The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) handed out more than $31 million in bonuses last year to 79 executives and more than three-quarters of its total workforce, according to government information reviewed by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF).
The data comes in response to a question asked in the House of Commons in April by Andrew Scheer, Conservative Member of Parliament for Regina–Qu’Appelle.
Scheer had asked for information on bonuses awarded at each Crown corporation for the 2025-26 fiscal year, broken down by percentage of officials both at and below the executive level who received bonuses, and their amounts.
Some organizations, such as the Canada Council for the Arts and CBC/Radio-Canada, said they do not award bonuses, while others said the information was not yet available.
However, the CMHC said it had awarded $31,720,451 in bonuses for the year to 79 people at or above the executive level, and 2,371 people below that level.
The executives received a total of $3,545,057, for an average of almost $45,000 each, while those below the executive level took home $28,175,394, an average of almost $12,000 per person.
The Crown corporation also noted that the lower echelon of those receiving bonuses constituted 77.76 per cent of the employees at that level. It did not say what percentage of executives received bonuses, citing the Privacy Act and noting: “Certain information which could be used to identify a small number of individuals has been withheld on the grounds that the information constitutes personal information.”
However, CMHC previously disclosed that about 99 per cent of its executives took a bonus in 2024-25.
In a news release , the CTF pointed out the irony of such bonuses from an organization whose stated mandate is “to promote housing affordability and choice, facilitate access to, and competition and efficiency in the provision of, housing finance, protect the availability of adequate funding for housing at low cost, and generally contribute to the well-being of the housing sector in the national economy.”
Ahmed Hussen, the federal minister of housing and diversity and inclusion from 2021 to 2023, added in his forward to the CMHC’s 2022-2026 Corporate Plan Summary that the document “is built on an ambitious goal — housing affordability for all.”
“If your organization’s goal is making homes affordable, your C-suite shouldn’t be taking millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses while Canadians can’t afford homes,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF’s federal director. “The housing minister promised to review CMHC bonuses years ago and the CMHC has handed out bigger taxpayer-funded bonuses every year since.”
Coleen Volk, president and CEO of CMHC, has said housing supply remained one of Canada’s biggest challenges last year, adding: “CMHC rose to meet this challenge head-on, putting all the organization’s tools to work to make an impact in communities across the country.”
“CMHC executives have a pattern of rewarding their own failure with taxpayers’ money,” the CTF said in its release, noting that executive pay at the corporation rose to an average of $697,667 per executive in 2022, up from $617,556 four years earlier, an almost 13 per cent increase.
Asked about bonuses by Members of Parliament in 2023, former housing minister Sean Fraser said he was “happy to review the process by which bonuses are provided,” though he added: “I am very hesitant to have elected officials interfere with the independence of the public service when it comes to the appropriate compensation for public servants.”
The CMHC website includes what it says is “one heck of an aspirational goal: by 2030, everyone in Canada has a home they can afford and that meets their needs.”
Terrazzano begs to differ. “If bureaucrats taking bonuses made homes more affordable, every Canadian would own a home with an in-ground pool plus a cottage at the lake,” he said. “Canadians need more homes, not more highly paid pencil pushers rubber-stamping bonuses for each other.”
He points to a 2025 poll from Abacus Data that described housing affordability as “a crisis everyone feels.” It found that nearly nine in 10 Canadians are worried about the state of housing and that most Canadians, at least occasionally, worry about being able to keep up with their rent or mortgage payments.
“Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to end Ottawa’s government entitlement culture because every year government executives take taxpayer-funded bonuses even when their organization fails,” Terrazzano said. “Bonuses are for when you go above and beyond, they shouldn’t be handed out like participation ribbons.”
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