The Globe is going with a pretty click-bait-y title. But, I’ve seen others call for coordinating federal immigration numbers with infrastructure planning by municipalities and provinces. It looks like National Bank is on the same wavelength.
“The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing supply and demand. According to Statistics Canada, the working-age population surged 238,000 in Q2. That was the largest quarterly increase on record and 6.8 standard deviations from the historical norm of 82,000 per quarter. Unfortunately, Canadian homebuilders can’t keep up with this influx. Housing starts for Q2 2023 stood at 62,000 units (or 247,000 annualized). At just 0.26, the ratio of housing starts to working-age population growth fell to a new and stands at less than half its historical average of 0.61 (the ratio is normally below 1 to account for the fact that there is more than one person per household). To meet demand, builders would need to break ground on 144,000 units per quarter (or 576K annualized), double the best performance ever!
At an absolute bare minimum, post-secondary institutions should show students have decent housing before visas are granted.
Convert churches and empty office buildings into affordable housing. Break up the REIT monopoly in the rental market. Make it really difficult to own more than one home. Crack down on foreign investment until the market stabilizes.
Or we can blame immigrants.
Nobody’s blaming immigrants.
There have been a fair number of people and institutions (e.g. National Bank) saying that our infrastructure isn’t keeping up with population growth.
Until we get our health system, housing, and schools sorted out, we should limit immigration to people who can solve those problems.
Gotcha, we’re going to punish undesirable immigrants.