#35

Most Canadians don’t realize how much poorer we’ve become than Americans. Ten years ago, our per capita GDPs were comparable. We’re now about 20-25% lower. Back then, even the New York Times was running stories about our middle class being richer than theirs. We’re not seeing those stories anymore.

This relative decline doesn’t seem to have been internalized by our elites, certainly not enough to make a genuine effort to reverse it. That might be because they’re all high on their home value increases, or because their distaste for American politics creates an unresolvable cognitive dissonance.

But it is true, and it is important.

When young guys reach out to me and ask for career advice, I give them my two cents, including that they should seriously consider emigration. I don’t like that that’s often my best advice, but it is.

Those who stay—and I’m not leaving—have to work much harder to change that.

Ontario, in particular, is underperforming most provinces. We’ve got a higher unemployment rate than the country as a whole, much higher housing prices than the country as a whole, lower growth forecasts than the country as a whole, and a government that couldn’t be more proud of its accomplishments (getting re-elected).

I continue to think that making life better for your constituents is underrated in politics, relative to the narrower work of making life better for individual pressure groups.

At some point, the folksy rhetoric wears thin and the opposition starts making the case successfully. I don’t know how many provincial Conservatives see the inevitable coming after seven years of relative decline.

New data show the Province falling short of its self-imposed housing completions target, even after broadening what counts as a new unit. 2025 should be a bit better on this front, but 2026 will be worse, and 2027 much worse.

This is a good time to be building rental housing. That’s how markets should work, of course, with dynamic supply responses to increasing scarcity and rising prices.

We’ve made a new hire at Toronto Standard: a Construction Project Manager (CPM). He’ll be responsible for building our smaller projects (~10 units in stick-framed walkup buildings) and for managing our third-party Construction Managers on our larger projects.

In real estate development, you make money by buying land well and lose it by managing construction poorly. There’s more to it than that, of course, but those are key factors within the category of things we can control. (There are plenty of things we can’t control—like interest rates.)

We’ve gotten pretty good at making money on the buy; our new CPM will help us not lose it on the build.

Our biggest current frustration is not having any new projects under construction. Despite recent reports that the City has accelerated approvals timelines by 80% , we’re not experiencing anything close to that. It still takes way too long to get shovels in the ground.

The back half of the year and all of 2026 will be much better in terms of regular, day-to-day, construction progress, which is frankly more satisfying to see than entitlement progress, including because you can literally see it.