Canada

That’s how supply and demand works. When the government decides to build something, they create more demand for materials but they don’t create more supply. If they could snap their fingers like a genie and create a pile of building materials out of thin air then they could make prices go down. But obviously they can’t do that!

You might say “oh well the construction materials companies could just keep charging the same prices and be satisfied with their current profits” and you’d be right, they could do that. But then the distributors and retailers would raise prices and capture those profits themselves! You could also insist that the distributors and retailers do the same thing. But then you’d get private individuals stockpiling the materials and reselling them at a profit, just like people did with toilet paper shortages during COVID.

You could then say “oh but we’ll make that illegal too” then you end up with a black market. Now you’ve got to hire tons of police officers to fight against the black market you created with your price control policies.

Ultimately you can’t win against the laws of supply and demand.

I mean there is actually increasing demand so I'm not really sure if this is an example of corporate greed or if it's just a realistic adjustment to the market. If the government is effectively subsidizing housing starts, it's pretty reasonable to expect that without removal of tariff barriers and trade barriers for building materials, that the price of building materials would just increase in Canada overall. The only variables that Canada can really control is the price of softwood lumber due to the prevalence of stumpage fees, and the cost of importing foreign skilled trades labour (which is vehemently opposed by trade unions in Canada.) I can only hope that your plant is reinvesting its profits into increasing supply instead of paying out dividends, which would improve the ability to facilitate housing starts in the long run.

Thing is, there's still what you might call a stagnation space between "line goes up" and "must declare bankruptcy", one in which even a publically traded company can ride for a year or so without the shareholders getting too anxious while they wait for the line to start going up again. Yes, you'll get the occasional company cratering by doubling down on a bad decision made in pursuit of line-goes-up, but 240 of them suggests that there's something more going on here.

It may be that the issue is the "higher borrowing costs" that the article alludes to, and the way these companies have been conditioned to do business causes them to overextend themselves by borrowing too much. That means that the ones that stay afloat will be the ones that can correctly balance the risks inherent in taking out loans.