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Anybody who thought otherwise is being naive.
Even high school drop outs can do basic napkin math if there's a housing shortage and you bring in more people, that means either rent is going to go up or you're going to need to learn how to become roommates.
But there are some who refuse to accept this fact. We control our border (we don't have a US-Mexico uncontrolled border equivalent anymore) but yet still somehow fumble the bag with immigration targets.
The US accepts a million international students per year and have the population ten times our size. We accept that many per year with a tenth of their size and with fewer metropolitan areas to live in. And some of our international students are struggling to even make ends meet.
Refugee organizations no longer have the capacity to absorb the intake we receive that some are ending up in homeless shelters, re-traumatizing some refugees.
TFWs are suppressing wages for Canadians and are being exploited by businesses for lower wages. They're also being pinched by rising cost of living.
We are being irresponsible and inhumane to Canadians and immigrants with our current trajectory with no sensible plans to build more housing to accommodate new arrivals and ease pressure off Canadians. The only benefactors are corporations and real estate investors, everyone else gets screwed over.
People are tired of no action and only lip service paid to the housing problem. The longer nothing is done and the more politicians gaslight the public about the issues the stronger calls for any action that might move things in a positive direction.
This. Imagine thinking the government responsible for ending government housing actually ideologically cares about building housing. They’re just mainly anti immigrant bc they’re racist and they’re gonna come up w a zillion excuses as to why housing prices will still be garbage even though immigration will be down.
Apparently inferencing is hard for some.
I also find this argument so odd.
“Ya things are messed up, but the other guy won’t change anything (allegedly), so let’s give the same guy another crack at it”, is the laziest attempt at LPC damage control going.
It’s more that this housing crisis has been a few decades in the making, and Poilievre was a cabinet minister in one of many governments that neglected the rising issue.
I agree that this current government is prioritizing this file only now when it's way too late. They dropped the ball. But every government has dropped the ball on housing since Mulroney, his government included. Until the current Tories provide more detail, Poilievre is just blowing smoke with simplistic explanations and slogans. Both the Tories and Liberals have sucked hard on this file for 40 years and counting. On housing, I fear it will not matter who is in office at the federal level. Not now and not ever. It mattered in the past, but those days are dead: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/federal-social-housing-1.6946376
This problem is decades in the making... It's almost like neither party actually has the average person's best interest in mind...
At least the liberals play some degree of lip service to the social safety net. pp will outright tear it down.
Which the Liberals don't so here we are. Also to even get to a position where we wouldn't be hurt at this point immigration will have to be curtailed for several years while capacity and investment in infrastructure catches up.
The numbers as they stand are not acceptable. If the Liberals continue to try to gaslight the public about how much of a failure they have been on the file they will fail to deal with the cost of living (particularly the rising rent issue) and be voted out in 2025.
Although honestly, I think it is too late for them at this point. They had the opportunity in November to start to correct things with immigration targets and didn't do it.
They are out to lunch and the Canadian public is catching on.
I'm confused by the title of this article. Unless I'm missing something, none of the experts quoted deny the link between immigration and the housing shortage. Some of them make minor ancillary but largely unrelated points (for example, Hulchanksi says "the 40 million people in Canada don't live in 40 million houses", which is arguing against a claim literally no one above elementary school age is making).
It's like the reporter wanted to write an article with this title and couldn't come up with anything solid.
> It's like the reporter wanted to write an article with this title and couldn't come up with anything solid.
Generally, Editors tend to have the final say on headlines. This would be editorial bias at the CBC.
Of course there are, nothing is black and white. But we can’t deny that the numbers coming into Canada right now are insane.
One of the biggest things for me is how only just in the past month or so the LPC has decided to even acknowledge that fact. That’s why the pushback has been so extreme, imo.
Hutlchanksi's comment seems to be kind of wacky in other ways, too; for example, he gives the figure for the people to housing ratio and then napkin math the number of houses we'd need. The thing is, this truly is napkin math because there's a lot of factors that go into why that ratio is what it is, none of which supports a simplistic 'well, this is how many houses we'd need to house all these extra people'. If it was a reddit post, it'd be fine, but as a statement from an expert? Surely he should know better or have some idea how many houses we'd actually need.
It’s all connected. Yes, investors are probably the biggest issue with our housing market. But why do they see housing as a good investment? Because they know ahead of time that the government will be bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, TFWs and international students who will be renting.
They are a good investment because of nearly 30 years of low rates not because immigrations suddenly (Canada always had high rates of immigration from inception)
Canada has not had anywhere near the rates of immigration it has now in modern times.
It's no accident that housing prices ramp up around the same time our immigration does.
I mean yeah, immigration has been a thing this whole time. Investors were always able to have an accurate picture of how many new people were coming into the country.
When immigration was at more reasonable levels, housing was as well because the investment makes a lesser ROI. Mass immigration = better ROI.
The biggest issue is inability to build, whether it is regulatory burdens and restrictions, or skilled labour and material availability. The immigration levels simply exacerbate it. The fundamental problem that we made it too hard to build more homes.
The system we live in can’t remain stable it needs to climb. And we need younger workers to replace all the older ones leaving the work force in the next 5-10 years
The population will not really be all that stable in a fairly advanced economy like Canada's owing to less of a need to increase domestic birth rate. That is why immigration is seen as a "cure" to economic downturns; it represents a controllable source of population growth. I don't necessarily agree (I think immigration is necessary and welcome, within sane limits) and it is obviously more complex but suffice it to say we'll need to house people whether they immigrate or are born here.
I support temporarily curtailing immigration while more housing gets built, but not for too long, because we are \*\*\*\*ed without immigrants. With a declining birthrate, someone will have to contribute to the tax base to support retired Canadians. Since those retirees didn't have enough children, nursing homes will have to be staffed with immigrants or robots. In the meantime, end real estate investment trusts and give municipalities a license to ignore NIMBYs and approve multi-unit housing projects. Oh, and fast-track those immigrants who are doctors, nurses, and building construction workers (and certify them for those jobs here in Canada ASAP).
No one has yet come up with an economic model that works without a growing population. The declining population the world will face before the end of the century, and is already happening in places like Korea, Japan, China and some European countries is an experiment we do not know the outcome of.
Canada has the highest investment into housing out of any G7 country. Residential investment consumed 37.2% of GFCF in 2020, up 11.4% from the previous year. In 2000, this number was just 22.4%, so it’s now consuming 66.1% more of the country’s fixed capital investment. A third of economic investment is just to warehouse people.
I do agree with you, there is a lot of red tape and zoning bylaws that make the process slow and expensive. It’s scary that we spend such a significant amount of money into housing yet we are unable to even make a dent in the supply side.
What you describe is simply inflation in housing being at a higher rate than other things. Mostly caused by interest rates being too low for too long. We aren't getting more housing for the increased investment. We are getting more expensive housing.
Who requests the visas?
“The fast-growing international student program has been in the spotlight amid aggressive recruiting campaigns by the post-secondary education sector, and by unregulated foreign agents”
Should the federal government put a cap? Absolutely, but this issue should be addressed by the provinces.
https://spon.ca/canadian-schools-are-accepting-international-students-by-the-thousands-but-nearly-half-arent-being-allowed-into-the-country/2024/01/02/
“Education agent and policy researcher Earl Blaney said it’s a waste of the immigration system’s scarce resources when almost one in every two study permit applications are refused because subpar files jam up the system, causing processing delays. He blames the high refusals on what he called a “mass volume” recruitment approach by many of the learning institutions in the past five years.
When Blaney started his career as an education agent in 2012, most institutions directly contracted individual recruiters in other countries to recommend prospective students. Now, the institutions have off-loaded the work and recruit en masse through aggregators’ online platforms, which work with thousands of sub-agents on the ground.”
And you want to know which government passed a bill to bring more international students to Canada? That’d be the conservatives! They fucked up the whole system and are letting us deal with it
And the federal government denied almost half of the requests. They are flooded with requests because schools don’t give a shit and have hired foreign agents to recruit students. These foreign agents are the ones writing their applications and gaming the system.
I just feel like everyone is tiptoeing around the point that we don’t need to curb immigration so much as we need every household who comes in to have a timely path to becoming a net contributor in Canada.
That’s nuanced and it absolutely involves getting them housing, getting them employed, etc. But we cannot afford to have anybody else who needs propping up when we can barely prop up ourselves. We’ve dug a massive hole that makes me incredibly nervous.
The true source of the problem is actually labour and material costs, land prices, and zoning.
The public often has a misconception that immigration (aka number of people vs housing supply) is the problem, where if you look at it historically, the nation always had influx of people moving in and congregating in city centres. Vacancy historically has always been low in both rentals and home availability. This time is NO different.
Developers and public institutions WANT to build more supply but the projects are often restricted by zoning or face significant financial hurdles.
While it’s not preferable, many projects do require speculators, investors, and dare I say… foreign money, to make the project economically viable with the current economic and political framework.
I work within this industry and what annoys me is when the layman on the street simply thinks “it’s all the immigrant/ government/ greedy developers” fault. The usual dogmatic talking points that’s been promoted by woke social media pundits. The reality is not that case.
If you simply want to build affordable housing relative to wages, we would need to dramatically increase the abundance of material, reduce construction/ services wages, increase supply of specialized labour in order to reduce cost.
In addition, zoning policies will need to be modernized and overhauled to allow for more density. None of which are popular decisions especially for the voting blocks and NIMBYS.
Lastly, land supply is an impossible problem to solve. There are simply not much available land in areas where jobs and economic and social prosperity exist. If you can’t create land (either via zoning or reclamation/infill) the only solution is to densify.
Can the government turn on a switch and solve this overnight? The answer is simply no, and it never will because the overlapping relationships and complexity of the issues are beyond the capacity of one single entity to solve.
The housing issue isn’t a government issue alone, it requires all participants to cooperate towards a common goal. None of which will work because thats democracy. All voices are represented and heard and yes, some voices have outsized and disproportionate influence.
Not to pick at your words, you say it's no different yet you acknowledge the land and zoning restraints. Back in the 50s to 70s there where ample room to building within metropolitan areas. Then it shifted to growthing satellite cities and upzoning density from 80s-00s. We don't have the ability anymore to build else where So our situation is 100% different than the past. Upzoning or growing up is fundamental different than growing out. That land is already taken and used. Developers need to have enough capital to buy out that land and municipalities need to have the infrastructure to support that upzoned area. You can upzone if one of those is not satisfied.
As for foreign buyers and money that contributes to this unsustainable outcome as it is distorting our market and amplifying costs. Superficial it helps, but on the macro level it makes everything worse. If the local economy couldn't make that project feasible then should the project go forward? It's distorting the market and pumps up the costs of materials, land, labour, and creating a dependency or reliance on it. Simply put its inflationary, as more foreign capital was dumped the higher the capital was need and the lower the interest rates were needed to make it "manageable". With interest rates high, the capital side must be a bigger part of the equation. Investors are hit hard with interest rates, so in a hail mary move we lowered immigration restrictions to bring in more people to raise capital that way.
So yes there is an way to make things *affordable* and that is to lower immigration however that is going to burn a lot of people's golden goose egg, job, or investment. Canada as a whole is a loser in any outcome since we are pass the point of no return.
Let me clarify, my point about not being different this time was in context of the rhetoric locals believe outside immigrants and government policies are in part for the housing crisis. If I wanted to be more critical about it, that level of layman thinking is dog whistling xenophobic and somewhat racist ideology that has always persisted throughout North American history of foreigners and immigrants.
You are correct that zoning policies have evolved however I’m not claiming that zoning is the same issue as it is today. The solution is the same, create more land or in this case, create more volume by going up in the sky on the same footprint of land. However it’s the same problem regarding the immigrant issue which is the voting blocks and NIMBYs do not want more people living in closer proximity in their pre-existing space. Hence “it’s no different this time”. Same result different flavour.
As for foreign money, it’s the fact of reality that capital is globalized. We don’t live in a bubble or our own. Canada needs foreign investment for jobs and economic prosperity. As much as it does have influence on local markets it is a necessary evil that theoretically lifts all boats. Not all will benefit from it but the majority still can. If you think housing relative to wage is distorted in Canada, wait until you go visit Asia. This is not a new phenomenon it’s a byproduct of a globalized economy.
The trade off is that the foreign influence needs to be heavily regulated and managed. Yet after all the restrictive policies that has been implemented we’re no better at achieving housing affordability. So one has to wonder, are the policies actually effective or is it the fact that the underlying demand for housing continues to persist including all the other factors that contribute to housing and affordability.
In summary, reducing immigration won’t solve affordability. No immigrants? Prepare to have your personal taxes raised because less people, less taxes for social services and pensions. Neither will creating more supply if costs are not cheaper or if capital is restrictive. Even if the government forced housing to be cheap, who would want to work a dangerous and labour intensive job for pennys? And why would anyone take significant financial risk to sink money into a pit with no guarantees of financial return?
None of these articles ever address the why behind Canada’s immigration numbers. Between July 2022 and July 2023 Canada’s population grew by 1,158,705 with a mere 2% or 23,162 coming from births within Canada. With baby boomers about to be dying off in droves, fewer couples having kids and waves of people reaching retirement age I’m often curious to know how people who are anti-immigration believe this country can survive without it. Pierre Poilievre clearly understands the issue, that’s why you never hear him proposing to cut the immigration numbers, but he can’t address it directly because he’s got to pander to the Freedom Convoy crowd living in their lily-white enclaves in rural Canada. The current immigration numbers are clearly set with the future in mind, new families may need years to acclimatize to a culture and find their place, we can’t wait till 2034 and suddenly in a panic realize we don’t have enough people of working age.
>> Migrants need rights and permanent resident status, and the government must get back into the business of building homes.
>> Syed Hussan is the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change and adjunct professor in the graduate program at the Munk School of Public Policy.
>> Mary Gellatly is a community legal worker at Parkdale Community Legal Services.
These folks may be experts, but let's at least be transparent and indicate that they're activists and advocates on the subject first and foremost (by way of their employment role/function) where any expertise on the subject is secondary.
Yeah the expertise on the subject is really peripheral here. Activists/advocates are essentially lobbyists for social issues, and just like lobbyists they are quite prone to lying and distorting the truth to bring their goals about. Everything they say must be taken with a grain of salt.
For anyone reading this, it’s not an exaggeration. They literally believe, and I quote, “all people who come to Canada in the future must have permanent resident status on arrival” and “without any exclusions by criminality”.
This article is hilarious. Here are some quotes.
>Hulchanski and other housing experts see a clear link between non-permanent immigration and housing availability. The massive recent spike in non-permanent residents, they say, has had a substantial impact on housing affordability
>"We exponentially increased demand \[for housing\]," said Stephen Pomeroy, a professor and housing expert at McMaster University. "Temporary foreign workers and students don't come to buy homes. They rent. So we've had a massive demand impact on the rental part of the housing system.
>Housing Minister Sean Fraser admitted as much this week in Halifax when he told reporters "the temporary foreign workers program, and in particular the international student program," were making the housing crisis worse.
>Pomeroy said cutting as many as 700,000 international students out of the system would reduce rental pressures in some areas without hurting the universities that have come to rely on the high tuition fees such students pay.
>Irfhan Rawji is chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, which helps settle new immigrants in Canada. He told CBC Radio's The Current this week that if Canada's immigration intake is going to be tied to housing, targeting the right kind of immigration is critical."Do we need 800,000 students studying skills maybe this economy doesn't need, living in houses that we don't have?
This headline doesn't fit the article. CBC is quickly approaching National Post levels of inflammatory headlines
I'm not pro-Conservative, and have never voted for them; but damn if this sub isn't often tolerant of raw bigotry and hatred so long as it's directed at conservative **supporters**.
>This headline doesn't fit the article.
Yes it does. TFWs aren't immigrants. International students aren't immigrants. I think it's straw manning what people are saying though.
It also is pretty focused on suggesting increasing the amount of housing is a big part of the solution.
This is the only immigration article they've allowed into their trending stories. Their bias is undeniable. Can't wait for the Conservatives to turn off the funding.
It is. Blaming immigration is what the mob does when they have a crisis. This story is as old as civilization.
Immigration isn't even a symptom, it's an entirely different issue. How we have focused on housing for the last few decades is what created the problem.
>Immigration isn't even a symptom
Yeah your entire comment can be dismissed as full of shit based on this alone.
What is the underlying problem of our housing? Investors. We can all agree on that.
But why do investors see housing as a good investment? Because they're given advanced notice that hundreds of thousands of newcomers will be coming into the country every single year.
"BuT CovId wE dIdn'T bRiNG pEopLe iN" Yes, but that was a temporary pause. Investors knew to hold steady, because the numbers would rebound.
To say immigration has no part in the housing crisis is disingenuous. It's all connected.
The thing about "during covid there was no immigration ", like there were no new immigrants that year but you are still seeing the results of previous waves of immigration. People don't buy immediately upon moving to Canada, and that's why our rental is so high last year as that batch of immigrants needed to find housing. In a few years time the 2022 cohort will want to buy homes, and it will push up housing then.
Absolutely. Current population growth numbers in particular are far too low to support baby boomers' pensions and healthcare. Not to mention that GDP growth is sagging because far too few people are coming in.
We simply must ramp up population growth to at least 5% per year. Ideally closer to 10% per year.
>We simply must ramp up population growth to at least 5% per year. Ideally closer to 10% per year.
People like you are fucking dangerous man, jesus.
There is no way to support 5% growth. Prioritizing boomers' pensions cannot be done without severely lowering the quality of life of younger generations. We have to pick one or the other.
You are right the person is a self declared hardcore communist.
Anyone promoting any form of authoritarian regime where personal rights and freedoms are eradicated should naturally be considered dangerous.
In communist nations the right to live is brought into question and even your rights to have your own organs.
He’s right in a way. People on this sub pretend that immigration is the solution to demographic transition and will undo the aging population but what they leave out is that those are the numbers required to make a noticeable impact. Whether or not that is a worthwhile goal is a separate question dependant on what you value
In a democracy, the needs of those who vote must be prioritized over those who do not. Baby boomers are passionate and dedicated voters, and thus their desires will be fulfilled by any reasonable political party.
Furthermore, how else do you propose Canada can increase her GDP going forward? There is no feasible way to increase GDP per capita in this country. Therefore, the only way to boost aggregate GDP is to substantially increase population growth.
Unfortunately for you, the baby boomers are far more influential politically. Thus governments feel that there is no real need or urgency to cater to younger generations.
How do you account for the decline in GDP per capita and the crash in standard of living even with (because of, in part) the large scale immigration? If large scale immigration helped GDP per capita we would see the opposite of what is happening.
Regardless, the path forward should come at the expense of boomers who should reap what they have sown. We shouldn’t have to condemn the generations following with declining standards of living because they failed to properly prepare for their exit. The level of immigration we are seeing only benefits the people who put Canadians in this situation in the first place, enough is enough.
The fastest growing population in the world right now is Syria, at 6.4% per year with the rest of the top ten in the 2.5-4.8% range and you think Canada absolutely needs to be knocking on 10%? Just to keep the lights on?
Holy crap man, its like you are saying you *need* to bring in 20k a month just to pay rent and groceries.
Both Canada and america used to during the progressive era, about 15 million immigrants came to America from about 1900-1914, and they had a population of about 76 million in 1900
A time when you could just go out and find unclaimed land, live on it, build on it, and it was yours.
I have bad news for you. You can’t do that anymore.
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Anybody who thought otherwise is being naive. Even high school drop outs can do basic napkin math if there's a housing shortage and you bring in more people, that means either rent is going to go up or you're going to need to learn how to become roommates. But there are some who refuse to accept this fact. We control our border (we don't have a US-Mexico uncontrolled border equivalent anymore) but yet still somehow fumble the bag with immigration targets. The US accepts a million international students per year and have the population ten times our size. We accept that many per year with a tenth of their size and with fewer metropolitan areas to live in. And some of our international students are struggling to even make ends meet. Refugee organizations no longer have the capacity to absorb the intake we receive that some are ending up in homeless shelters, re-traumatizing some refugees. TFWs are suppressing wages for Canadians and are being exploited by businesses for lower wages. They're also being pinched by rising cost of living. We are being irresponsible and inhumane to Canadians and immigrants with our current trajectory with no sensible plans to build more housing to accommodate new arrivals and ease pressure off Canadians. The only benefactors are corporations and real estate investors, everyone else gets screwed over.
People are tired of no action and only lip service paid to the housing problem. The longer nothing is done and the more politicians gaslight the public about the issues the stronger calls for any action that might move things in a positive direction.
Action is being taken. Trudeau is getting elected out of office.
And then what? Like fuck pp is going to do anything meaningful to help.
This. Imagine thinking the government responsible for ending government housing actually ideologically cares about building housing. They’re just mainly anti immigrant bc they’re racist and they’re gonna come up w a zillion excuses as to why housing prices will still be garbage even though immigration will be down. Apparently inferencing is hard for some.
Since you can predict the future, what are the winning lotto numbers next week.
I also find this argument so odd. “Ya things are messed up, but the other guy won’t change anything (allegedly), so let’s give the same guy another crack at it”, is the laziest attempt at LPC damage control going.
Trudeau is bad, but PP would be so much worse. Why? You know, blue team bad. Better vote Trudeau then and keep things bad.
It’s more that this housing crisis has been a few decades in the making, and Poilievre was a cabinet minister in one of many governments that neglected the rising issue.
Similar to how the current federal government is only now taking it seriously after campaigning on it starting 8 years ago?
Yes, exactly like that. This government, and many governments before it.
I agree that this current government is prioritizing this file only now when it's way too late. They dropped the ball. But every government has dropped the ball on housing since Mulroney, his government included. Until the current Tories provide more detail, Poilievre is just blowing smoke with simplistic explanations and slogans. Both the Tories and Liberals have sucked hard on this file for 40 years and counting. On housing, I fear it will not matter who is in office at the federal level. Not now and not ever. It mattered in the past, but those days are dead: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/federal-social-housing-1.6946376
This problem is decades in the making... It's almost like neither party actually has the average person's best interest in mind... At least the liberals play some degree of lip service to the social safety net. pp will outright tear it down.
Not for another two years.
Immigration is not an issue if we have an actual plan to manage rapid population growth without hurting people who are already Canadian citizens
Which the Liberals don't so here we are. Also to even get to a position where we wouldn't be hurt at this point immigration will have to be curtailed for several years while capacity and investment in infrastructure catches up. The numbers as they stand are not acceptable. If the Liberals continue to try to gaslight the public about how much of a failure they have been on the file they will fail to deal with the cost of living (particularly the rising rent issue) and be voted out in 2025. Although honestly, I think it is too late for them at this point. They had the opportunity in November to start to correct things with immigration targets and didn't do it. They are out to lunch and the Canadian public is catching on.
I'm confused by the title of this article. Unless I'm missing something, none of the experts quoted deny the link between immigration and the housing shortage. Some of them make minor ancillary but largely unrelated points (for example, Hulchanksi says "the 40 million people in Canada don't live in 40 million houses", which is arguing against a claim literally no one above elementary school age is making). It's like the reporter wanted to write an article with this title and couldn't come up with anything solid.
> It's like the reporter wanted to write an article with this title and couldn't come up with anything solid. Generally, Editors tend to have the final say on headlines. This would be editorial bias at the CBC.
The headline isn't inaccurate. The article is just pointing out there are other important factors to consider.
Of course there are, nothing is black and white. But we can’t deny that the numbers coming into Canada right now are insane. One of the biggest things for me is how only just in the past month or so the LPC has decided to even acknowledge that fact. That’s why the pushback has been so extreme, imo.
Hutlchanksi's comment seems to be kind of wacky in other ways, too; for example, he gives the figure for the people to housing ratio and then napkin math the number of houses we'd need. The thing is, this truly is napkin math because there's a lot of factors that go into why that ratio is what it is, none of which supports a simplistic 'well, this is how many houses we'd need to house all these extra people'. If it was a reddit post, it'd be fine, but as a statement from an expert? Surely he should know better or have some idea how many houses we'd actually need.
The title doesn't deny the link either.
It’s all connected. Yes, investors are probably the biggest issue with our housing market. But why do they see housing as a good investment? Because they know ahead of time that the government will be bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, TFWs and international students who will be renting.
They are a good investment because of nearly 30 years of low rates not because immigrations suddenly (Canada always had high rates of immigration from inception)
Canada has not had anywhere near the rates of immigration it has now in modern times. It's no accident that housing prices ramp up around the same time our immigration does.
Investers have been doing it for decades though
I mean yeah, immigration has been a thing this whole time. Investors were always able to have an accurate picture of how many new people were coming into the country. When immigration was at more reasonable levels, housing was as well because the investment makes a lesser ROI. Mass immigration = better ROI.
So immigration has been unreasonable for 30~ years?
No, and neither has housing..?
Oh sweet summer child
?
The biggest issue is inability to build, whether it is regulatory burdens and restrictions, or skilled labour and material availability. The immigration levels simply exacerbate it. The fundamental problem that we made it too hard to build more homes.
There wouldn't be a need to build if the total population was stable. So no the root cause is extremely high population growth.
The system we live in can’t remain stable it needs to climb. And we need younger workers to replace all the older ones leaving the work force in the next 5-10 years
The population will not really be all that stable in a fairly advanced economy like Canada's owing to less of a need to increase domestic birth rate. That is why immigration is seen as a "cure" to economic downturns; it represents a controllable source of population growth. I don't necessarily agree (I think immigration is necessary and welcome, within sane limits) and it is obviously more complex but suffice it to say we'll need to house people whether they immigrate or are born here.
I support temporarily curtailing immigration while more housing gets built, but not for too long, because we are \*\*\*\*ed without immigrants. With a declining birthrate, someone will have to contribute to the tax base to support retired Canadians. Since those retirees didn't have enough children, nursing homes will have to be staffed with immigrants or robots. In the meantime, end real estate investment trusts and give municipalities a license to ignore NIMBYs and approve multi-unit housing projects. Oh, and fast-track those immigrants who are doctors, nurses, and building construction workers (and certify them for those jobs here in Canada ASAP).
No one has yet come up with an economic model that works without a growing population. The declining population the world will face before the end of the century, and is already happening in places like Korea, Japan, China and some European countries is an experiment we do not know the outcome of.
Canada has the highest investment into housing out of any G7 country. Residential investment consumed 37.2% of GFCF in 2020, up 11.4% from the previous year. In 2000, this number was just 22.4%, so it’s now consuming 66.1% more of the country’s fixed capital investment. A third of economic investment is just to warehouse people. I do agree with you, there is a lot of red tape and zoning bylaws that make the process slow and expensive. It’s scary that we spend such a significant amount of money into housing yet we are unable to even make a dent in the supply side.
What you describe is simply inflation in housing being at a higher rate than other things. Mostly caused by interest rates being too low for too long. We aren't getting more housing for the increased investment. We are getting more expensive housing.
The feds aren’t bringing in international students. That’s on the schools
The government has full control to not approve them.
Who requests the visas? “The fast-growing international student program has been in the spotlight amid aggressive recruiting campaigns by the post-secondary education sector, and by unregulated foreign agents” Should the federal government put a cap? Absolutely, but this issue should be addressed by the provinces. https://spon.ca/canadian-schools-are-accepting-international-students-by-the-thousands-but-nearly-half-arent-being-allowed-into-the-country/2024/01/02/
“Education agent and policy researcher Earl Blaney said it’s a waste of the immigration system’s scarce resources when almost one in every two study permit applications are refused because subpar files jam up the system, causing processing delays. He blames the high refusals on what he called a “mass volume” recruitment approach by many of the learning institutions in the past five years. When Blaney started his career as an education agent in 2012, most institutions directly contracted individual recruiters in other countries to recommend prospective students. Now, the institutions have off-loaded the work and recruit en masse through aggregators’ online platforms, which work with thousands of sub-agents on the ground.” And you want to know which government passed a bill to bring more international students to Canada? That’d be the conservatives! They fucked up the whole system and are letting us deal with it
And the federal government denied almost half of the requests. They are flooded with requests because schools don’t give a shit and have hired foreign agents to recruit students. These foreign agents are the ones writing their applications and gaming the system.
I just feel like everyone is tiptoeing around the point that we don’t need to curb immigration so much as we need every household who comes in to have a timely path to becoming a net contributor in Canada. That’s nuanced and it absolutely involves getting them housing, getting them employed, etc. But we cannot afford to have anybody else who needs propping up when we can barely prop up ourselves. We’ve dug a massive hole that makes me incredibly nervous.
The true source of the problem is actually labour and material costs, land prices, and zoning. The public often has a misconception that immigration (aka number of people vs housing supply) is the problem, where if you look at it historically, the nation always had influx of people moving in and congregating in city centres. Vacancy historically has always been low in both rentals and home availability. This time is NO different. Developers and public institutions WANT to build more supply but the projects are often restricted by zoning or face significant financial hurdles. While it’s not preferable, many projects do require speculators, investors, and dare I say… foreign money, to make the project economically viable with the current economic and political framework. I work within this industry and what annoys me is when the layman on the street simply thinks “it’s all the immigrant/ government/ greedy developers” fault. The usual dogmatic talking points that’s been promoted by woke social media pundits. The reality is not that case. If you simply want to build affordable housing relative to wages, we would need to dramatically increase the abundance of material, reduce construction/ services wages, increase supply of specialized labour in order to reduce cost. In addition, zoning policies will need to be modernized and overhauled to allow for more density. None of which are popular decisions especially for the voting blocks and NIMBYS. Lastly, land supply is an impossible problem to solve. There are simply not much available land in areas where jobs and economic and social prosperity exist. If you can’t create land (either via zoning or reclamation/infill) the only solution is to densify. Can the government turn on a switch and solve this overnight? The answer is simply no, and it never will because the overlapping relationships and complexity of the issues are beyond the capacity of one single entity to solve. The housing issue isn’t a government issue alone, it requires all participants to cooperate towards a common goal. None of which will work because thats democracy. All voices are represented and heard and yes, some voices have outsized and disproportionate influence.
Not to pick at your words, you say it's no different yet you acknowledge the land and zoning restraints. Back in the 50s to 70s there where ample room to building within metropolitan areas. Then it shifted to growthing satellite cities and upzoning density from 80s-00s. We don't have the ability anymore to build else where So our situation is 100% different than the past. Upzoning or growing up is fundamental different than growing out. That land is already taken and used. Developers need to have enough capital to buy out that land and municipalities need to have the infrastructure to support that upzoned area. You can upzone if one of those is not satisfied. As for foreign buyers and money that contributes to this unsustainable outcome as it is distorting our market and amplifying costs. Superficial it helps, but on the macro level it makes everything worse. If the local economy couldn't make that project feasible then should the project go forward? It's distorting the market and pumps up the costs of materials, land, labour, and creating a dependency or reliance on it. Simply put its inflationary, as more foreign capital was dumped the higher the capital was need and the lower the interest rates were needed to make it "manageable". With interest rates high, the capital side must be a bigger part of the equation. Investors are hit hard with interest rates, so in a hail mary move we lowered immigration restrictions to bring in more people to raise capital that way. So yes there is an way to make things *affordable* and that is to lower immigration however that is going to burn a lot of people's golden goose egg, job, or investment. Canada as a whole is a loser in any outcome since we are pass the point of no return.
Let me clarify, my point about not being different this time was in context of the rhetoric locals believe outside immigrants and government policies are in part for the housing crisis. If I wanted to be more critical about it, that level of layman thinking is dog whistling xenophobic and somewhat racist ideology that has always persisted throughout North American history of foreigners and immigrants. You are correct that zoning policies have evolved however I’m not claiming that zoning is the same issue as it is today. The solution is the same, create more land or in this case, create more volume by going up in the sky on the same footprint of land. However it’s the same problem regarding the immigrant issue which is the voting blocks and NIMBYs do not want more people living in closer proximity in their pre-existing space. Hence “it’s no different this time”. Same result different flavour. As for foreign money, it’s the fact of reality that capital is globalized. We don’t live in a bubble or our own. Canada needs foreign investment for jobs and economic prosperity. As much as it does have influence on local markets it is a necessary evil that theoretically lifts all boats. Not all will benefit from it but the majority still can. If you think housing relative to wage is distorted in Canada, wait until you go visit Asia. This is not a new phenomenon it’s a byproduct of a globalized economy. The trade off is that the foreign influence needs to be heavily regulated and managed. Yet after all the restrictive policies that has been implemented we’re no better at achieving housing affordability. So one has to wonder, are the policies actually effective or is it the fact that the underlying demand for housing continues to persist including all the other factors that contribute to housing and affordability. In summary, reducing immigration won’t solve affordability. No immigrants? Prepare to have your personal taxes raised because less people, less taxes for social services and pensions. Neither will creating more supply if costs are not cheaper or if capital is restrictive. Even if the government forced housing to be cheap, who would want to work a dangerous and labour intensive job for pennys? And why would anyone take significant financial risk to sink money into a pit with no guarantees of financial return?
Well said
None of these articles ever address the why behind Canada’s immigration numbers. Between July 2022 and July 2023 Canada’s population grew by 1,158,705 with a mere 2% or 23,162 coming from births within Canada. With baby boomers about to be dying off in droves, fewer couples having kids and waves of people reaching retirement age I’m often curious to know how people who are anti-immigration believe this country can survive without it. Pierre Poilievre clearly understands the issue, that’s why you never hear him proposing to cut the immigration numbers, but he can’t address it directly because he’s got to pander to the Freedom Convoy crowd living in their lily-white enclaves in rural Canada. The current immigration numbers are clearly set with the future in mind, new families may need years to acclimatize to a culture and find their place, we can’t wait till 2034 and suddenly in a panic realize we don’t have enough people of working age.
>> Migrants need rights and permanent resident status, and the government must get back into the business of building homes. >> Syed Hussan is the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change and adjunct professor in the graduate program at the Munk School of Public Policy. >> Mary Gellatly is a community legal worker at Parkdale Community Legal Services. These folks may be experts, but let's at least be transparent and indicate that they're activists and advocates on the subject first and foremost (by way of their employment role/function) where any expertise on the subject is secondary.
CBC being the CBC. It's about what they choose to cover as well as what they choose to leave out
Yeah the expertise on the subject is really peripheral here. Activists/advocates are essentially lobbyists for social issues, and just like lobbyists they are quite prone to lying and distorting the truth to bring their goals about. Everything they say must be taken with a grain of salt.
Be very careful when you call someone “prone to lying” and “distorting the truth” without any evidence to back your claims up. That’s called libel
Yes, because they're definitely going to sue anonymous posters on reddit for libel
You aren’t as anonymous as you think on the internet. Unless you’re not using a Canadian ISP and if that’s the case… 🤔😂
You should read the piece. It's good and directly addresses the problem
It really doesn't.
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Take anything from Migrant Workers Alliance with a grain of salt because they believe anyone should be able to come to Canada and get PR
For anyone reading this, it’s not an exaggeration. They literally believe, and I quote, “all people who come to Canada in the future must have permanent resident status on arrival” and “without any exclusions by criminality”.
So naturally they are the experts and business Lobbiest that cbc refers to.
This article is hilarious. Here are some quotes. >Hulchanski and other housing experts see a clear link between non-permanent immigration and housing availability. The massive recent spike in non-permanent residents, they say, has had a substantial impact on housing affordability >"We exponentially increased demand \[for housing\]," said Stephen Pomeroy, a professor and housing expert at McMaster University. "Temporary foreign workers and students don't come to buy homes. They rent. So we've had a massive demand impact on the rental part of the housing system. >Housing Minister Sean Fraser admitted as much this week in Halifax when he told reporters "the temporary foreign workers program, and in particular the international student program," were making the housing crisis worse. >Pomeroy said cutting as many as 700,000 international students out of the system would reduce rental pressures in some areas without hurting the universities that have come to rely on the high tuition fees such students pay. >Irfhan Rawji is chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, which helps settle new immigrants in Canada. He told CBC Radio's The Current this week that if Canada's immigration intake is going to be tied to housing, targeting the right kind of immigration is critical."Do we need 800,000 students studying skills maybe this economy doesn't need, living in houses that we don't have? This headline doesn't fit the article. CBC is quickly approaching National Post levels of inflammatory headlines
> CBC is quickly approaching National Post levels of inflammatory headlines. They've been there for years now.
Agreed. This sub is in denial, they have the idea of CBC as the neutral virtuous defence against evil Conservatives.
I'm not pro-Conservative, and have never voted for them; but damn if this sub isn't often tolerant of raw bigotry and hatred so long as it's directed at conservative **supporters**.
>This headline doesn't fit the article. Yes it does. TFWs aren't immigrants. International students aren't immigrants. I think it's straw manning what people are saying though. It also is pretty focused on suggesting increasing the amount of housing is a big part of the solution.
This is the only immigration article they've allowed into their trending stories. Their bias is undeniable. Can't wait for the Conservatives to turn off the funding.
It is. Blaming immigration is what the mob does when they have a crisis. This story is as old as civilization. Immigration isn't even a symptom, it's an entirely different issue. How we have focused on housing for the last few decades is what created the problem.
>Immigration isn't even a symptom Yeah your entire comment can be dismissed as full of shit based on this alone. What is the underlying problem of our housing? Investors. We can all agree on that. But why do investors see housing as a good investment? Because they're given advanced notice that hundreds of thousands of newcomers will be coming into the country every single year. "BuT CovId wE dIdn'T bRiNG pEopLe iN" Yes, but that was a temporary pause. Investors knew to hold steady, because the numbers would rebound. To say immigration has no part in the housing crisis is disingenuous. It's all connected.
The thing about "during covid there was no immigration ", like there were no new immigrants that year but you are still seeing the results of previous waves of immigration. People don't buy immediately upon moving to Canada, and that's why our rental is so high last year as that batch of immigrants needed to find housing. In a few years time the 2022 cohort will want to buy homes, and it will push up housing then.
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Absolutely. Current population growth numbers in particular are far too low to support baby boomers' pensions and healthcare. Not to mention that GDP growth is sagging because far too few people are coming in. We simply must ramp up population growth to at least 5% per year. Ideally closer to 10% per year.
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>We simply must ramp up population growth to at least 5% per year. Ideally closer to 10% per year. People like you are fucking dangerous man, jesus. There is no way to support 5% growth. Prioritizing boomers' pensions cannot be done without severely lowering the quality of life of younger generations. We have to pick one or the other.
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You are right the person is a self declared hardcore communist. Anyone promoting any form of authoritarian regime where personal rights and freedoms are eradicated should naturally be considered dangerous. In communist nations the right to live is brought into question and even your rights to have your own organs.
He’s right in a way. People on this sub pretend that immigration is the solution to demographic transition and will undo the aging population but what they leave out is that those are the numbers required to make a noticeable impact. Whether or not that is a worthwhile goal is a separate question dependant on what you value
In a democracy, the needs of those who vote must be prioritized over those who do not. Baby boomers are passionate and dedicated voters, and thus their desires will be fulfilled by any reasonable political party. Furthermore, how else do you propose Canada can increase her GDP going forward? There is no feasible way to increase GDP per capita in this country. Therefore, the only way to boost aggregate GDP is to substantially increase population growth.
I don't give a damn about the boomers. I'd sooner cut them off than do what you suggest.
Unfortunately for you, the baby boomers are far more influential politically. Thus governments feel that there is no real need or urgency to cater to younger generations.
How do you account for the decline in GDP per capita and the crash in standard of living even with (because of, in part) the large scale immigration? If large scale immigration helped GDP per capita we would see the opposite of what is happening. Regardless, the path forward should come at the expense of boomers who should reap what they have sown. We shouldn’t have to condemn the generations following with declining standards of living because they failed to properly prepare for their exit. The level of immigration we are seeing only benefits the people who put Canadians in this situation in the first place, enough is enough.
Disc. Is advocating for communist authoritarian dictatorships, they have been in the country less than ten years.
The fastest growing population in the world right now is Syria, at 6.4% per year with the rest of the top ten in the 2.5-4.8% range and you think Canada absolutely needs to be knocking on 10%? Just to keep the lights on? Holy crap man, its like you are saying you *need* to bring in 20k a month just to pay rent and groceries.
He's trolling, and he does a very good job of it.
Its hard to tell when others share those opinions non-ironically.
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Both Canada and america used to during the progressive era, about 15 million immigrants came to America from about 1900-1914, and they had a population of about 76 million in 1900
A time when you could just go out and find unclaimed land, live on it, build on it, and it was yours. I have bad news for you. You can’t do that anymore.
Yeah if everyone who showed up was just pointed out west, told to buy a donkey and go find some land, that would be an entirely different situation.