Canadian policymakers are sprinting across the country to rain cash to stimulate homebuilding. Unfortunately, it’s not working with new housing starts actually falling further from targets in January. BMO wrote to investors to explain this is predictable, since the targets were unrealistic and will never be hit. Partially due to the lack of resources available to build at that scale, but also the fact that homebuilders build for the market, not policymakers.
Canadians are living through a housing hell. Since Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister, rent and mortgage costs have doubled. Rents have reached a record-high average of $2,196 a month. It now takes 25 years for the average Toronto family to save up for a down payment. Before Trudeau, you could pay off an entire mortgage in that time. Over the past year, the cost to rent an apartment with a roommate jumped by 18.5 per cent, making it more expensive than living alone when Trudeau was first elected.
Housing minister denies he ignored warning about immigration levels and housing supply
OTTAWA – Housing Minister Sean Fraser said he didn’t ignore warnings as immigration minister about the number of new Canadians the country was accepting exceeding the number of houses the country was building.
The Liberals immigration targets set to plateau next year at 500,000 permanent residents are twice what the targets were when they came to office in 2015.
Fraser appeared at the House of Commons finance committee, where Conservative MP Jasraj Singh Hallan demanded to know why he had failed to act on that warning in his last cabinet post as immigration minister.
There is no “labour shortage” – Canada’s much-touted labour shortage is mostly a mirage
… Despite that apparent shortage, wages are not rising in response. That could be explained in part by a lack of pricing power by some employers. They may not be able to increase their own prices enough to absorb the cost of higher wages.
The heart of the answer, however, is the rise in the number of temporary foreign workers who are willing to work for cut-rate wages and are not as able to shift jobs nearly as easily as Canadian residents. The number of such workers has exploded since the pandemic, jumping to 120,000 at the end of 2022 from 73,360 at the end of 2019.
Our Captains of Industry loved indentured servants.
Tent encampments prove ‘exactly how broken’ Canada’s system is, federal housing advocate says
A new report on tent encampments across Canada calls for urgent action from all levels of government to end what the federal housing advocate describes as a “life and death crisis.”
Marie-Josée Houle said her report released Tuesday is the first of its kind in Canada. The report — titled Upholding dignity and human rights — outlines six calls to action to address ongoing homeless encampments across Canada.
“It is a physical manifestation of exactly how broken our housing and homelessness system is from coast to coast to coast in Canada. It needs urgent measures,” Houle told CBC News.
In recent months, politicians have been speaking with increasing urgency about housing affordability in Canada. But it’s not clear that policy makers, or the broader public, understand what restoring affordability actually means in terms of dollars and cents, according to Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist at credit union hub Alberta Central.
In a report published last week, Mr. St-Arnaud crunched the numbers on the size of adjustments that would be needed to bring affordability, specifically for the home ownership segment of the market, back in line with historical trends in seven of Canada’s largest cities.
Basically we’re fecked.
But I still don’t understand why as in other articles on the topic mass imigration’s impact on demand was not discussed.
To me that makes the article nothing but propaganda in support of Corporate Canada’s wage slave imports.
Could the way Canadians park vehicles be part of the housing crisis?
It’s no secret that Canada is facing a major housing shortage. But could the sheer amount of space used for parking vehicles be part of the problem?
A recent Re/Max report looking at participation in the housing market said the “vast majority” of lower-priced properties in the Greater Toronto Area are parking spaces, and that most of the 250 ‘properties’ listed for sale under the $400,000 price point are parking spaces, lockers and vacant land.
For housing advocates, it touched on a longtime frustration
The central conceit of government is that the people working in it have the intelligence and expertise to solve complex problems. And yet, evidence of these high-level problem-solving skills is difficult to find.
Take the housing crisis, an issue felt most acutely in Ontario, which has the country’s fastest population growth and its greatest housing supply shortage. Fixing the problem is largely up to the government of Premier Doug Ford and the province’s 414 municipalities. Feeling confident?
The City of Ottawa says there are about 300 families or 1,039 people staying in hotels, motels, and post-secondary residences waiting for permanent housing because emergency shelters are over-capacity.
Jamieson Ferguson and her family were once one of them. The 26-year-old mother of three, expecting her fourth, stayed in a motel for just over two years.
“Let me tell you, that is not a place for children,” she said.
The homeless crisis in America is set to come to a head with a Supreme Court ruling as early as this spring, in the case of Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, Oregon.
The Supreme Court could—depending on what it decides—force changes in city ordinances and homeless policies across the country.
The decision is one of the most anticipated in years for San Francisco and other cities facing legal challenges from homeless people and advocacy groups.
Even as housing markets cool in some areas, housing affordability in Canada is the worst in over four decades due, in part, to sustained post-pandemic inflation and comparatively higher interest rates.
According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation — the federal Crown corporation responsible for administering Canada’s National Housing Act — affordability is defined as mortgage or rent payments that do not exceed more than 30 per cent of a household’s gross monthly income.
If a family makes $50,000 per year before taxes, for instance, anything more than $15,000 per year (or $1,250 per month) spent on rent would put them in an unaffordable situation.
In late July, Lindsay Dworkin, a senior project manager at a medical tech company, received a text message from her downstairs neighbour. Their landlord, the neighbour said, was putting the home Dworkin lived in with her husband and two-year-old daughter up for sale. Her family would have to find a new place to live.
In a normal city, at a normal time, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. But in the Toronto of 2023 it was devastating. “I couldn’t function,” Dworkin said. “I had to get my parents to come over and take over child care duties.”
The Star’s solution is to turn Toronto into a giant slum! Well it’s already on its way there.
A migrant family has been camping in broad daylight outside the Midtown headquarters of billionaire George Soros’ lefty advocacy group Open Society Foundations — which poured tens of millions of dollars into pushing loose immigration policies, shocking video footage shows.
The video, posted Wednesday on X by activist and political consultant Jason Curtis Anderson, shows a mother he claims is a Asian migrant sitting in the freezing cold on a gray blanket spread along the sidewalk outside of Soros’ grant-making network’s offices on West 57th Street near Broadway.
A Hamilton councillor’s recent experience witnessing a baby born in an encampment in the city demonstrates the “unacceptable” housing crisis residents face and “eye opening” situations paramedics and police officers are currently responding to, he says.
Coun. Matt Francis (Ward 5) told CBC Hamilton he was doing a ride along with police on a cold morning in late November when they were called to a medical emergency at an encampment tucked away in an industrial area in the east end.
Canadians never imagined that a man so criminally stupid, so self righteously indifferent to the genuine suffering of citizens as Justin Trudeau could ever be elected PM.
The Supreme Court may soon overturn Ninth Circuit rulings that have aggravated the crisis on the West Coast.
The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, dealing with whether the homeless have a constitutional right to camp on public property. As a result, the Court may soon overturn rulings by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that have greatly contributed to the West Coast’s homelessness crisis.
Six years ago, the Ninth Circuit first decided Martin v. City of Boise, ruling that, unless sufficient shelter beds were available, imposing criminal penalties on people for sleeping and camping in public violated the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 2022, the Ninth Circuit strengthened this precedent in the Grants Pass case, stating that even civil citations and citations for putting down bedding were forbidden.
B.C. and Ontario are vowing to crack down on private post-secondary institutions that are accused of exploiting international students, after the federal government announced Monday it will cap the number of student permits issued in the next two years.
Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced the government will reduce the number of student visas by 35 per cent for 2024, stating the goal is in part to target private institutions he described as “the diploma equivalent of puppy mills.”
I don’t believe this for a minute.
A very good explanation of the housing crisis and why the Liberals can’t fix it doing what they’re doing.
Most housing economists at that time concluded that Canada’s booming population wasn’t the key driver of rising home prices.
The key driver of rapidly rising home prices, they argued, was a “lack of supply” driven mainly by municipal inefficiencies and zoning restrictions 2/
— John Pasalis (@JohnPasalis) January 22, 2024
