AI Analysis: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, housing starts, under construction and completions in all centres of 10,000 and over for Canada and provinces

Executive Summary

Canada's housing dataset (Statistics Canada, Table 34100136) spans 67 years of monthly data from 1959 to 2026, tracking starts, units under construction, and completions across all provinces. Units under construction reached an all-time peak of 362,752 in October 2022, while housing starts hit a record 69,109 in April 2025, signaling an unprecedented construction backlog. However, provincial-level outlier analysis reveals a dramatic geographic shift, with Atlantic Canada and Alberta driving recent anomalies even as national completions remain well below their 1987 peak of 60,491 units.

Key Findings

• Housing under construction reached an all-time high of 362,752 units in October 2022, far exceeding historical norms and reflecting a massive accumulated construction backlog.
• Housing starts hit a record 69,109 units in April 2025, yet completions have never surpassed their 1987 peak of 60,491 units, indicating a growing gap between new construction and finished homes delivered.
• Nova Scotia 2025 is the single most extreme provincial anomaly in the dataset, recording 8,732 starts with a Z-score of 4.00, while New Brunswick and PEI also posted multi-year highs, pointing to an Atlantic Canada housing boom.
• Alberta recorded 53,184 housing starts in 2025 (Z-score of 2.89), reflecting strong population-driven demand and ranking among the most statistically significant provincial surges in recent history.
• At the national level, annual starts ranged from a 2021 peak of 244,141 units down to just 49,206 in partial-year 2026, representing a sharp and dramatic swing within a historically short period.
• The dataset's overall distribution is strongly right-skewed, with a mean of 5,062 units nearly 9 times the median of 581 units, driven by large national and urban aggregates across 165 unique time series.
• Historical provincial anomalies include Quebec in 1987 (66,757 starts, Z=2.81) and Saskatchewan in 1977 (9,326 starts, Z=2.80), confirming that regionally concentrated boom cycles have been a recurring feature of Canadian housing over the past 67 years.