‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure’

Continued from FP1

“This is much needed,” said Craig Wright, chief economist with the Royal Bank of Canada. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

The funding commitment announced Wednesday will be spread over five years. After that, the government said it will spend a further $6.6 million a year on the collection of housing data.

The funding will enable Statistics Canada to create the Housing Statistics Framework, a database of all properties in Canada that will track purchases and sales. “Statistics Canada will begin to publish Housing Statistics Framework data in the fall of 2017,” the budget document states.

Douglas Porter, chief economist with BMO Capital Markets, said the national housing data will be welcome. “Just last year I Homes for sale in the Leslieville neighbourhood of Toronto earlier this month. A stunning 24-per-cent rise in the benchmark price for existing homes in the city was reported in February, and the federal budget is putting money toward collecting and analyzing housing data. poked fun at the government for announcing all of $500,000 on foreign data collection. That’s barely enough for a down payment on a Vancouver or Toronto home.”

Housing prices in Vancouver have cooled this year because the B.C. government has introduced a tax directed at foreign purchasers. The tax was introduced after the B.C. government collected data on the provincial housing market.

The Ontario government has started compiling data but has taken no steps as of yet to address the housing market in Toronto, where data from February showed a stunning 24-per-cent rise in the benchmark price for existing homes.

The creation of the Housing Statistics Framework is one of several housing-related measures in the budget. Much of this spending, which is called the national housing strategy, is directed toward boosting the amount of subsidized housing that is available to low-income Canadians. For example, a National Housing Fund will receive $5 billion in funding over the next 11 years.

The Liberal government, which likes to talk about its use of “evidence-based decision making,” is keen to document the impact of its spending.

For example, the national housing strategy spelled out in Budget 2017 also contains a commitment to provide Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. with $241 million in funding over the next 11 years to improve data collection and analytics.

Taken together, the price tag for collecting CMHC data and creating and running the Housing Statistic Framework would cost $291 million over the next 11 years.