Don’t be fooled by Carney’s “best-in-a-decade” affordability claims

Lower mortgage rates won’t save you from a decade of Liberal government policy failures

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On March 25, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in the House of Commons and declared that affordability in Canada is the best it has been in over a decade. He said it with confidence. Winnipeggers are entitled to ask: compared to what?

Carney’s claim is based on how much of a household’s income goes to pay for a mortgage. By that measure, Winnipeg’s housing affordability has improved. The mortgage payment on a typical home now takes about 31.4 per cent of median household income, according to the National Bank’s Q4 2025 Housing Affordability Monitor. That’s better than Toronto’s 70 per cent or Vancouver’s 85 per cent, but Winnipeg has long been one of Canada’s more accessible housing markets.

But 31.4 per cent is still above Winnipeg’s own long-run average of 26.4 per cent. What Carney is pointing to as a decade-high achievement is, according to the same data, worse than what this city’s households managed for most of the 2010s, when Winnipeg consistently tracked well below today’s level.

In 2015, the average single-detached home in Winnipeg sold for $278,220, according to Peg, the United Way of Winnipeg’s community indicator system. As of March 2026, the average detached home ran $474,567, according to the Winnipeg Regional Real Estate Board. That’s an increase of approximately 70 per cent.

Manitoba incomes rose by a significantly smaller margin over the same period, while prices grew nearly three times faster. That gap between incomes and prices does not close just because mortgage rates have come down from their 2023 peak.

On food, Manitoba’s story is worse than the national picture. Manitoba’s Consumer Price Index for food rose 5.9 per cent year-over-year in December 2025, the second-highest rate among all provinces, according to the Manitoba Bureau of Statistics. National food inflation for store-bought groceries in December ran at approximately 5.0 per cent. The Canada Food Price Report 2026 projects the average family of four will spend $17,571.79 on groceries this year, up nearly $1,000 from 2025.

The Manitoba government has cited food insecurity as serious enough to launch a provincial grocery study targeting predatory pricing practices. The 2026 budget eliminates the Provincial Sales Tax on prepared grocery foods starting July 1, saving households up to $100 a year. That’s welcome. It is also an acknowledgment that affordability is a genuine crisis, not a solved problem.

The Bank of Canada cut its policy rate 11 times between June 2024 and October 2025, reducing it from five per cent to 2.25 per cent. That drove down mortgage carrying costs and helped ease pressure in the most expensive markets. Housing affordability improved for eight consecutive quarters, the longest streak on record.

But eight quarters of recovery from the worst housing conditions in 40 years does not restore a decade of damage. Based on National Bank data, the recovery lands closer to 2018 than 2015. That matters because 2018 was already the year Canadians were widely describing their housing situation as broken.

Winnipeg was not hit as hard as southern Ontario or Metro Vancouver, so the improvement is more real here. The deeper problem is the cumulative cost of everything else: food up nearly six per cent, utilities rising, wages not keeping pace with five years of compounding inflation.

Carney’s claim makes more sense as a statement about housing in a handful of expensive markets than as a description of how Manitoba families are living.

When your grocery bill rises $1,000 in a year, your provincial government launches an emergency grocery study and cuts food taxes to deal with a cost-of-living crisis it calls urgent, and when affordability by Winnipeg’s own historical measure remains above normal, the decade’s best affordability has not arrived at your kitchen table yet.

It may be coming. The data show an improvement trend. The plain fact is that it has a long way to go before it earns the word “best.”

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).