Housing has become a key object of financialisation (Aalbers, 2017b). As evidenced by the proliferation of empirical studies on the financialisation of housing, states at both the national scale and the local scale play a key role in this process (e.g. Aalbers et al., 2017; Fields and Uffer, 2016; Walks, 2014). While many studies have analysed the role of either the national state or the local state, few have systematically explored the roles of states at different scales. Existing understanding on this topic is limited to the national state creating the overall situation of marketisation, privatisation and deregulation to favour financialisation at the local scale (e.g. Aalbers et al., 2017; Fields and Uffer, 2016). However, literature on multiscalar governance suggests that governance processes are organised and regulated in a complex manner by institutions at multiple scales (e.g. Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2006). Existing understanding on the roles of multi-scalar states in the financialisation of housing is oversimplified.

In Canada, the provision of social housing used to be the federal government’s responsibility. In the 1960s–1970s, the federal government built significant numbers of social housing units. However, under the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state, the federal government ceased to build new social housing units in the early 1980s, ended subsidies abruptly in 1993 and ‘downloaded’ Beresford et al. (2014) the responsibilities to the provinces in the mid-1990s. The provincial governments, in most cases, further downloaded the burden from federal downloading to municipalities in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Suttor, 2016, for a comprehensive review of Canada’s social housing policy history). But the downloading of responsibilities has not come with the provision of equal funding and resources (Hackworth and Moriah, 2006).

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