Canada’s housing starts ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 248,896 units in September, up 3% from August and well above the 232,500 economists expected, but the bigger cities told a different story: actual starts in Toronto fell 61% from a year earlier and Montreal’s fell 51%. The national number looks steady. The urban pipeline doesn’t.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. released the figures Oct. 16. The six-month trend edged up 0.6% to 250,411 units, which the agency called virtually flat.
Canada housing starts by metro
In centres with at least 10,000 people, builders broke ground on 19,984 units in September, down 11% from 22,375 a year earlier. Year to date, those centres are at 170,964 starts, 4% behind 2025.
The split by city is wide. Toronto went from 3,678 starts in September 2025 to 1,440. Montreal dropped from 2,610 to 1,266, and its six-month trend fell 8% on weaker multi-unit work. Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo collapsed from 1,259 to 112.
The West and Ottawa carried the month. Vancouver rose 27% to 2,491 starts and Calgary gained 12% to 2,535. Ottawa-Gatineau climbed 83% to 979. Vancouver’s six-month trend is up 6% on multi-unit starts, and British Columbia’s provincial trend rose 10% while Quebec’s fell 11%.
Monthly numbers in Canada swing hard because a handful of large rental towers can make or break a month in any one metro. That’s why the trend lines matter more than any single September reading.
Multi-unit construction drives the decline
Multi-unit buildings are most of the market and most of the drop. In the larger centres, actual starts of apartments, row houses and other multi-unit types fell 12% year over year to 16,316, against a 6% decline for single-detached homes. Year to date, multi-unit starts are down 4% and single-detached down 6%.
The work already underway is holding. CMHC counts 371,617 units under construction in centres of 50,000 or more, flat from August. Completions slipped 0.9% to 17,398, and approved permits that haven’t started rose 1.1% to 143,929.
That last figure is worth a look. Nearly 144,000 permitted units waiting to start is a backlog of approved work that developers are choosing not to begin, usually because pro formas don’t close at current costs and rents.
What CMHC’s economist is warning about
Aled ab Iorwerth, CMHC’s deputy chief economist, said a key risk now is not building enough while housing markets soften across the country. Of the four most populous provinces, he said, only Quebec has posted modest gains in starts this year, and affordability improvements since 2023 will be hard to keep without more construction.
For contractors working both sides of the border, the pattern is familiar. U.S. builders are also reporting labor shortages wider than the 2004-06 boom with starts far below that era. In Canada, the shortfall is showing up first in its two largest metros, where concrete high-rise residential has long been the backbone of the trades.
The next read comes Nov. 17. If Toronto’s six-month trend, now 24,837 units, keeps slipping, the 144,000 approved-but-unstarted units will be the number Canadian GCs watch.