There are multiple things that need to look at, but we've had similar policies for decades on most other fronts, but the inflection point in prices started around 2015 which is coïncidentally when immigrations numbers—especially foreign student visa—kicked into a higher gear.
Mike Moffatt has done a lot of interesting research on this that's worth checking out.
* https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Moffatt
Good discussion on TVO from April:
* https://www.tvo.org/video/is-canada-doing-immigration-wrong
> But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying.
If provinces are only able to build at a rate of X units per year, why are we bringing in (e.g.) 2X the number of people? Yes, we should be building more units, but one of the factors in determining how many folks to bring in is being able to house them.
If we can build only build X units in 2023 then we should only bring in X. If we get to X+Y units in 2024, then that's how many people can be brought in.
You don't allow in X+Y (or 2X) people and hope that the units will magically appear.
There is no wand that can be waved to suddenly get more framers, plumbers, electricians, inspectors, urban planner, and capital.
If folks are told "in year 202X we are planning to bring in X people", they can plan for it: but that's not what is happening. Right now it's "here are X people, deal with it, it's your responsibility".
But this was my point. Because the health/survival of the Canadian economies requires that rate of immigration, that's what we do. But its on the provinces, not the feds, to manage housing & municipal issues. But there's a deep conflict of interest about how this is managed. Too many voters, real estate agents, developers, and contractors see benefit from rising housing prices, donors and voters for both parties.
Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan. I'm 50 next year. I've lived through both Conservative and Liberal governments. They've both made the same mistakes. Housing has been precipitously rising since the end of the 90s. It was already in double-digit growth rates in Toronto and unaffordable for working class people when my wife and I bought our first house in 2005.
The reality is that the most serious "inflection point" was 2008, when US (and most global) housing prices collapsed and stabilized, while Canada's continued to grow exponentially.
Trudeau was not Prime Minister then.
But the provinces do not know ahead of time what needs to happen. The feds simply announce a number for the next year or so and then everyone else has to scramble. If the feds say that X people are coming, but you can only build X/2 units because that's all resources (trades, land plots) available, how do you suddenly get new capacity?
If we need X people to come in for a health economy, but can only handle Y<X, then we do not just let X people, we build up to being able to going from Y to X.
> Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan.
Nothing partisan about it:
> Up until 2015, Moffatt said, Ontario had a well-functioning real estate market, but changes to federal immigration policy under then Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and that have been expanded by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, increased the amount of newcomers to Canada.
> When the price of oil crashed in 2015, not only did more immigrants choose to settle in Ontario instead of Alberta and Saskatchewan, many Canadians who moved to Western Canada for economic opportunities started coming back.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ontario-build-housing-...
Net immigration in Ontario:
* https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com/ontarians-on-the-move-2022-e...
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More people arrived than could be handled because there was no prior preparation.
Yes: lower levels of governments need to up their game. But the upper levels can't just steam roll them and hope for the best: everyone needs to get on the same page on what's presently possible and then what's needed for the future.
While other government interference in the market is certainly a factor, it's not just a "narrative" that immigration is the main driving force behind the severe distortions in the Canadian housing market. It's reality, backed by numbers and what's going on on the ground.
> It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low.
The pre-2020 immigration numbers, even going back decades, really aren't much lower. It was over 300,000 people in 2018 and 2019, for example. It was well over 200,000 a year from 1990 through to 2017 (except for 1998 and 1999, although both were still near 200,000).
By Canadian standards, 200,000 to 300,000 people would be a larger mid-sized city. While there has been some property development, of course, I don't think that the equivalent of a new Saskatoon, or a new Gatineau, or a new Regina, or a new Burnaby is being built each and every year just to house and support the incoming immigrants for that single year.
An interesting thing about the lockdowns, especially after the foreigners who could temporarily leave had left, and when the higher education situation was uncertain and a huge number of foreign students didn't bother to attend in person, apartment rental prices in the major cities dropped significantly.
A number of my colleagues across the country who live in apartments, and who couldn't flee the country, ended up moving to new apartments to take advantage of this situation. Some of them were getting free months and other bonuses, and generous referral fees were being offered to existing tenants who found new renters, even in places like Vancouver and Toronto. That was certainly not common before, and not since.
Canada's flawed immigration policies are by far the main contributor to today's housing situation and other economic problems. The solution isn't to rush to build more low-quality housing. The solution is to put an almost complete halt to all immigration into Canada, including of permanent residents, foreign "students", "refugees", "asylum seekers", and every other type.
Notably not all parts of Canada have this problem, despite having high immigration rates. Immigration is still high to, e.g. Edmonton, and employment rates are good, etc. but housing affordability there is "fine" (relatively, for now).
I think you started to touch on the problem here, which is the dysfunction of our federal/provincial relations. Political trends right now want to blame Trudeau (I don't like him either, but whatever), so they're pointing the finger at immigration. But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying. Now that they're caught with their pants down here in Ontario their answer is to pave over farmland and build more low-density McMansions, which, well, it's blatant vote buying and corruption because the people in those 905-belt houses vote Tory and the developers contribute to the PC party.
That and building public housing is something people in western G7 countries have become disturbingly allergic to. The last time we had housing crisis at this level, that was one way out of the problem: we built massive rental towers all over the place, along with public housing projects.
In large part what we have here is a powerful baby boomer electorate that has up until now felt itself benefited by skyrocketing real estate prices. The increases in their home values allowed them to ignore their pathetic retirement savings. It was an "Eat The Young" mentality that just assumed "Number Goes Up" forever on real estate prices. And governments -- both prov and fed -- were perfectly willing to just keep feeding that fire.
It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low. So the numbers spiked afterwards for a bunch of causes, partially recovery from that, partially policy, and partially refugees from the war in Ukraine.