Construction Pulse: December 2023

National snapshot

In December 2023, 42 municipalities with a direct reading from Statistics Canada's monthly building permits survey authorized 13,630 permits worth a combined $5,920,973,000 ($5.9B). That works out to an average of $434K per permit across the cities counted this month. Of that total, $3,410,632,000 was residential construction and $2,510,341,000 was non-residential, and the underlying permits point to 11,204 new housing starts recorded in the period.

This snapshot covers only municipalities with a direct, city-level figure in the source table for December 2023. Municipalities that only appear inside a broader census metropolitan area row, and municipalities whose current figure is a seed estimate, are left out of every total and ranking on this page. The national figure then matches activity that was reported directly for that month. Some smaller places still appear on the permits atlas through a regional proxy; they are simply omitted from this report.

Year-over-year and month-over-month change

A year-over-year comparison is not yet available for December 2023. It becomes available once a live reading exists for the same calendar month one year earlier.

Against November 2023, the prior calendar month, total permit value moved -34.0% and permit counts moved -26.9%. Month-over-month figures move more than year-over-year figures on average, since they are more exposed to a single large project clearing approvals, seasonal permitting patterns, and the normal lag between a municipality submitting data and the survey closing for the period.

Residential vs non-residential

Residential permits accounted for 57.6% of total permit value this month ($3,410,632,000), against 42.4% non-residential ($2,510,341,000). The two categories are driven by different forces: residential permit volume tracks population growth, mortgage rates, and municipal zoning capacity in a comparatively gradual way, while non-residential permit volume moves in large, irregular steps tied to individual industrial, commercial, and institutional projects. A single large hospital, warehouse, or office tower clearing approvals in one city can shift the national non-residential total for the month without reflecting any broader change in the pace of construction elsewhere.

Reading the split alongside the national total avoids treating a jump driven by one category as evidence of a broad-based acceleration in the other. New housing starts, which move with the residential category specifically, are the more direct read on whether that gradual upward trend continued this month.

Top cities by value

The 15 cities below reported the highest total permit value in December 2023. Together they account for roughly 47% of the month's national total in just the top three, a reminder that a handful of large metropolitan markets carry most of the dollar value in any given month even though many more cities are tracked.

Fastest-rising cities

A fastest-rising ranking is not available for December 2023. It requires a live reading for the same calendar month one year earlier for at least one city, which is not yet available for this period.

How to read this report

• Treat a single month as one data point. Building permit value is naturally lumpy, particularly on the non-residential side, so look for a pattern across several editions of this report before concluding that a city or the national total is on a sustained trend.
• Permits measure authorization, not completion. A permit counted this month can still be delayed, revised, or in some cases withdrawn before construction finishes, and the survey does not update this report retroactively for those later changes.
• Only cities with a direct reading for the month are included. A municipality missing from this report for a given month either has not yet been assigned a live reading for that period or is tracked on the permits atlas through a regional proxy rather than a city-specific figure; its topic page states which applies.
• Percentage changes on a small prior-year base can look dramatic without representing much dollar value. The fastest-rising table applies a minimum prior-year threshold for this reason, but the same caution is worth applying when comparing any two figures directly.

Construction Pulse counts only municipalities with a direct reading from Statistics Canada Table 34-10-0292-01 for the month shown. Regional-proxy and seed-fallback rows, used for municipalities not separately broken out in the underlying CMA table, are excluded from every total, ranking, and share calculated on this page so the national and city figures reflect directly reported activity only. The fastest-rising ranking additionally requires a same-month reading one year earlier of at least $5.0M in total permit value, so a small city moving from a negligible base cannot register an outsized percentage change.

Sources

Every figure in this report is drawn from Statistics Canada Table 34-10-0292-01, "Building permits, by type of structure and type of work", the same source cited on every city page in the permits atlas. See the data sources page for the full list of datasets behind every OpenStats permits topic, and the methodology page for how figures are ingested, normalized, and assigned a data tier.

For background on what the underlying survey measures and how to read a single city's figures, see the guide to Canadian building permit data. For a cross-city view outside this monthly format, see the building permit value ranking and the permit momentum ranking.