Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during an announcement at a construction site in Vancouver on June 18, 2026. The Canadian Press/Chad Hipolito
Prime Minister Mark Carney says his government’s plan to purchase vacant condos in British Columbia and turn them into affordable housing is meant to help Canadians, and not housing developers.
Ottawa and the B.C. government recently announced a proposal to finance the acquisition and conversion of more than 2,200 vacant unsold condo units into affordable housing.
Carney told reporters on June 25 that this initiative would cost around $1.5 billion, and the federal government would contribute about 10 percent of the cost. “Of course, developers are not going to admit that they’re going to have distressed condos. But we don’t care about the developer, we care about the person, the family that can potentially move into the home,” Carney said.
The prime minister said that wherever the government saw “opportunities where that’s the best use of the dollar,” they would consider buying up the unsold condos. Carney also said his government had not done a “particularly good job of rolling this out and explaining exactly what it is.”
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has criticized the proposal, saying on June 25 it amounted to “bailing out these condo developers who have made billions over the last several decades.” He argued that the Liberal government had inflated the housing market into a “bubble” and was now asking ordinary Canadians to use their tax dollars to “bail out his developer friends.”
When Carney was asked by a reporter if any developers had asked him to implement the policy, he replied, “no developer asked for this from me directly.” Carney said that the province of B.C. had “initiated the idea.”
B.C. Premier David Eby told reporters on June 25 that with the “absence of the details” around the policy, “the plot has been lost a bit there.” Eby said his government seeks to make housing more affordable by buying housing at below the cost of construction and making homes available to people.
“If people hate it, that’s ok, we don’t have to do it. But I actually think that ultimately, we’ll be buying below the cost of construction, no developers will be profiting from us, and it will give people an opportunity to buy a home that would otherwise not have it,” Eby said.
Eby said the federal government would have preferred to use its $300 million in funding to remove the GST on new homes like it had done in Ontario, but he said that “doesn’t work” in his province because a GST exemption on new homes already exists for first-time homebuyers. That means such a policy would only help people who already have homes.
Conservative MP Scott Aitchison, who serves as his party’s shadow housing minister, questioned who had come up with the plan “to spend Canadians’ tax dollars buying thousands of unsold condos,” given that Carney said developers did not ask him to implement the plan. Aitchison said he wrote a letter to federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson “demanding transparency” on the plan, which he said would keep housing prices high. Aitchison also noted that despite Ottawa promising to build half a million homes per year, only around half that number had been built so far.
