Assessing the National Housing Strategy
The National Housing Strategy (NHS) is Canada’s 10-year, $40-billion plan to reduce housing need and homelessness and to advance the progressive realization of the right to housing. A central feature of the Strategy is its accountability architecture, established through the National Housing Strategy Act, including the creation of the National Housing Council (NHC) to advise the federal government on whether the NHS is delivering on its stated goals, and particularly for people in greatest need.
In 2021, the National Housing Council engaged Blueprint to conduct in-depth, independent analysis of the extent to which major programs under the NHS are addressing core housing need and homelessness. This work formed part of the Council’s mandate to provide evidence-based advice to the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion on how the Strategy could be strengthened.
Blueprint’s analysis focused on the design, funding, and early implementation of key bilateral National Housing Strategy programs, including the Canada Community Housing Initiative, Provincial-Territorial Priorities Funding, the Canada Housing Benefit, and the Northern Housing Initiative. Drawing on administrative data, program documentation, and microsimulation modelling, the report (Analysis of the progress of bilateral National Housing Strategy programs) examined whether these programs are aligned with the scale and distribution of housing need across Canada, including among Indigenous peoples and in Northern communities.
The findings surfaced several critical insights. While bilateral NHS programs are helping to preserve existing community housing, current funding levels are insufficient to meaningfully expand supply or reverse long-term declines. Demand-side measures such as the Canada Housing Benefit show promise in reducing housing need, but only if significantly scaled and better targeted. The analysis also identified gaps in monitoring, reporting, and data transparency that limit public accountability and make it difficult to assess whether NHS investments are advancing the right to housing in practice.
Beyond program-level findings, Blueprint’s work highlighted structural challenges in Canada’s housing policy architecture, and especially the disconnect between high-level targets and the data available to track progress. The report offered concrete, evidence-informed recommendations to improve program design, strengthen accountability, and ensure that future NHS investments are better aligned with the needs of households experiencing the deepest housing insecurity.
For policymakers and system leaders, this work provides a rigorous, policy-relevant assessment of one of Canada’s most significant social policy investments, and demonstrates Blueprint’s capacity to support rights-based policy evaluation, complex data analysis, and federal accountability processes.
Reports
Our team and partners live and work on the traditional territory of many Indigenous people across Turtle Island. Blueprint’s home office is situated in the area known as Tkaronto, an area that has been caretaken by the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat for thousands of years. We strive to meaningfully incorporate principles of reconciliation with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in our day-to-day work, as is our collective responsibility as treaty people, which requires ongoing reflection and collective action.
© 2026 Blueprint. All rights reserved. Accessibility | DEI at Blueprint | Careers at Blueprint