Indigenous housing gap a $1.4 billion problem

OTTAWA — The federal government would have to spend about $1.4 billion more a year to close a housing gap facing urban Indigenous people, the parliamentary budget officer says in a report that hints at the scale of a promised federal strategy to address the issue.

The cost in the report would be at the upper end of a range that starts at $159 million annually, depending on what percentage of construction costs and rent subsidies government wants to cover.

As is, the Liberals’ decade-long national housing strategy explicitly allocates $179 million per year to Indigenous housing in urban, rural and northern areas, the PBO calculated.

The Liberals bill the cost of the strategy at over $55 billion, which includes spending to help offset mortgage costs for first-time homebuyers, as a key avenue to help ease a housing crunch for hundreds of thousands of households.