The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) just published its latest housing supply report for Canada’s 6 largest city regions (downloadable over here).

One figure that stands out is the increase in housing starts in the Calgary CMA — it was up almost 63% last year compared to 2020. This is a positive indicator for that market.

It’s also worth mentioning that Calgary’s supply is more evenly split between low-rise and apartment housing. This is in contrast to markets like Toronto, where 3/4 of all new housing is now “apartment”, and in Montreal, where the percentage is even higher.

My view is that it’s time to get more granular with our reporting of higher density housing. In the above example, we are showing 3 categories for grade-related housing and only 1 for anything outside of that.

This is our national bias toward low-rise housing coming through.

In March 2018, Statistics Canada launched the largest "wastewater-based epidemiology pilot test" ever conducted in North America. Over a 12 month period, it collected wastewater samples across the country in order to test for traces of cannabis and other drugs. The pilot captured 8.4 million people in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Montréal, and Halifax. And it was allegedly timed to coincide with the legalization of cannabis in Canada on October 17, 2018.

This week Statistics Canada published its findings. While the study does cover over 8 million people, it was not intended to be representative of the entire Canadian population. Some sites, such as Vancouver, had nearly complete coverage of the metro area population. While others, such as the Halifax site, only covered about half of the metropolitan area. In any event, the findings are interesting.

Above is one example: methamphetamine load per capita for the five study cities. The y-axis is grams per million people per week. And the time period is, again, March 2018 to February 2019. Average levels for Edmonton and Vancouver were found to be about 3.7x higher than those in Montréal and Toronto. There was also no apparent seasonal/monthly variation, which is something else they looked at.

Here I learned that a large portion of this drug passes through the body unchanged. And so the concentrations they discovered in wastewater is likely a fairly direct indicator of consumption within the population. Stats Canada is still reviewing its findings and evaluating this approach to collecting large scale urban data. But I am certain we'll be seeing more of these kinds of urban studies.

Chart: Statistics Canada

Curbed published an article this week called, Why U.S. cities should stop whining and embrace winter. It is about Canada and how we allegedly embrace winter, which is arguably true, except I think there’s still a healthy dose of whining combined with trips to the south.

I went ice skating a few weeks ago along the waterfront here in Toronto. It was a cold night and we debated whether we should skate or do something indoors involving Niagara’s finest red wines. We opted for skating and weren’t cold at all. It was great.

I was reminded of this when I read the line: “The purpose is to get you skating. If you are skating, you are warm.” It is a good reminder that one of the keys to a successful winter space is physical activity. That and hot tubs.

Photo by Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash