HACI Puts Ottawa, Montréal, And Halifax In The Same Affordability Conversation Canadians Used To Reserve For Toronto And Vancouver
Modern Vancouver rowhouses stand as the old epicenter while affordability pressure creeps into Ottawa, Montréal, Halifax. (Credit: Shutterstock.com)
On February 25, 2026, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation launched a new yardstick—the Housing Affordability Composite Index (HACI)—and used it to make a blunt point: even with slight national easing, affordability pressure is now formally showing up well beyond Toronto and Vancouver in cities like Ottawa, Montréal, and Halifax.
That’s the news hook, but it’s not the whole story. The deeper implication is psychological: for the last decade, Canadians have been trained to treat “Toronto/Vancouver unaffordable” as a special category, while mid-tier cities functioned as relief valves. HACI’s framing flips that. It suggests the relief valves have been taking on pressure too—and the old mental model (“I’ll just move somewhere cheaper”) needs an update.
Homeowner.ca’s spin is simple: this is the affordability migration trap. In the pandemic era, remote work made it easier to leave expensive cores. But as more households ran the same play, destination cities absorbed the demand shock—and the affordability advantage that justified the move started to shrink. The trap isn’t that moving never helps; it’s that moving can stop helping faster than people expect, especially when rental and ownership markets tighten together.
This article breaks down what HACI is measuring, why it’s different from “one-number” affordability trackers, and what it means—practically, not as advice—for homeowners and movers trying to make sense of 2026’s narrowing affordability gaps.
In the methodological notes, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation describes HACI as two composite indices—one for homeownership and one for rentals—built from multiple affordability indicators and combined using a principal component analysis approach, with coverage across major CMAs including Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Montréal, Halifax, Calgary, and Edmonton.
That design choice is the point. CMHC’s critique is that many Canadian affordability indexes lean on a single indicator (often price-to-income or mortgage payment-to-income) and typically spotlight ownership while underweighting rental realities. HACI is meant to treat affordability as a system: costs matter, but so do incomes, supply-and-demand conditions (how hard it is to find a unit at a given price), and how much discretionary budget households can shift toward housing.
Here’s the practical difference homeowners should care about: a city can “get less affordable” without having the loudest headline price growth. If incomes lag, if the rental market tightens (reducing flexibility), or if the ease of finding housing deteriorates, affordability pressure can rise even when the sticker-price story looks quieter than Toronto’s.
If you’re using HACI as a homeowner, treat it like a pressure gauge, not a scoreboard: the key signal is whether affordability pressure in your city is trending toward “harder choices” (less flexibility, fewer options, more budget strain), even if your home value is holding up on paper.
CMHC’s narrative isn’t that Toronto and Vancouver suddenly became affordable. It’s that Canada’s affordability problem has become multi-city in a way that changes how households experience risk.
One of the most useful parts of the HACI write-up is the long-run lens: CMHC breaks national homeownership affordability erosion into three waves (2001–2007, 2015–2020, and 2020–2023). The first two waves were driven primarily by worsening affordability in Toronto and Vancouver. The 2020–2023 wave is different because affordability deterioration accelerated and showed up in Ottawa, Montréal, and Halifax as well—an effect CMHC links to labour mobility enabled by pandemic-era remote work.
That’s the trap mechanism in plain terms: the ability to move became part of the affordability problem. When higher-income households can relocate from high-cost cities without losing employment income, they can bid up prices in destination markets faster than local incomes can catch up, compressing the affordability advantage the move was supposed to deliver.
CMHC also adds a second layer that many “move somewhere cheaper” plans ignore: rental affordability erosion is more recent and tied to different drivers. In the 2022–2023 window, CMHC links rental affordability deterioration to a sharp rise in inflation and high levels of immigration, noting that renters tend to have less discretionary income flexibility to absorb broad cost shocks. Translation: if you move and plan to rent first (or might need to rent again later), rental tightness can turn a relocation strategy into a budget squeeze.
There’s also an important nuance that helps explain why households can feel whiplash even when an index shows “slight improvement”: aggregate measures can hide segment splits. CMHC notes that higher-end rental conditions may loosen in some markets while the more affordable end remains particularly tight due to slower supply growth and sustained demand. So a headline about “improvement” can coexist with on-the-ground reality where entry-level renters and first-time buyers still face intense competition.
Halifax is a clean example of the migration trap because the price acceleration was fast enough to be visible to ordinary households, not just analysts. The Halifax Partnership’s Halifax Index 2024 reports that Halifax’s average home price reached $550,605 in 2023—more than double its 2014 level—after prices surged 27.4% in 2021 and 14.9% in 2022 before slowing to 2.8% growth in 2023.
This pattern is exactly what “migration trap” looks like financially for a household that moved in 2021–2022 thinking it had found a stable discount market:
The Halifax Index also flags the rental side of the same squeeze. When vacancy is low and rents rise quickly, the “I’ll rent for flexibility” option weakens—making it harder to pivot if a job changes, a household splits, or renewal payments jump. That’s how a city can feel like it’s closing in from both sides: buying is harder, and renting isn’t a soft landing.
A separate compilation gives a helpful “late-cycle” snapshot of where Halifax landed after the surge. The The Canadian Magazine of Immigration publishes CREA-sourced monthly averages showing Halifax’s average house price around $543,000 in December 2025, after large gains earlier in the cycle and more modest movement later on.
None of this is a forecast, and no single dataset captures every neighbourhood or property type. But the arc matters: Halifax went from “obviously cheaper than Toronto” to “still cheaper, but no longer cheap,” and that shift is exactly what HACI is trying to formalize across multiple cities.
One reason affordability gaps don’t simply reset is that replacement cost can hold the line. Even if resale markets cool, new construction costs and new home pricing can keep a floor under what’s economically viable to build—especially in markets where demand is still outpacing supply.
That’s why Halifax stands out in Canada’s broader cooling narrative. Statistics Canada reported that while the New Housing Price Index was trending down nationally after peaking in August 2022, Halifax was a notable exception, with new home prices rising 4.9% in the first 10 months of 2025 even as prices fell over that same period in Toronto and Vancouver.
This matters for movers deciding whether a mid-tier city still offers meaningful relief. If new home prices are still rising in a destination market, it’s a signal that demand pressure and build economics remain tight—conditions that tend to keep affordability strained even when the national mood turns cautious.
Local market commentary points in the same direction, with appropriate caveats. A Nova Scotia Home Finder summary estimated 2025 year-over-year price growth around 6.1% province-wide and placed Halifax-Dartmouth averages higher (around $550,500), which aligns with the idea that the region’s “discount” has been narrowing rather than widening.
Taken together, this is the practical lesson behind HACI’s spread story: the arbitrage window can close without a dramatic crash. Affordability can worsen (or improve only slightly) because the system is more than just resale prices—it’s incomes, rental pressure, market tightness, and build costs all moving at once.
HACI is most useful when you treat it as an early-warning dashboard for affordability pressure—not a prediction engine and not a “where to buy” list.
For homeowners (especially those who bought in 2021–2022 in a former “escape market”), HACI reframes the equity conversation in a healthier way. The question isn’t only “Did my home value rise?” It’s also:
For movers considering Toronto → mid-tier city relocation in 2026, the migration trap isn’t a moral warning—it’s a math warning. “Cheaper” is not binary. The right comparison is whether the destination market still provides a meaningful buffer after you account for the full system: rents, availability, incomes, and the real difficulty of finding housing at the price point you need.
If you want one simple framework for reading HACI headlines without overreacting, use three questions:
The headline from CMHC’s new index isn’t that Canadians should stop moving. It’s that moving no longer guarantees relief, because the relief markets are now part of the national affordability system—and HACI is designed to measure that spread in a consistent way.
