This article was written and submitted by Brad Jones, Chief Development Officer, Wesgroup.
It’s become a running joke in our office that we aren’t developers anymore; we’re full-time policy advocates who build on the side. Truthfully, the joke is wearing a little thin. The reality is that we’re spending significant time, energy, and money just to try and shift the dial on the most incremental changes.
Meanwhile, the system keeps getting more complex, more expensive, and more detached from the economics of actually delivering homes.
Canada’s housing system is broken. Not just because of high costs or slow approvals, but because our governments have been making policy in a vacuum, guided by lagging, incomplete, and often misleading data. This vacuum exists, in part, because we as an industry have allowed it to.
For too long, many of us have kept our heads down, focused on getting homes built despite a system that piles on costs, delays, and contradictions at every turn. That silence has come at a cost not just in policy, but in public perception. While we’ve been busy trying to make projects pencil, others have filled the gap with easy narratives. “Greedy developer” makes for a convenient villain. But the truth is, the system itself is what’s extracting value — from projects, from future homeowners, and from the people trying to build homes in the first place.
However, with a new federal government, a stalled market, and housing now firmly among the defining political issues of our time, silence is no longer an option.
At Wesgroup, we’ve delivered over 7,000 homes in Metro Vancouver, led some of the region’s biggest masterplans, and built relationships across all levels of government. Yet even with that experience and scale, the system has become nearly unworkable.
You know the story: Fees have skyrocketed — Metro Vancouver’s alone are up more than 1,900% since 2015. Construction costs are climbing due to constant code changes and contradictory policy requirements. Development returns are often lower than government revenues from those same projects. One city recently put its density bonus “on sale” to paper over its own flawed policies. That’s not a strategy; it’s a gimmick.
At the same time, we’re bombarded by endless overlapping regulations: 198 active consultations across the region last summer alone. It’s hard to focus on building homes when you’re constantly dodging policy shrapnel.
And yet, the disconnect between this reality and what policymakers seem to believe remains stark. We’re still letting outdated narratives drive new decisions. Take housing starts. CMHC recently reported a 30% jump nationwide – 6% in Metro Vancouver – and in some city halls the reaction was: “Starts are up, prices are down: the crisis is easing.”
But that data is a 24- to 36-month trailing indicator. It reflects decisions made under entirely different conditions — often before a shovel hits the ground. Our Keary project in New Westminster launched in 2022, started construction in 2023, and only appeared in the stats in 2025. In that time, construction costs have risen, fees have escalated, and market conditions have worsened.
If we keep letting headlines based on that data shape public and political opinion, we’ll never get the policy shift we need.
So, here’s the ask: as an industry, we need to start showing our receipts.
Share the numbers. Share the timelines. Share the friction. If you’re shelving projects because the math no longer works, say so. If you’re getting buried in fees, make that visible.
We launched our Homes Don’t Just Happen campaign not as a marketing exercise, but as one small way to clarify how housing actually gets delivered — and why it so often doesn’t. But one campaign isn't enough. What’s missing is scale.
If we want governments to take housing delivery seriously, we need to start treating it as essential infrastructure and start speaking with one voice about what’s standing in the way. If we want better data to shape policy, we have to start providing it ourselves.
That means shifting from reactive lobbying to proactive, industry-wide storytelling. It means being honest about what’s broken, even when it’s uncomfortable. We need to stop whispering behind closed doors and start saying the quiet part out loud: that government often makes more on a project than the developer; that timelines are getting longer while margins shrink, and viability goes out the window; that complexity is killing speed.
It also means consistency. We can’t keep showing up with 50 different explanations for why something’s not working. We need alignment – across developers, builders, lenders, trades, and planners – around the real, measurable barriers to housing delivery.
The good news? There’s already momentum. But we need more voices pushing in the same direction, and we need to stop assuming someone else will do it.
If you're in this industry, this is your moment to speak plainly. Share data. Show your workings. Help shift the narrative by making the facts impossible to ignore.
We can either keep waiting for change, or we can force a reckoning with reality.
