Carney’s Cabinet Composed Entirely of Homeowners, Global News Analysis Reveals
A comprehensive analysis of financial disclosures by Global News has uncovered that every single member of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 37-member cabinet — ministers and secretaries of state alike — owns their primary residence. Not one of them rents.
Nearly 40 Percent of Ministers Are Landlords
The analysis, which examined disclosures filed by all members of Parliament along with follow-up questions posed to selected politicians, found that 38 percent of Carney’s ministers are landlords who earn rental income or hold investments in property management companies and real estate investment trusts.
Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab, the MP for Nova Scotia, owns or co-owns 14 rental units in Halifax. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, the MP for Quebec, owns or co-owns two rental properties in London, England. International Development Minister Randeep Sarai of British Columbia holds ownership in approximately six rental units across Burnaby and Surrey.
Carney’s own assets are held in a blind trust, meaning even he does not know his current status as a landlord. However, among the numerous companies previously linked to him and subject to his disclosed conflict-of-interest review, several generate income by collecting rent from commercial or residential tenants.
Landlord Representation Extends Across Party Lines
The trend is not confined to cabinet. Across the House of Commons, 103 MPs or their spouses have disclosed rental income, ownership of rental properties, or ownership of businesses involved in rental property management and investment.
Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre and 44 other Conservative MPs are on the list, alongside 52 Liberal MPs, six Bloc Québécois MPs, and one New Democrat — Alexandre Boulerice, who reports that his spouse earns rental income.
At least 295 lawmakers own their primary residence, while only a small number rent their primary home in their own riding.
Tenant Advocates Sound the Alarm
The findings carry significant implications for the roughly 30 percent of Canadian households who rent rather than own, according to Ricardo Trajan, a housing policy researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of the 2023 book The Tenant Class.
“These statistics cause us to turn our attention to the simple political facts that tenants are underrepresented in city halls, provincial legislatures and the Canadian Parliament, and that it will obviously be harder to advocate for their policies if they are not there,” Trajan said.
Despite tenant advocates pushing for meaningful reforms during committee hearings this spring on the Carney government’s flagship housing legislation — Bill C-20, the Build Canada Homes Act — not a single amendment proposed by tenant representatives was adopted.
Reform Proposals That Were Rejected
Advocacy groups put forward a range of measures they argued would help address Canada’s deepening housing crisis. The DisAbled Women’s Network (DAWN) of Canada called for a national Renter Bill of Rights to protect tenants — particularly those with disabilities — from exploitation. Samuel Watts of Welcome Hall Mission and Tim Ross of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada urged the creation of a targeted rent protection fund to prevent evictions and keep vulnerable tenants housed. The Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU) pushed for the definition of “affordable housing” to be restructured around tenants’ ability to pay rather than market rent benchmarks. And The Shift, a human rights organization, argued that security of tenancy should be a mandatory condition for any developer receiving financial support through the newly formed Build Canada Homes agency.
Liberal MPs on the committee, who hold a majority, declined to recommend any of these amendments.
An Institutional Bias?
Julieta Perucca, co-founder of The Shift, described the outcome as deeply telling.
“It shows that there is some institutional bias to keep the housing system running exactly as it is now because it is the most profitable business in Canada — unfortunate for the rest of us, the renters, the people trying to access home ownership, and worst of all for those living in homelessness or housing precarity,” Perucca said.
She went further, questioning whether legislators with significant financial ties to real estate investment can truly be impartial when crafting housing policy. “What if our representatives didn’t have money tied up in real estate investment trusts and didn’t rely on the high returns from those real estate and investment trusts? Could that then perhaps support how they legislate to change the status quo of these corporate landlords?”
A Tenant Rights Charter in the Works
The previous Trudeau government attempted to establish a tenant rights charter as part of its 2024 budget, with then-Justice Minister Arif Virani describing it as “a really important document about ensuring that tenants have rights that they can enforce, including in courts.” However, because the initiative required provincial sign-off, it ultimately stalled and died.
Sources within the Carney government indicate that Housing and Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson is currently working on a successor to that charter, though no details have been made public.
How the Analysis Was Conducted
The Global News analysis drew on financial disclosures that every incumbent MP is required to file with Parliament’s Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, whose office then publishes a summary of each filing. As of June 23, summaries had been released for every cabinet minister and all but 11 of the 343 sitting MPs.
While the published summaries do not include the monetary value of assets or liabilities, they do reveal the names of stocks held and the types of outside income an MP or their spouse is expected to earn over the following 12 months. Dozens of lawmakers were found to hold shares in real estate investment trusts — investment vehicles designed exclusively to generate rental profits.
“Politicians are homeowners or landlords themselves and the interests of tenants are not directly represented in their discussions,” Trajan said. Asked whether MPs might be thinking about their own investment portfolios when weighing policies that would strengthen tenant protections at landlords’ expense, Perucca responded plainly: “I think it’s possible, yes.”
