Ron Butler does not talk like a central banker. He talks like a man who has taken mortgage calls for decades.
On The Really Big Show with Jim Czech and Ian Burns, the Angry Mortgage host described the high-rise condominium market in Ontario and British Columbia in one long burial. Dead. Buried. Dug up. Stake through the heart. Lit on fire. Pre-sale towers that financed themselves on deposits are gone for five, six, seven years in his view. Young buyers who stretched for a dog-crate condo at the peak now sit on contracts they cannot fund and values that went the other way.
That is not a cycle comment. It is a machine comment. The machine that was supposed to make the next generation wealthy is the same machine three layers of government spent twenty years turning into a rental pipeline. Butler’s forecast for the Canadian economy is what happens when that pipeline is the plan.
The Municipal Layer Never Cuts
Municipal elections are on across the country. Housing is on every pamphlet. Development charges, land, step codes, climate add-ons that Butler says can tack 30% onto a build. Kelowna’s fight over single-family streets versus “build up” and the 15-minute script is the small-city version of Toronto and Vancouver.
Butler’s number on Toronto is the one he wants checked. Development fees up 5,000% since 2000. Look it up, he said. Whether a given city prints that exact multiple or not, the direction is not in dispute. Charges stacked. Inspections stacked. The 4% budget bump that compounds until the levy is a second mortgage.
He has been self-employed for 45 years. Businesses cut in a down cycle. They lay people off. They find the line that does not print money. “There is no city or municipality in the history of Canada that’s ever cut anything.” That is his indictment of the first layer. Infinite spiral. Older voters with walkers set the room. They want property tax frozen and the block unchanged. Young people stay home. Policy follows the people who show up. Boomer neighbourhoods keep their shape. The starter lot disappears into a charge schedule.
Kelowna property tax up about 50% in a decade, the hosts said, while wages did not. Compounding works for councils the way it used to work for homeowners. The person trying to buy pays for the bloat. Affordability talk is the press release. The budget is the tell.
The Provincial Layer Stops the House You Can Raise a Kid In
Butler’s second forecast sits in the starts data he cited. In 2018, high-rise already dominated. Low-rise — the house, the townhouse, anything with a yard — was starved in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. A little HST-rebate burst does not reverse a decade of not pouring those foundations.
Scarcity is how he parts company with the crash chorus. Boomers will sell. They will not all die in the same year. Two spouses do not exit on the same Tuesday. Prices are already falling in the GTA, the Lower Mainland, Montreal, Calgary. Affordability is still ugly. Toronto still eight or nine times family income on almost any roof, he said. History wants three. Doctor-level incomes still need four and a half or five. That is not a healthy market. It is also not, in his map, a fire sale of every detached street. You stopped building the thing people still want. Rarity holds a bid for the households that have parental equity or a top-decile wage.
The prairie contrast is the control group. Less tape. Faster builds. More rational prices. Want to buy a farm and put 900 houses on it? Have at it. That sentence does not exist in the same form in the Lower Mainland, the GTA, or much of Quebec. The average commuter never meets the forestry clerk who must certify there is no tree before a one-inch water line becomes two inches. Eight weeks. No tree. Still wait. Butler calls it strangulation by regulation. One-tenth of 1% of Canadians ever try to build their own house. Those people learn the country is not rich. It is licensed.
Fertility is the delayed invoice. You cannot raise a family in 425 square feet. That is what Vancouver and Toronto poured for years. Crushing prices and, until recently, crushing rents kept adults in childhood bedrooms. Culture plays a part. Japan and South Korea show what a 0.8 rate does with no immigration valve. Butler will not dump the whole collapse on newcomers. He will say the housing math did the job the manifesto never had to write. Unmanageable shelter costs suppress births. You get the country that follows.
The Federal Layer Advertises a Lease
Ottawa’s product, in Butler’s telling, is rental.
Purpose-built rental has exploded. Kelowna, he said, will add about 30% to its rental stock in two and a half years. Ontario and B.C. towns show the same spike. Purchase stock is not what the state is funding. Build Canada Homes is the brand. The ad opens on a couple with keys and a sign that looks like a sale. Roll it back. The sign says leased. The agency, he said, is 100% rental and social housing. Social housing for people who need it is not the fight. The fight is a federal state that recapitalizes CMHC to grow the rental book and then buys ads so you feel like an owner.
Klaus Schwab’s line sits on the table because the hosts put it there. You will own nothing and be happy. Butler’s answer to “is Canada becoming Pottersville?” was an unequivocal yes. George Bailey is not writing the next decade. Mr. Potter is. A nation of renters is not a vibe. It is the output of municipal charges, provincial codes, and federal programs that all rhyme.
The lost decade is the other federal file. Butler says the current Liberal shop needs amnesia about Justin Trudeau. Three million-plus newcomers in a short window. No business case for the fuels the world still burns. Carbon theatre. Battery-plant slogans. 2014’s richest-middle-class boast is a museum label. Carney can say energy was not taken seriously “for ten years” without saying the name. Voldemort economics. The vacuum story is how you inherit the wreckage and still look like central casting.
Mark Carney will not sit on the Angry Mortgage podcast. Butler put the odds next to Sydney Sweeney asking him for a date. The prime minister talks to selected rooms and to media the state funds. Good politics. Bad for anyone who wants a straight hour on young wages and young roofs. Pierre Poilievre gave Butler that hour. Butler is a supporter and said so. What he claims he heard was ordinary people: jobs, housing, affordability. Not a Davos guest list and not an airport privatization seminar. Readers can watch that tape and score it themselves. The contrast Butler wants is simple. One shop talks to fund managers in a ballroom. The other is being asked to talk about a 28-year-old’s payment.
The Household Layer Is Already Recutting the Budget
On the ground, 80% of Butler’s inbound calls are resets. Sub-2% five-year paper rolling into fours and fives. Payments do not always double. Cheap years paid a lot of principal. The hit he sees is often 16% to 28%. Still brutal. People make it by killing discretionary spend. Credit cards and personal lines fill the hole. Retail in some markets sags. Forced sales from rate shock have not exploded, he said. Court-ordered and power sales are rising for other reasons. The jury on a wave of renewal evictions is still out. The jury on a squeezed generation is not.
Canada is still rich for a slice of people over 60 with a pension and a house bought for five figures that touched $2 million in 2021 and sits nearer $1.5 million now. Fastest-growing slice of new homelessness, he noted, is seniors. The country can be both. Under 40, unless you sit in the top 5% of pay, you will not feel wealthy. High tax. Low productivity. Softer job growth than the United States. That is the lived forecast, not a think-tank fan chart.
Toronto’s mayor is Butler’s municipal exhibit. He calls Olivia Chow a Mercedes Marxist: 15-minute city, fewer cars, a renter city as the moral end-state. He repeats the old Jack Layton housing file — subsidized unit, income over the cap — as documented hypocrisy. Attribute the costume language to him. The policy rhyme is the point. City hall that never cuts plus a mayor who talks like ownership is a vice is how you get the leased-home ad from Ottawa.
Wheat, Diesel, and the Next Rate Shoe
Butler’s line about wheat and mortgage rates is the macro hinge. Diesel at records runs farms. Fertilizer plants and refineries have been hit in the war zone. Russia and Ukraine still matter for grain. He put raw wheat about 42% above a year ago. Energy plus food is how you get inflation back through 3.5% toward 4% in months, not in a speech. Central banks have one blunt tool. The Fed already hiked a quarter point. He expects Canada to hike in December or the first meeting of the new year. Fixed mortgages live on the bond market. Bond yields have climbed for weeks. The household that just recut the budget for a reset may recut it again for groceries and then for the next five-year quote.
That is the federal-provincial-municipal stack meeting the world price of diesel. City charges do not fall when wheat rips. Provincial codes do not shorten. Ottawa does not convert Build Canada Homes into ownership stock because a kernel got expensive. The young buyer eats all three layers and the commodity tape.
Europe Is Not a Life Raft
A richer middle class in 2014 would have laughed an EU associate-member pitch out of the room, the hosts said. A country on its knees gets walked toward the pot. Butler’s Europe is extra bureaucracy, France as the seal-of-approval capital, Germany’s energy self-harm, industrial power paying an 1,100% power shock in two years in his telling. Nice weather. Good food. An open-air museum going broke. Joining a club with more tape than Ontario is not how you unstrangle a water line. It is how a weakened capital city shops for applause after it failed the American customer and the Canadian starter home.
Scott Galloway calling Carney a transformational world figure is the polish. Czech and Burns cannot get an email answered in Ottawa and are flying to Washington to prove access is better in the country Canada is picking a fight with. Butler does not pretend the polish is fake. He pretends it is permanent. Justin was the greatest in 2015. Pierre Trudeau had his innings. Macron will be a forgotten name in France. Fear plus a grey-haired banker in a perfect suit, after the most radioactive Liberal in modern memory stepped aside, is a one-time cocktail. He would bet Carney wins bigger if an election were held tomorrow. He would also bet that in some later year 80% of the country is glad the act ended. Time turns. Cycles reverse. That is the only softness in the forecast.
The Forecast, Without the Music
High-rise pre-sale stays cold for years. Purpose-built rental keeps eating the skyline. Single-family scarcity in the big provinces holds a floor under the houses young families cannot qualify for. Mortgage resets squeeze budgets and feed consumer credit. Diesel and wheat can put another hike in the window. Municipal governments will not cut. Provincial tape will not vanish. Federal housing policy will keep building the thing you lease. Fertility stays a lagging casualty of the dog crate. Europe is a photo, not a customer. The resource endowment is still there — energy, metals, hydro, food — if the country ever takes a bomb to its own code.
Butler believes leaders will appear who drop the multinational ballroom and the extra flag and put young incomes first. He named Poilievre as one such person. Belief is not a schedule. Until the pendulum moves, the forecast is a nation that advertises keys and prints leases. Potterville with better branding. The three layers of government that built it will call it compassion. The payment will still be due.
Disclaimer
Based on Ron Butler’s appearance on The Really Big Show with Jim Czech and Ian Burns. Development-fee, price-to-income, and rental-stock figures are Butler’s characterizations unless independently verified. This is political and housing-market analysis, not mortgage, legal, or investment advice.