The number that matters is not the rent. It is the change: the same Ottawa unit cost $400 less four years ago, and wages here have not moved with it. CMHC put the average two-bedroom in Ottawa at $1,926 in 2025, up 3.4% in a year.
We are deliberately not quoting a rent-to-income ratio here. CMHC’s 30% affordability threshold measures rent plus electricity, fuel, water and municipal services, against before-tax household income, for renter households. A rent-only figure compared against that threshold is not the same measurement, and we would rather publish one number fewer than one comparison that does not hold.
Shelter costs across Canada rose 27.4% between March 2020 and February 2025, against 19.3% for overall inflation over the same period. Housing did not merely get more expensive along with everything else. It outran everything else by eight points.
RBC forecasts that more than half of the 1.9 million new Canadian households expected to form by 2030 will not be able to afford homeownership — and that 40% of those will not be able to afford market rents either. This is not a coastal-city problem being imported. It is arriving in Ottawa on its own.
Canada has the lowest number of dwellings per capita in the G7. That is not an accident of geography or of demand. Development charges, restrictive zoning, and some of the longest permitting processes in the world make it uneconomical to build the thing Ottawa actually needs: modest, purpose-built rental housing close to where people work.
Development charges are large enough that in June 2026 Ottawa and Ontario opened an $8.8 billion programme paying municipalities to cut them — Toronto took $1.5 billion in exchange for reducing residential charges by 40 to 60 percent. Even after that cut they are levied before a shovel enters the ground. That cost does not vanish. It is paid by whoever signs the lease.
Eliminate the federal portion of development charges on purpose-built rental developments of ten units or more. Fast-track zoning reform. End speculative foreign ownership of residential property. The target is 500,000 new purpose-built rental units by 2030.
The costings are published with the policy, as they are for every policy on this site. Eliminating development charges reduces federal revenue by roughly $400 million a year. Land conversion costs $2 billion upfront, recoverable over thirty years. The plan is funded in part by redirecting $1.5 billion a year from the First Home Savings Account toward rental supply — moving money from a programme that bids up prices to one that adds units.
On the housing policy page there is a tool that lets you enter your own city, rent and income, and see what share of your income rent takes. It reports the figure and does not grade it, for the reason above. We would rather you checked than took our word for it.
Every figure above is drawn from this party’s published policy record and is linked on the housing policy page. Sources retrieved 2026-09-13; policy corpus last refreshed 2026-09-10, so anything published in that three-day window is not reflected here. Claims were checked against their cited sources by freehuntx/qwen3-coder:8b over five passes, which resolved all sixteen before the numeric gate examined any figure — so the numbers on this page were verified against the source text, not recomputed.