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“I know we’re going to do some serious work here,” Carney, wearing a white hard hat with a Canadian flag sticker on it, said to a group of students who were standing around a table saw working on a framed, decorative wooden maple leaf. Carney cut the stem and placed it at the bottom of the leaf.

Minutes later, he announced a plan to put those students to work post-graduation.

“By getting government back into the business of building affordable homes and by making the market work better, we will drive a huge increase in housing supply so we can bring costs down for Canadians,” Carney told reporters in the city north of Toronto. “We will build at a pace not seen since the Second World War.”

Carney said the new agency, Build Canada Homes, would act as a developer to build affordable housing at scale, including housing on public lands, and would develop and manage projects.

He said the “lean, mission-driven organization” would provide more than $25 billion in financing to builders of prefabricated homes and $10 billion in low-cost financing and capital to builders of affordable homes. A Liberal-led government would transfer all affordable housing programming to the new agency from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., he said.

Carney compared his plan to the massive homebuilding effort that took place in the post-Second World War era, when William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government oversaw construction of tens of thousands of affordable starter homes for returning veterans and their families.

Carney said his government’s program would emphasize the use of prefabricated and modular housing, which he said can be built quickly, affordably and sustainably using domestic materials.

The party is also proposing to lower the cost of homebuilding by cutting municipal development charges, facilitating the conversion of existing structures and building on the housing accelerator fund. That fund offers communities federal dollars in exchange for changes to bylaws and regulations that boost home construction.

Carney said the building program would also create new jobs and stimulate the economy in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war.

“We can give ourselves more than any foreign government, including the United States, can take away,” he said. “But to do that, we need to do things that were previously thought impossible, at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”

The Liberals previously announced that they would eliminate the GST for first-time homebuyers on homes sold for up to $1 million.

While Monday’s announcement was focused on building homes, Carney was pressed to explain why he hasn’t replaced a candidate whose recent comments about a Conservative candidate are being broadly condemned.

Markham-Unionville Liberal candidate Paul Chiang told a Chinese-language newspaper at a news conference three months ago that everyone at the event could claim a bounty on Don Valley North Conservative candidate Joe Tay if they turned him in.

Tay is one of six activists targeted by Hong Kong police, which announced rewards of HK$1 million, equivalent to about C$180,000, for information leading to their arrests.

Chiang apologized Friday, calling his comments “deplorable.”

Carney said Chiang’s comments were “deeply offensive” and a “terrible lapse of judgment” but otherwise stood by his candidate, calling him a “person of integrity” who has served his community as a police officer.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 31, 2025.