AI Analysis: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, housing starts, under construction and completions in centres 10,000 and over, Canada, provinces, selected census metropolitan areas

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 34100143 provides nearly 78 years of monthly Canadian housing data (January 1948 to April 2026), tracking starts, units under construction, and completions across six dwelling types in urban centres of 10,000 or more. Housing under construction dominates in scale — averaging 40,271 units per month versus roughly 5,800–5,900 for starts and completions — while all three metrics move in strong positive correlation, confirming the sequential nature of the construction pipeline. Long-term trends reveal clear boom-bust cycles tied to economic conditions, with the post-COVID surge producing an all-time starts peak of 25,014 units in November 2021.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 940 monthly periods from January 1948 to April 2026, with values ranging from near 0 to a single-period peak of 174,929 units under construction recorded in October 1973.
• Housing under construction averages 40,271 units per month — roughly 7 times higher than starts (~5,900) or completions (~5,800) — because it accumulates all active builds rather than measuring a single pipeline stage.
• All three housing metrics are strongly correlated: completions vs. under construction (r = 0.802), starts vs. under construction (r = 0.730), and starts vs. completions (r = 0.564), reflecting the sequential starts → under construction → completions pipeline.
• The all-time monthly peak for housing starts was 25,014 units in November 2021, nearly double the long-run monthly mean of 12,576 units, marking the post-COVID construction surge as the most statistically anomalous recent event.
• Outlier detection found only 1 month exceeding the ±2.5 standard deviation threshold across nearly 80 years of starts data, indicating that Canadian housing activity, while cyclical, trends relatively smoothly over time.
• All three housing metrics exhibit right-skewed distributions — medians consistently fall below means — reflecting the outsized influence of large urban centres on national totals.
• The historic low of 1,298 housing starts in February 1948 contrasts sharply with the 2021 peak, illustrating the dramatic long-run growth in Canadian urban housing construction over nearly eight decades.