 979 vacant properties in 2024.

Another 3,718 properties were empty but qualified for exemptions.

That is a much smaller problem than the national “more than a million unoccupied homes” headline makes it sound.

The definitions are different.

And that difference matters.

None of this means long-term vacancy is irrelevant.

Toronto’s Vacant Home Tax is currently 3% of assessed value.

For an $800,000 property, that works out to:

That gives an owner a pretty strong incentive to:

rent it

sell it

live in it

or prove the property qualifies for an exemption.

Vancouver uses the same basic idea.

And there is evidence these taxes can change behaviour.

A C.D. Howe Institute study estimated Vancouver had about 5,355 fewer vacant units between 2016 and 2021 than researchers estimated it would have had without the tax.

So vacancy taxes can work at what they are actually designed to do:

But that brings us to the harder question.

The same Vancouver study found something surprising.

Researchers found no measurable reduction in average rents.

More homes became available.

Average rents did not measurably fall.

That does not mean the policy failed.

Thousands of additional homes becoming available still matters.

But it tells us something important about the size of the problem.

If recovering thousands of homes does not noticeably move rents, Canada’s housing shortage is probably much larger than the vacant-home problem alone.

And that raises the questions I dug into for Plus.

I do the digging. You get the important part.

In the full edition:

Do vacancy taxes actually make housing cheaper?

How much of the “investor problem” is really a vacancy problem?

How important is foreign ownership?

Why did Ottawa end its own Underused Housing Tax?

And would filling every genuinely empty home make a meaningful dent in Canada’s shortage?

READ THE FULL PLUS EDITION →

Here is the number that puts everything else in perspective.

CMHC estimates Canada needs roughly 417,000 to 469,000 housing starts every year through 2036 to restore affordability to 2019 levels.

Under business as usual, it expects roughly:

231,000 starts a year.

That leaves Canada short roughly:

That is why the answer cannot simply be:

Using genuinely vacant homes better can help.

Especially in expensive cities.

But Canada still needs a lot more housing.

Explore CMHC’s housing-supply analysis

I think the viral version of this argument gets two things wrong at once.

Canada does not have a million investor-owned homes sitting ready to be rented tomorrow.

But that also does not mean genuinely vacant homes should get a free pass in places where people are struggling to find somewhere to live.

Vacancy taxes can help us make better use of the housing we already have.

Construction deals with the much bigger shortage underneath it.

We probably need both.

Until next time,

Dean

P.S. What surprised you more: the 7.5% national number, or how small Toronto and Vancouver’s taxable vacant-home counts are by comparison?