“Units with approved building permits (excluding conversions) that have not yet begun construction.” That is the line. It sits under the construction indicators table in the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation release for June 2026, published July 16. The number beside it is 137,324.
Approved and permitted. Not started.
The same release counts 20,265 actual starts in Canada’s urban centres in June, against 23,292 in June 2025. That is a drop of 13%. In a country that has agreed, loudly and across every party, that it is short of homes.
Key facts
- Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported on July 16, 2026 that actual housing starts in Canadian centres with 10,000 or more people fell 13% to 20,265 units in June 2026, from 23,292 units in June 2025.
- The seasonally adjusted annual rate of starts fell 6% to 238,971 units in June 2026 from 253,083 units in May 2026, according to the same release.
- Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation counted 137,324 units with approved building permits that had not begun construction in June 2026, down 1.1% from May.
- The release reported June 2026 actual starts down 35% in Vancouver, up 25% in Toronto and up 10% in Montreal, year over year.
What an approved unit with no start actually tells you
Read the footnote. The agency describes those units as ones where no construction activity has yet been observed, and says they may be indicative of future starts. May be.
Here is what the line item means in plain terms. Every one of those units cleared the municipal permit desk. The zoning worked and the fees were assessed. Then the project stopped at the point where somebody had to write the cheque for the concrete.
By our arithmetic, 137,324 units is almost seven months of urban starts at June’s pace. That is a full construction season sitting in a filing cabinet.
The agency’s deputy chief economist, Kevin Hughes, named the causes in the release: rising uncertainty, higher development costs, weaker demand and more unsold homes. His outlook was blunt. He expects that environment to “drive 2026 actual housing starts below last year’s levels.”
Notice what is missing from that list. Permitting. The bottleneck in this release is downstream of the permit desk, in the pro forma. It is the renovation that stalls after the building permit is taped to the window, because the quote for the trusses came in higher than the budget.
Where the June slowdown landed across the big cities
The national figure hides a split. Toronto starts rose 25% on multi-unit projects. Montreal rose 10%. Vancouver fell 35%, on both multi-unit and single-detached.
So the national drop comes from a few large markets swinging hard in both directions at once.
Alberta sits inside this number. The province’s own first-half numbers turned down after three record years, a slide set out in Alberta’s first-half housing starts count earlier this week. The mix has also shifted, with rentals now more than a third of what Alberta builds. A province that led the country on starts is now watching the same cost line eat into its pipeline.
That matters for household budgets here. Fewer starts this year means fewer completions in 2028 and 2029. Prices in Calgary and Edmonton have been cushioned by supply that was permitted and built in earlier years. The permit desk did its job. The next part of the job belongs to whoever controls the costs that sit between a permit and a footing.
What to ask for before the next count
Some of those costs are municipal. Off-site levies. Servicing agreements that take months to sign after the permit is issued. Those are documents, and documents can be requested.
Ask your council for the local version of the 137,324. How many permitted units inside city limits have no start, and how long each has waited. Which fees were paid at permit and which are still owed at start.
Put the question to your councillor in writing, and ask for the answer before the fall budget adjustment debate. The next national count lands in mid-August.
