Ottawa’s new $1.5-billion Canada Rental Protection Fund aims to keep about 7,000 existing rental homes affordable over its first five years, according to Build Canada Homes, which announced the fund’s launch on Sept. 22. Set against the best available national count of how quickly low-rent units have been disappearing, that target would offset only a small fraction of the losses.
The fund, first announced in the federal budget in April 2024, gives non-profit, co-operative and Indigenous housing providers money to buy existing rental buildings before they are sold to investors, renovated or re-rented at market rates. Of the $1.5 billion, $470 million is in contributions and $1 billion is in low-interest loans, according to the Prime Minister’s Office release from April 2024. It is being deployed by the Canadian Housing Acquisition Fund (CHAF), a new non-profit whose founding members include the Canadian Housing Renewal Association, the National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc., the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada and the BC Rental Protection Fund, Build Canada Homes said.
What $1.5 billion buys
Dividing the headline budget by the target gives roughly $214,000 of federal capital for each home protected. That figure overstates the long-run cost somewhat, since the fund is designed as a revolving pool in which repaid loans are reinvested in future purchases, according to the Build Canada Homes announcement. The 7,000-home target is also described as “subject to market conditions.”
The closest comparison is the British Columbia program the national fund is modelled on. B.C.’s Rental Protection Fund launched in January 2023 with $500 million in provincial money and a goal of about 2,000 units over three years, according to the province and reporting by Business in Vancouver. The federal launch release says the B.C. fund has now protected nearly 2,200 homes, or roughly $227,000 of provincial money per home, in the same range as the federal math.
In other words, the national fund has about three times B.C.’s budget and is targeting about three times B.C.’s results, spread across the whole country and over five years rather than three.
The scale of the losses
The more telling comparison is with how many affordable rentals Canada has been losing. Steve Pomeroy, a housing researcher and industry professor at McMaster University, calculated from census data that Canada lost 322,600 private rental units renting below $750 a month, levels affordable to households earning under $30,000, between 2011 and 2016. Over the same five years, fewer than 20,000 new affordable units were added through federal and provincial programs, he wrote in a 2020 analysis for Focus Consulting, concluding that 15 existing low-rent units were lost for every one created.
That pace works out to roughly 64,500 low-rent units a year. The new fund’s target of 7,000 homes over five years is about 1,400 a year, or roughly one home protected for every 46 that were being lost annually during that census period.
The comparison has limits. The census figures are a decade old, the $750 threshold is in 2016 dollars, and the losses include units that were demolished, converted or simply re-rented at higher prices after a tenant left, not all of which an acquisition fund could realistically buy. Rents have also softened across much of the country this year, which could make some buildings cheaper to acquire. But the gap between the two numbers is large enough that the fund is best understood as a targeted tool rather than a fix for the erosion of low-cost rentals.
The launch also came about two and a half years after the fund was first announced in April 2024. CHAF opened an online intake portal and pre-qualification process on Sept. 22, with regular intake cycles starting in October 2026, according to the launch release.
“Every home acquired becomes part of Canada’s community housing stock for the long term,” CHAF board chair Ray Sullivan said in the release.
Sources: Build Canada Homes, CHAF launch release via Newswire, Prime Minister’s Office (April 2024), Business in Vancouver, Steve Pomeroy, Focus Consulting.
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