About the Project
Project Summary
While there is virtual unanimity that Canada is in the midst of a massive housing crisis, there is disagreement on theappropriate policies to address it (CMHC 2023). The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) estimates that 3.5 million additional units are needed to meet demand (CMHC 2023). Public construction is nearly at a stand-still, and efforts to spur private construction through affordable housing requirements have not yielded adequate results (Gupta 2024).
At the same time, the massive Canadian public pension funds hold over $2.2T of investments in global assets (Benefits Canada 2023). This figure includes expanding investment in housing markets in Canada and around the world, notably in the Global South. Given that housing shortages are global, this institutional investment has been welcomed and incentivised with tax credits and subsidies in Canada and elsewhere. But the consequences of having public pension funds becoming some of the world’s largest landlords suggest that more and better regulatory oversight is needed.
Recent research points to management practices that include racial discrimination, substandard maintenance, exploitation of labour, and rampant disregard for tenants’ wellbeing as pension funds follow the path of other financial investors in prioritizing profit maximization despite formally recognizing and purporting to champion environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. These practices contradict the common image of tax-assisted pension funds as trusted stewards of workers’ retirement savings. To date there has been no systemic analysis of this incongruence, nor its implications for policymakers. This project accordingly seeks to develop a framework of Canadian pension fund policies respecting investment in housing in order to help policymakers and the public understand the trade-offs that both pension funds and regulators are currently engaging in as they pursue financialized housing as a global investment commodity.
This project is a collaboration between has been awarded a SSHRC Insight Development grant for 2024-2026, with Priya Gupta (McGill Law) and Kevin Skerrett (Carleton Political Economy) as co-Principal Investigators. The current team working on this project is listed below.
