Sean Fraser

Sean Fraser took on the housing file as Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities in 2023 after years as Immigration Minister — a portfolio where the record was similarly a story of real action against an accelerating problem. On housing, he was visibly energetic: the Housing Accelerator Fund, which paid municipalities to remove zoning barriers to density, was a genuine policy innovation. Agreements with major cities to legalize multiplexes and end exclusionary single-family zoning represented federal leverage deployed in a way the federal government had long resisted. I want to be fair here. Fraser inherited a crisis that had been building for thirty years and was asked to fix it in eighteen months with tools that are largely indirect — the federal government does not zone land or issue building permits. He pushed hard on the levers available to him. But Canada's housing crisis did not improve meaningfully during his tenure. Rents hit record highs in 2023 and 2024. Shelter costs remained the dominant driver of inflation. Home prices outside a few markets stayed structurally inaccessible for median-income earners. The gap between what was announced and what was built remained enormous. The Housing Accelerator Fund unlocked zoning on paper; the buildings those zones allow for have not yet appeared at the scale needed. Fraser announced he would not seek re-election in 2025, citing exhaustion and family. That's an honest statement, and politics at the ministerial level is genuinely punishing. He gave the housing file real effort. The problem was bigger than the effort.