TORONTO—Weak business investment in Ontario has the provincial economy increasingly dependent on Toronto’s housing market for growth, leaving the province especially vulnerable if the market slows, finds a new study released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“Toronto’s hot housing market is the one leg propping up Ontario’s otherwise weak and vulnerable economy, making the spectre of a possible housing bubble burst or even just a slowdown all the more worrying,” said Philip Cross, former chief economic analyst for Statistics Canada and author of Ontario’s One Cylinder Economy: Housing in Toronto and Weak Business Investment.
The study finds that housing—both homebuilding costs and record high prices—accounted for more than a quarter (29.0 per cent) of Ontario’s economic growth in 2016.