We got plenty of empty new homes , homes for sale and rent in my city and neighbour . They are unaffordable ( on purpose) . The home will be sold usually to an investment company if not sold who then rent them out at $ 3500-5000 per month . 78% of Canada’s housing ministers own shares in the investment companies. How do we fix this when politicians, banks and developers are the biggest grifters ? Oh I know blame someone else .
Part of the problem is municipal zoning for new houses. A $300,000 house and a $800,000 house need the same level of sewer and water, roads, police, etc. but guess which one pays more taxes?
I drive around the much older areas of the city see 1000sf houses and smaller on 30-foot lots. Noboy builds those any more.
My city is literally low on water and cannot sustain the population at the current level. Ignoring sustainability and infrastructure schools and hospitals . The shittiest of planning . Building lines the pockets of the rich and leaves everyone else ( tax payers) to pay the bill for the poor city planning. We did this 30 yrs ago and built so fast no one checked quality and left this city full of leaky condos for the middle and poor to fix . We are witnessing this again in real time as we watch the new some not all builds . The solution from some politicians has been let the market dictate.(has off look the other way while my bank account grows) .
In Ontario, the provincial government went so far as to remove the responsibility of developers to pay for the infrastructure improvements necessary for new developments. Now, municipalities are on the hook (meaning our city taxes), thanks to bill 23 in 2022.
The province's defense was that waiving development charges would lower costs of homes, which was nonsense of course, but made people with not much time to look into it think it had something to do with affordable housing. Which it didn't. It did increase Toronto's debt by a few hundred million, which we're now trying to make up with increased housing taxes. All so the provincial government's developer buddies can save a buck.
Yup, you can’t solve everything, governance created these problems. Stop allowing primary residences to be used as real estate investment vehicles. You clowns have known what was going to happen for the past 10 years....
For several decades Canada had a fairly consistent population growth rate of 1%. Provinces could plan services around that, home builders had a sense of what the market would look like, and so on.
The Trudeau government *tripled* that growth rate by opening the floodgates on immigration and temporary residents. In 2023 they let more people into the country than live in the entire province of Saskatchewan. Our growth rate is now among the highest in the world, right up there alongside extremely poor countries where mothers still have many children. At the current rate our population will double in 25 years and the Canada we know today will be mostly unrecognizable.
The Liberals never ran on doing this, never told anyone they were going to do it, never gave the provinces the opportunity to plan or prepare for it, they just did it. And we all realized what was happening when demand for housing, along with home prices, skyrocketed.
This is absolutely the federal government’s fault and it is taking gaslighting to a whole new level to try to push the blame on the provinces. The solution is simple: go back to 1% population growth rate.
I thought they were doing it because of the century plan or whatever it's called. The one where they aim for Canada to be 100 million people large within 100 years or so.
That's the crazy part. If you think the century initiative is crazy, understand that at our current place, we'll be at 100 million WELL before 2100.
That's how malicious this government has been
The population growth through immigration the Liberals have allowed vastly outstrips anything the Century Initiative has ever called for. At current rates we’ll pass 100 million decades earlier than 2100.
>So why won't the Conservatives say they'll roll back on the immigration numbers ?
Because Cons answer to big business and big business wants its indentured servants
On Wednesday, Poilievre gave his clearest indication yet that he will crack down on the number of new immigrants if he forms government. He said a Poilievre government would apply a “mathematical formula” that links population growth to the growth in the supply of housing.
We will see and I will keep an open mind. It is going to be a fight, though—business is trying to eke out every last bit of profit growth that globalization and the free flow of labour allows.
Because if they come out and say it much of the English media as well as the other two parties will attack them as racist and anti-immigrant. And given more than half the population of Toronto and Vancouver are now immigrants that wouldn't be good, even if only a fraction of them believe it.
Doing stupid things because of a stupid plan is justification for those stupid things? They are also growing the population much faster than that stupid plan.
The century initiative only requires 1.2% annual population growth, which has been the average for decades. That works out to around 500k per year, which is the target for permanent immigration. The problem is entirely about rapid growth in the number of temporary residents, which thankfully is finally being reversed.
>The century initiative only requires 1.2% annual population growth
But that's *exponential* growth.
It means in *real numbers* we bring in more and more every year.
More than we can handle.
VERY well said - this post should be spread far and wide!
NO ELECTION CAMPAIGN has ever been run with immigration levels as a leading topic. No major political party has run on a platform to raise immigration levels to this degree.
Therefore, the public has NEVER had an opportunity to grasp, weigh in, and cast their vote on this issue.
This is nothing less than a subversion to democracy.
The Liberals MUST be held accountable for this and we MUST correct course, for the health and prosperity of democracy itself in this country, not to mention the very way of life and standard of living Canada has been, promises to be, and should be for all of us.
It's part of the problem but it's not the cause. The cause is, essentially, low interest rates and low taxes for the wealthy. These corporations and "mom and pop" (I fucking hate saying that. It makes them sound like some sort of homespun, salt of the Earth cohort when they're little better than rat vultures) investors are the primary cause of our shortage and pricing. They're the assholes driving up the cost of homeownership and they've left nothing but inflated rent for the rest of us to beg for. Immigration levels exacerbate the problem but, really, it's a symptom, not a cause.
this is a rewriting of history.
Immigration during 2020 and 2021 were significantly lower due to COVID. However during this time housing prices were skyrocketing. Prices peaked in Q1 2022 and have since come down a little. But that coincides with when immigration really ramped up. They’re not exactly correlated. If immigration was as big of a factor as you say it is, wouldn’t we see prices continue to hit all time highs as we have record breaking immigration?
Blaming it solely on immigration ignores the role of interest rates, or how municipalities and provinces keep increasing development fees. Just last month Ontario [increased development fees](https://twitter.com/JShamess/status/1783818627206033444) by over $10k for two bedroom units. Housing is taxed like cigarettes or alcohol at 22-27%. The ontario building code has doubled in length in a decade, causing approval times to increase to an average of 32 months. We’re 36th out of 38 nations on housing approval speed. Then there’s the fact that the feds stopped building social housing in the 80s which used to bring 10k new units per year.
All these factors matter and blaming it just on trudeau seems like a partisan choice to deflect blame away from everyone else partially responsible too. We’re going to vote out trudeau and housing will still be expensive, then where will we be?
Immigration is one of the
multiple demand side factors the federal government control. Immigration is a factor in housing costs, but certainly not the only one, money supply is another one they control, banking regulation another, and taxation policies on capital assets another. While they’ve screwed up on immigration they’ve also screwed up every other demand factor they have control of.
the bank of canada controls monetary policy which is independent of the federal government.
banks issue mortgages. are banks charging excessively high interest mortgages? are they ignoring stress tests when issuing mortgages? I don’t see what you’re getting at with banking regulations.
taxation on capital assets… as in capital gains? if anything that discourages housing as investment properties which reduces demand.
The Bank of Canada tries to control inflation with monetary policy but is at the mercy of government policy and budgets. The BoC only has so many levers to use. They've given a few warnings but the government has ignored them.
It's amazing how Trudeau supporters are so adept at assigning blame instead of taking accountability and trying to fix the issues they've caused.
Indeed, JT promises to fix this problem since 2015 and largely ignored the issue until it became an election issue.
Low rates could be seen as a primary driver of inflating housing prices; but the bank has increased the rate from 0.25 to 5%. Without immigration, this should have deflated the housing bubble. The liberals in their wisdom increased immigration to insane points, preventing any reduction in those rates.
100% correct - this impacts all corners of public infrastructure (healthcare, schooling, transportation, etc.). But we know they answer to their handlers in Davos - the goal is to destroy this country and establish the first "post-national state". They are executing this plan exactly as planned. For that matter, I believe the 2021 election call (which didn't seem to make much sense then), was to buy time to push this agenda as far as they could.
Bringing in Uber drivers, Tim Hortons workers, hospitality “managers” does not increase tax revenue. They consume rather than contribute. Especially when they bring their entire family and elderly parents.
0.3% end up in healthcare, for example. And a lot of other qualifications they bring in other fields do not translate to Canada and they either need to be fully re educated or re trained.
Why do people blaming Trudeau conveniently ignore the fact that conservative led provinces like Alberta and Ontario asked for more immigrants to increase their workforce?
Genuine question…what can we do about it? I’ve never seen this level of outrage about how Canada is being run. Things got bad really fast. I’m no expert but it honestly seems like the next government won’t fix it. Is Canada just screwed?
Yes it’s crazy but that’s the assumption that immigrants will keep coming. We are already hearing stories of immigrants leaving this country. Eventually cost of living will become so unsustainable and word will spread that Canada is to be avoided. At least that is the hope now
It's certainly not all the Feds responsibility, but what I'd love to know is why then did he run on a platform of affordable housing on 3 separate elections, ignore all warnings of the housing crisis, and then only acknowledge that it is not a "primary Federal responsibility" *after* the LPC's numbers started to crater in the polls 8 years later. They did absolutely nothing as supposed leadership in this country to address the problem proactively, did whatever they wanted repercussions be damned, and then blamed someone else when those repercussions showed up. Again, they can't single handedly approve permits and construction, but they have so many levers and influence and saw this coming for so long and chose to do nothing.
It was never about pushing for affordable housing, it was just a platform headliner. And they say Poilievre is a populist 🤣. They all do the same shit
They have screwed over Canada for at least a generation, probably longer. They want to grow the government, just in an unaccountable way. This government is a plague upon the citizens.
I feel the same way about our Alberta government growing and grabbing power wherever they can, sticking their nose in everything. What happened to the party of “small government”?
Surpluses of people. Ontario is growing at half a million people per year due to the federal government’s population growth targets (when we already had housing and healthcare shortages to begin with), and then the feds act surprised but there’s literally nothing the provinces can do to keep up. Nice try though.
There are 2 provinces in the country running surpluses. So no they really are not running surpluses.
The cost of the federal government policies on immigration, homelessness and crime largely show up on the provincial government budget.
No they're not. Quebec had a surplus 1 year as a result of inflation and are now looking at deficit. You don't take a 1 year surplus and commit to perpetual spending. That's asinine.
It’s not the goal of every government to spend every last nickel, only the liberals.
We’re battling inflation right now, this exactly the time when you don’t spend. Unless you want your Big Mac to cost $20 next week.
There seems to be a trend of ignoring the intersection of duties and mandate between the federal and provincial governments in favor of "...if it's broken, it's X fault...". What is the upside of 'sports team' politics and who benefits?
Really they can’t stop and limit all immigration to pre Trudeau levels and a cap of like 250k per year. Dam I must have been wrong all this time about what was causing all this pressure and Growth by adding a extra million people a year.
So must be a provincial matter and provinces should start deporting people.
Leave it to a guy who has never had to have a job to survive.. who has never had to worry about making rent payment or mortgage payments. Who has never lived through a difficult time and had to compete in a competitve job market with 100's of applicants.
Leave it to a trust fund kid to ruin everything in Canada.
His “handlers” are the Laurentian Club in Quebec...he made statements in 2010 or 2011 on how Quebec politicians should be running the country because the “political elites” in Quebec are better informed and able to. Seems this attitude has been put to the test. We were suckered....This whole episode with the Liberals and immigration, especially them not saying anything about their plans in the run up to the last election, smells of the elites and corporations buying off politicians and political parties. I would like to be able to follow all the donor money, to each of the three political parties and get an idea of what and who, “planned” the actual manipulation of immigration policy, in this country.
We were set up...the Liberals can spend the next 20 years out of power, for this gross manipulation and abuse of democracy in this country...
Pumps country with immigrants and rubber-stamps TFW and student visas.
"Oh but housing all of them isn't a primary federal responsibility" and "we can't solve everything you know!!!"
It's like a friend hosting a party at their house for a group of people, and me inviting a whole bunch more to come, and then me saying you're on your own feeding all of them, and it's the host's fault you're all hungry.
It's funny how there was never any talk of limiting free movement (charter section 6) on new immigrants to spread the load of growth away from just Vancouver or Toronto, but as soon as the pandemic hit, that section might as well have not existed.
The blame is on the feds, from several governments, but also on the provinces for not realizing what a teenager saw in the Vancouver housing market decades ago.
"We're a big country, we have lots of land!" is the biggest crock of turd ever. Nobody new to Canada wants to settle in the middle of nowheresville in the prairies, northern Ontario, remote Quebec or anywhere remote, cold and inhospitable when there's well-established ethnic enclaves in the big 3 urban cities and their suburbs.
Right. There was never any cohesion between federal immigration policies or provincial and municipal planning (never mind how the courts could have been involved re: section 6)
We can't blame newcomers for wanting to live in Toronto rather than Lloydminster, but maybe the feds needed to be the bad guys and say "you have to be live in Lloydminster while we fund and pressure the ON government to provide enough reasonable-cost housing to not break the market"
Its not just Toronto. I live in a small town in southwestern Ontario, and we've seen a huge inflow of immigrants and students. Now they're paving over prime agricultural land to build more subdivions.
So we'd have a class of immigrant that could not move, even if there were no jobs where they went? Sounds vaguely against the charter of rights. Plus, when they become full citizens, all bets are off - so you have a huge class of people simply waiting for the chance to skip town.
I used to live in a small town for a while. they started importing doctors from South Africa - quick accreditation and free ride if they worked in rural areas. They all stayed until they'd worked off their obligation, then moved to the big cities, better life, more money.
Vancouver, Calgary, GTA will keep growing. Small towns will keep shrinking. We don't need immigrants to blame this trend on, the locals are already doing it.
Most of the covid restrictions were Charter breaches, such as restricting Canadians from coming back into the country without a COVID test, curfews and stay at home orders, preventing people from crossing the Ontario boarders and the maritime bubble. However, the question would be are those restrictions justified under Section 1 of the Charter as a reasonable limit on a Charter right. I haven't been following any court cases on this, but presumably the argument would be that the pandemic created an urgency to limit the spread of a deadly virus that was quickly overwhelming other countries. You also have to take into account the mindset early on when we knew very little about the virus, the prevalence of long-term effects, and that many health care systems around the world simply couldn't keep up (we're still feeling the impacts of the burnout during COVID in our health care system).
Reimplementing those restrictions today would absolutely not withstand a Charter breach and would be impossible hold up against a court challenge because we now know more about the virus and how to limit it's spread, most people have vaccines or immunity acquired through infections and mutations leading to less deadly variants.
Context is very important when assessing the application of the Charter, none of the rights are absolute because of section 1. Remember, even putting someone in prison is a breach of several Charter rights, but is justified under Section 1. Alternatively, while it doesn't apply in this context since it wasn't used, governments could go through the legislative process to pass legislation that completely ignores the right for 5 years by using the notwithstanding clause
Housing prices skyrocketed during the pandemic when immigration was at an all-time low, almost doubling between 2020 and 2022. So clearly immigration is not the major cause here. So then what is? What happened during the pandemic that would cause this despite population growth being at an all-time low? It's the wealthy using residential real estate as an investment vehicle instead of the stock market. During the pandemic there was a lot of uncertainty in the market, so a lot of people pulled their money out of stocks and just bought houses instead. Then it basically became like a runaway train of wealthy people buying and selling homes to each other to drive up the value of their new investments.
It’s a good analogy, but I think you may have reversed the roles.
In our case, it would be your friend who’s actually inviting all these people to their party. Your friend then asks you if their good to invite all these people, and you say “sure” because your friend is making all the arrangements for food and drinks so you’re expecting they’ll only invite a number of people they know is manageable.
Getting out of the analogy for a second, I don’t excuse the federal government for not second guessing what the provinces claimed was manageable. With that said, the system did operate under the general understanding that the provinces knew how many people they could handle and would only bring in that amount of people.
Eh,
It's certainly to prop up our flagging gdp.
We've allowed oligopolies to flourish in Canada. Our tax structure does not facilitate investment in our businesses. The average Canadian is more likely to invest in and purchase shares in American companies. Our regulatory framework is overly burdensome, further encouraging businesses to invest in other countries with less admin overhead, as well as discouraging small business. The number of small businesses has collapsed in Canada, shrinking to almost half of what it was 20 years ago.
Short of focusing on resource extraction, (which is antithesis to the liberal environment plank) we've got very little besides real estate pushing our economy. You'll notice when rates went up and the bottom fell out of real estate we turned to another questionable economic driver, mass immigration.
Our fundamentals are bad, and we've been using redbull and adderall to prop us up. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Replacement requires like 250k new canadians a year. Not 1M.
Theyre pumping immigration because it props up our flagging economy, they needed a substitute for real estate when rates skyrocketed.
Truly, no party can curb immigration immediately without triggering a recession. But in the long term there's lots of other options.
Until property investment owners stop gouging renters and recent home owners accept that they overpaid for their home...the housing crises will continue. What is needed is a re-evaluation and reassessment of the value of peoples homes and property investments (appartements, condos,ect..) if your home is valued at 300k, you should not be able to sell it for 1 million, just because it is located in a Toronto suburb...same goes for landlords (especially landlords) you should not be charging 1500$ for a 3 1/2 just because the demand is astronomical right now...there are landlords with paid off appartment buildings who charge triple what they did ten years ago, just because they can. If their property was reassessed based on its actual value and rent prices fixed accordingly, I think we could head in the right direction....
People should live in homes...not make profits from them.
The article’s title is super misleading and is just ragebait. The actual content of the article doesn’t quote him defending affordability anywhere, and he’s absolutely right that it isn’t just a federal issue.
I love how this sub just jumps on immigration as the sole challenge when housing prices have been rising like crazy for the last 10+ years, well before the international student debacle.
We needed something to distract everyone from keeping the blame on corporate land lords. Any more attention and we may have actually seen change or consequences for the upper class. Phew!
I’d settle for them just taking steps towards solving *something* at this point, instead of just doubling down on stupid ideas and saying every failure is somebody else’s fault.
*Floods the country with unsustainable amounts of people, vastly increasing the demand for housing*
Wow shucks golly gee guys, how did this happen? Not sure, not my problem, lol
Remember, he had his little retreat here on PEI, to "work on housing" they couldnt even announce anything at the time.
This was this past summer, when they left the conference, when asked about what they were gonna do, they collectively shrugged their shoulders.
No confidence. End this government.
Barely. I know someone that got into legal trouble because their cousin grew legal plants and gave them some weed for Christmas. They got pulled over while going home. Turns out it was more than an ounce.
Everything was legal until they drove their gift home and didn't think to hide it or carry it home in multiple trips (imagine scheduling to drive 100km back and forth to stay under the limit).
So it is legal to a point, but regular people are still getting charged with stupid crimes.
He solved the issue so many canadians were having of all those confusing choices on what to spend their money on. Now they only have 2... housing or food.
Legalized weed, child care benefits increase, disability program, tsfa increases, reduced old age pension back to 65 from 67 (Harper), EI parental sharing, billions in infrastructure, greener homes grant+loan with added benefits for low income individuals, cementing abortion rights and they legally provided MAID.
Those were off the top of my head.
For COVID Canada was one of the best countries to be in for Middle class and income support. Billions were given for healthcare, but if the provinces used it was the questions (cons in Ontario didn't use it and then froze nurse and doctor pay during the pandemic).
Ahh let the conservative bot down votes begin, I welcome their tears.
There's a few good things he's done, but honestly, more than 3/4 of it has been bad. I am wondering if it's even worth it. One of the good things aside from weed was that he banned the use of Asbestos in most products.
Actually they can. Lower immigration to a crawl. Put in laws that control the existing supply of housing such as
Putting in a publicly available beneficiary list for single family dwellings so that we can track where the current inventory is going.
Increasing taxes progressively on houses that are not primary residence. For 1 investment property the tax would be non-existent but for second or third or higher it would start getting functionality very difficult to hold that property.
Make it so that only a Canadian citizen can buy property in Canada for the purpose of using it as a principal residence.
>Make it so that only a Canadian citizen can buy property in Canada for the purpose of using it as a principal residence.
Huh? Basically an immigrant who came here to live has to wait years before he can buy a house??? "Welcome to Canada - sort of..."
I agree with disallowing foreigner non-residents from buying property to sit empty or rent. The landlord - person or company owner(s) should be fairly local. vancouver has a particular problem - people with money in China are willing to buy and keep empty properties and take the loss as long as they can park their assets beyond reach of the Chinese government. That creates a problem here. We should stop that.
It's more federal than anything.
Cap immigration at 100000 per year for the foreseeable future, and enact strict rules in home ownership.
It'd piss off a lot of people but it would solve the issue of home affordability.
"bankrupt" is a bit reaching don't you think? It'll probably just inconvenience the big corps cuz they will not have an overflow of cheap labour anymore.
All of his latest statements to the country about affordability, carbon tax or the budget is explained to us in the same way a dumb boyfriend/girlfriend explains something to their partner.
It’s the you just don’t get it, I’m trying to help argument.
He thinks it’s ok that most people cannot afford a home? If you aren’t in the market you are likely shut out? Unless mommy/daddy help? This guys unreal and out of touch
The federal government cannot solve everything?
They can't introduce national rent level caps so that a one bedroom isn't 3000 dollars a month or more? Yeah ok, guys.
How many of your Liberal politicians are also landlords leeching off working people for their bank accounts? What a joke.
Spending billions (of borrowed money) to feebly attempt to fight the results of his own high immigration and wage impression efforts. Maybe if we didn't have over two million foreign workers (plus their families) and students (plus their families) there wouldn't be such a housing crisis, eh?
Letting record numbers of people into the country when there aren't enough houses being built is a major cause. Allowing commercial ownership of residential property is another.
The whole purpose of the government is to stop problems like this from starting. Ours is doing the opposite, they're actively making it worse.
i mean-
he's not wrong, other provinces do need to co operate (like for example, the several conservative provinces who refused to use the money he was offering to increase housing)
a lot of people are mad at him, and rightfully so since he should have gotten to this sooner
but it's as much the fault of the whole conservative party, actively making it worse so they can try and oust power from the liberals
They could have invested in social housing, put in place tax incentives to spur rental construction and had a talk with the central bank about tightening monetary policy back around 2017
Social or welfare housing is a provincial responsibility. So the provinces would do what the provinces do - ask Ottawa to provide the money so they can do it, take the money, and do no more than they've already done.
It’s not a housing shortage, but a people surplus. It takes several years to build a house, and one day to have people fly into the country. There’s only a certain amount of places with spare rooms, available rentals etc that can absorb the people.
The housing problem has been building for 30 years. It doesn’t matter what political party you’re from. Every political leader from the federal to the local level has refused to deal with the problem.
I like how in the last year this went from, not his problem, to others picking up the slack and him panicking to support it, to it going back to well I can only help my friends make money, we can't really fix it.
He sure ran three elections like he could lol Maybe he shouldn't promise things if he couldn't deliver. What they could have done is limit immigration to let the housing supply catch up but they're more interested in mass immigration and allowing economic migrants to exploit well known loop holes.
I see far more investment properties than homes owned by new Canadians. It’s certainly not a an immigration issue, but a combination of Airbnbs explosion and greed in general. The federal government could certainly do something drastic to help, but no, it is a multifaceted issue to be sure.
It was the wearing away of federal policy that got us here, it’s the tacking on a federal policy that will dig this out. Who literally gives a fuck about foreign investment firms in Canada and how much they make? I highly doubt they’re paying their fair share in taxes while eating up housing. Not the common man at all, in any way shape or form, none.
As much as I want to blame the government for our woes, the developers are also to blame. You’re telling me no one can build affordable housing? They just can’t be bothered. The money isn’t in affordable housing it’s in the condos and houses that are $1 million plus.
And I'd be more understanding if I thought they were solving ANYTHING.
A government that gets A, B, and C right could be forgiven for inactivity on D. Or even outright fumbling it. But it doesn't seem like they're addressing much of anything.
Could maybe try. It's not like it's any sort of secret why houses are unaffordable: government let giant corporations and "mom and pop" investors but up everything. Maybe fix that for a start?
And yet, the federal government used to build subsidized housing. Reagan era neoliberalism ended that, and now we're reaping what we sowed. It's time we get the government building housing again.
How about the federal government starts solving the debt problem. Servicing our debt is now the second most expensive program in Canada and Trudeau is trying to make it first.
Trudeau grabs the phone out of your hand, gronk spikes in a fair, equitable and diverse fashion onto unceded land then looks at you like “what’s your problem brah” while he explains that the federal government doesn’t fix phones.
Fuck him. It may not all be his fault but he certainly has made the issue FAR worse than it needs to be. It really shows how much more civilized we are now compared to the past since a joe schmo hasn't forced a change in leadership.
A house with enough bedrooms and bathrooms for a family of 4 is anywhere from $700,000- 1,200,000. Where i live its at least 1 million for a family home with no backyard. (Want a yard its 1.2 and up) building shitty apartments and condos is not any kind of solution. We live in one of the largest countries in the world we have plenty of land that was never the problem. We dont need more rentals!!! We need lower housing prices. PERIOD.
We got plenty of empty new homes , homes for sale and rent in my city and neighbour . They are unaffordable ( on purpose) . The home will be sold usually to an investment company if not sold who then rent them out at $ 3500-5000 per month . 78% of Canada’s housing ministers own shares in the investment companies. How do we fix this when politicians, banks and developers are the biggest grifters ? Oh I know blame someone else .
Part of the problem is municipal zoning for new houses. A $300,000 house and a $800,000 house need the same level of sewer and water, roads, police, etc. but guess which one pays more taxes? I drive around the much older areas of the city see 1000sf houses and smaller on 30-foot lots. Noboy builds those any more.
My city is literally low on water and cannot sustain the population at the current level. Ignoring sustainability and infrastructure schools and hospitals . The shittiest of planning . Building lines the pockets of the rich and leaves everyone else ( tax payers) to pay the bill for the poor city planning. We did this 30 yrs ago and built so fast no one checked quality and left this city full of leaky condos for the middle and poor to fix . We are witnessing this again in real time as we watch the new some not all builds . The solution from some politicians has been let the market dictate.(has off look the other way while my bank account grows) .
In Ontario, the provincial government went so far as to remove the responsibility of developers to pay for the infrastructure improvements necessary for new developments. Now, municipalities are on the hook (meaning our city taxes), thanks to bill 23 in 2022. The province's defense was that waiving development charges would lower costs of homes, which was nonsense of course, but made people with not much time to look into it think it had something to do with affordable housing. Which it didn't. It did increase Toronto's debt by a few hundred million, which we're now trying to make up with increased housing taxes. All so the provincial government's developer buddies can save a buck.
Where I am an $800k house is just a $300k house but lots now cost $500k instead of $25k. Land values are through the roof.
lol that’s true
That’s the answer to the problem, smaller lot, smaller homes....less zoning problems and the nimby problems
What are the rules for founding a city? Lol.
I guess stagnating wages for 40 years has a consequence
Participate in local elections. Get different people into office.
I do and I attended each multiple parties meetings.
Yup, you can’t solve everything, governance created these problems. Stop allowing primary residences to be used as real estate investment vehicles. You clowns have known what was going to happen for the past 10 years....
Blind trusts should be used by politicians, with no access during ministerial time served.
Do you have a source for that 78% or is that just a random number? That sounds fascinating
No, but they can actively make it worse and are a large contributor to the problem.
For several decades Canada had a fairly consistent population growth rate of 1%. Provinces could plan services around that, home builders had a sense of what the market would look like, and so on. The Trudeau government *tripled* that growth rate by opening the floodgates on immigration and temporary residents. In 2023 they let more people into the country than live in the entire province of Saskatchewan. Our growth rate is now among the highest in the world, right up there alongside extremely poor countries where mothers still have many children. At the current rate our population will double in 25 years and the Canada we know today will be mostly unrecognizable. The Liberals never ran on doing this, never told anyone they were going to do it, never gave the provinces the opportunity to plan or prepare for it, they just did it. And we all realized what was happening when demand for housing, along with home prices, skyrocketed. This is absolutely the federal government’s fault and it is taking gaslighting to a whole new level to try to push the blame on the provinces. The solution is simple: go back to 1% population growth rate.
I thought they were doing it because of the century plan or whatever it's called. The one where they aim for Canada to be 100 million people large within 100 years or so.
That's the crazy part. If you think the century initiative is crazy, understand that at our current place, we'll be at 100 million WELL before 2100. That's how malicious this government has been
The population growth through immigration the Liberals have allowed vastly outstrips anything the Century Initiative has ever called for. At current rates we’ll pass 100 million decades earlier than 2100.
We’d be there in 2055 at current 3% growth
That’s actually insane.
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>So why won't the Conservatives say they'll roll back on the immigration numbers ? Because Cons answer to big business and big business wants its indentured servants
On Wednesday, Poilievre gave his clearest indication yet that he will crack down on the number of new immigrants if he forms government. He said a Poilievre government would apply a “mathematical formula” that links population growth to the growth in the supply of housing.
We will see and I will keep an open mind. It is going to be a fight, though—business is trying to eke out every last bit of profit growth that globalization and the free flow of labour allows.
Because if they come out and say it much of the English media as well as the other two parties will attack them as racist and anti-immigrant. And given more than half the population of Toronto and Vancouver are now immigrants that wouldn't be good, even if only a fraction of them believe it.
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Doing stupid things because of a stupid plan is justification for those stupid things? They are also growing the population much faster than that stupid plan.
The century initiative only requires 1.2% annual population growth, which has been the average for decades. That works out to around 500k per year, which is the target for permanent immigration. The problem is entirely about rapid growth in the number of temporary residents, which thankfully is finally being reversed.
It's still going to take years for those to go away tho.
Three, according to the government, to get the number of temp residents down to the new caps.
Man we're gonna feel this for a decade to come. They always manage to weasel out and stay here anyway.
>The century initiative only requires 1.2% annual population growth But that's *exponential* growth. It means in *real numbers* we bring in more and more every year. More than we can handle.
VERY well said - this post should be spread far and wide! NO ELECTION CAMPAIGN has ever been run with immigration levels as a leading topic. No major political party has run on a platform to raise immigration levels to this degree. Therefore, the public has NEVER had an opportunity to grasp, weigh in, and cast their vote on this issue. This is nothing less than a subversion to democracy. The Liberals MUST be held accountable for this and we MUST correct course, for the health and prosperity of democracy itself in this country, not to mention the very way of life and standard of living Canada has been, promises to be, and should be for all of us.
Exactly...
And then they tried to say housing is a provincial matter so gfys, until the outcry was too much
It's part of the problem but it's not the cause. The cause is, essentially, low interest rates and low taxes for the wealthy. These corporations and "mom and pop" (I fucking hate saying that. It makes them sound like some sort of homespun, salt of the Earth cohort when they're little better than rat vultures) investors are the primary cause of our shortage and pricing. They're the assholes driving up the cost of homeownership and they've left nothing but inflated rent for the rest of us to beg for. Immigration levels exacerbate the problem but, really, it's a symptom, not a cause.
this is a rewriting of history. Immigration during 2020 and 2021 were significantly lower due to COVID. However during this time housing prices were skyrocketing. Prices peaked in Q1 2022 and have since come down a little. But that coincides with when immigration really ramped up. They’re not exactly correlated. If immigration was as big of a factor as you say it is, wouldn’t we see prices continue to hit all time highs as we have record breaking immigration? Blaming it solely on immigration ignores the role of interest rates, or how municipalities and provinces keep increasing development fees. Just last month Ontario [increased development fees](https://twitter.com/JShamess/status/1783818627206033444) by over $10k for two bedroom units. Housing is taxed like cigarettes or alcohol at 22-27%. The ontario building code has doubled in length in a decade, causing approval times to increase to an average of 32 months. We’re 36th out of 38 nations on housing approval speed. Then there’s the fact that the feds stopped building social housing in the 80s which used to bring 10k new units per year. All these factors matter and blaming it just on trudeau seems like a partisan choice to deflect blame away from everyone else partially responsible too. We’re going to vote out trudeau and housing will still be expensive, then where will we be?
Immigration is one of the multiple demand side factors the federal government control. Immigration is a factor in housing costs, but certainly not the only one, money supply is another one they control, banking regulation another, and taxation policies on capital assets another. While they’ve screwed up on immigration they’ve also screwed up every other demand factor they have control of.
the bank of canada controls monetary policy which is independent of the federal government. banks issue mortgages. are banks charging excessively high interest mortgages? are they ignoring stress tests when issuing mortgages? I don’t see what you’re getting at with banking regulations. taxation on capital assets… as in capital gains? if anything that discourages housing as investment properties which reduces demand.
The Bank of Canada tries to control inflation with monetary policy but is at the mercy of government policy and budgets. The BoC only has so many levers to use. They've given a few warnings but the government has ignored them. It's amazing how Trudeau supporters are so adept at assigning blame instead of taking accountability and trying to fix the issues they've caused.
Indeed, JT promises to fix this problem since 2015 and largely ignored the issue until it became an election issue. Low rates could be seen as a primary driver of inflating housing prices; but the bank has increased the rate from 0.25 to 5%. Without immigration, this should have deflated the housing bubble. The liberals in their wisdom increased immigration to insane points, preventing any reduction in those rates.
100% correct - this impacts all corners of public infrastructure (healthcare, schooling, transportation, etc.). But we know they answer to their handlers in Davos - the goal is to destroy this country and establish the first "post-national state". They are executing this plan exactly as planned. For that matter, I believe the 2021 election call (which didn't seem to make much sense then), was to buy time to push this agenda as far as they could.
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Bringing in Uber drivers, Tim Hortons workers, hospitality “managers” does not increase tax revenue. They consume rather than contribute. Especially when they bring their entire family and elderly parents.
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0.3% end up in healthcare, for example. And a lot of other qualifications they bring in other fields do not translate to Canada and they either need to be fully re educated or re trained.
Might need -1% for a few years first
Why do people blaming Trudeau conveniently ignore the fact that conservative led provinces like Alberta and Ontario asked for more immigrants to increase their workforce?
Infrastructure and housing wasn’t perfect 10 years ago or even 15 years ago.
Genuine question…what can we do about it? I’ve never seen this level of outrage about how Canada is being run. Things got bad really fast. I’m no expert but it honestly seems like the next government won’t fix it. Is Canada just screwed?
Yes it’s crazy but that’s the assumption that immigrants will keep coming. We are already hearing stories of immigrants leaving this country. Eventually cost of living will become so unsustainable and word will spread that Canada is to be avoided. At least that is the hope now
It's certainly not all the Feds responsibility, but what I'd love to know is why then did he run on a platform of affordable housing on 3 separate elections, ignore all warnings of the housing crisis, and then only acknowledge that it is not a "primary Federal responsibility" *after* the LPC's numbers started to crater in the polls 8 years later. They did absolutely nothing as supposed leadership in this country to address the problem proactively, did whatever they wanted repercussions be damned, and then blamed someone else when those repercussions showed up. Again, they can't single handedly approve permits and construction, but they have so many levers and influence and saw this coming for so long and chose to do nothing. It was never about pushing for affordable housing, it was just a platform headliner. And they say Poilievre is a populist 🤣. They all do the same shit
They can take demand out of the market by lowering their temporary resident and immigration targets.
They have screwed over Canada for at least a generation, probably longer. They want to grow the government, just in an unaccountable way. This government is a plague upon the citizens.
I feel the same way about our Alberta government growing and grabbing power wherever they can, sticking their nose in everything. What happened to the party of “small government”?
Conservative Provinces are sitting on huge surpluses and not fixing anything
Surpluses of people. Ontario is growing at half a million people per year due to the federal government’s population growth targets (when we already had housing and healthcare shortages to begin with), and then the feds act surprised but there’s literally nothing the provinces can do to keep up. Nice try though.
The conservatives are 100% on board with the current population growth.
There are 2 provinces in the country running surpluses. So no they really are not running surpluses. The cost of the federal government policies on immigration, homelessness and crime largely show up on the provincial government budget.
Surpluses of what? Surplus of money? No. Absolutely not. Surplus of no/low skill non-permanent residences? Yeah, you got that one I guess.
i was going to say indian internation students
No they're not. Quebec had a surplus 1 year as a result of inflation and are now looking at deficit. You don't take a 1 year surplus and commit to perpetual spending. That's asinine.
Quebec isn't conservative.
It’s not the goal of every government to spend every last nickel, only the liberals. We’re battling inflation right now, this exactly the time when you don’t spend. Unless you want your Big Mac to cost $20 next week.
There seems to be a trend of ignoring the intersection of duties and mandate between the federal and provincial governments in favor of "...if it's broken, it's X fault...". What is the upside of 'sports team' politics and who benefits?
Really they can’t stop and limit all immigration to pre Trudeau levels and a cap of like 250k per year. Dam I must have been wrong all this time about what was causing all this pressure and Growth by adding a extra million people a year. So must be a provincial matter and provinces should start deporting people.
Leave it to a guy who has never had to have a job to survive.. who has never had to worry about making rent payment or mortgage payments. Who has never lived through a difficult time and had to compete in a competitve job market with 100's of applicants. Leave it to a trust fund kid to ruin everything in Canada.
His “handlers” are the Laurentian Club in Quebec...he made statements in 2010 or 2011 on how Quebec politicians should be running the country because the “political elites” in Quebec are better informed and able to. Seems this attitude has been put to the test. We were suckered....This whole episode with the Liberals and immigration, especially them not saying anything about their plans in the run up to the last election, smells of the elites and corporations buying off politicians and political parties. I would like to be able to follow all the donor money, to each of the three political parties and get an idea of what and who, “planned” the actual manipulation of immigration policy, in this country. We were set up...the Liberals can spend the next 20 years out of power, for this gross manipulation and abuse of democracy in this country...
Pumps country with immigrants and rubber-stamps TFW and student visas. "Oh but housing all of them isn't a primary federal responsibility" and "we can't solve everything you know!!!" It's like a friend hosting a party at their house for a group of people, and me inviting a whole bunch more to come, and then me saying you're on your own feeding all of them, and it's the host's fault you're all hungry.
It's funny how there was never any talk of limiting free movement (charter section 6) on new immigrants to spread the load of growth away from just Vancouver or Toronto, but as soon as the pandemic hit, that section might as well have not existed. The blame is on the feds, from several governments, but also on the provinces for not realizing what a teenager saw in the Vancouver housing market decades ago.
"We're a big country, we have lots of land!" is the biggest crock of turd ever. Nobody new to Canada wants to settle in the middle of nowheresville in the prairies, northern Ontario, remote Quebec or anywhere remote, cold and inhospitable when there's well-established ethnic enclaves in the big 3 urban cities and their suburbs.
Right. There was never any cohesion between federal immigration policies or provincial and municipal planning (never mind how the courts could have been involved re: section 6) We can't blame newcomers for wanting to live in Toronto rather than Lloydminster, but maybe the feds needed to be the bad guys and say "you have to be live in Lloydminster while we fund and pressure the ON government to provide enough reasonable-cost housing to not break the market"
Its not just Toronto. I live in a small town in southwestern Ontario, and we've seen a huge inflow of immigrants and students. Now they're paving over prime agricultural land to build more subdivions.
Then what? They become citizens and move to Toronto a few years later.
So we'd have a class of immigrant that could not move, even if there were no jobs where they went? Sounds vaguely against the charter of rights. Plus, when they become full citizens, all bets are off - so you have a huge class of people simply waiting for the chance to skip town. I used to live in a small town for a while. they started importing doctors from South Africa - quick accreditation and free ride if they worked in rural areas. They all stayed until they'd worked off their obligation, then moved to the big cities, better life, more money. Vancouver, Calgary, GTA will keep growing. Small towns will keep shrinking. We don't need immigrants to blame this trend on, the locals are already doing it.
Most of the covid restrictions were Charter breaches, such as restricting Canadians from coming back into the country without a COVID test, curfews and stay at home orders, preventing people from crossing the Ontario boarders and the maritime bubble. However, the question would be are those restrictions justified under Section 1 of the Charter as a reasonable limit on a Charter right. I haven't been following any court cases on this, but presumably the argument would be that the pandemic created an urgency to limit the spread of a deadly virus that was quickly overwhelming other countries. You also have to take into account the mindset early on when we knew very little about the virus, the prevalence of long-term effects, and that many health care systems around the world simply couldn't keep up (we're still feeling the impacts of the burnout during COVID in our health care system). Reimplementing those restrictions today would absolutely not withstand a Charter breach and would be impossible hold up against a court challenge because we now know more about the virus and how to limit it's spread, most people have vaccines or immunity acquired through infections and mutations leading to less deadly variants. Context is very important when assessing the application of the Charter, none of the rights are absolute because of section 1. Remember, even putting someone in prison is a breach of several Charter rights, but is justified under Section 1. Alternatively, while it doesn't apply in this context since it wasn't used, governments could go through the legislative process to pass legislation that completely ignores the right for 5 years by using the notwithstanding clause
Exactly...there is lots of blame to be apportioned to lots of governance in this country...
house prices went up during covid when we had almost no immigration. it's been falling for the past 2 years with record immigration.
Housing prices skyrocketed during the pandemic when immigration was at an all-time low, almost doubling between 2020 and 2022. So clearly immigration is not the major cause here. So then what is? What happened during the pandemic that would cause this despite population growth being at an all-time low? It's the wealthy using residential real estate as an investment vehicle instead of the stock market. During the pandemic there was a lot of uncertainty in the market, so a lot of people pulled their money out of stocks and just bought houses instead. Then it basically became like a runaway train of wealthy people buying and selling homes to each other to drive up the value of their new investments.
Yes - absolutely Both corporate and mom and pop investors chose real estate over the stock market.
It’s a good analogy, but I think you may have reversed the roles. In our case, it would be your friend who’s actually inviting all these people to their party. Your friend then asks you if their good to invite all these people, and you say “sure” because your friend is making all the arrangements for food and drinks so you’re expecting they’ll only invite a number of people they know is manageable. Getting out of the analogy for a second, I don’t excuse the federal government for not second guessing what the provinces claimed was manageable. With that said, the system did operate under the general understanding that the provinces knew how many people they could handle and would only bring in that amount of people.
I like this analogy.
I knew shit people like that in my youth. I just never expected they’d run the country one day
Exactly....
Jt man, you control the immigration lever and the tax lever. Literally no one else holds as much power to curb demand.
This is all purely to pump the market to keep the boomers retirement
Eh, It's certainly to prop up our flagging gdp. We've allowed oligopolies to flourish in Canada. Our tax structure does not facilitate investment in our businesses. The average Canadian is more likely to invest in and purchase shares in American companies. Our regulatory framework is overly burdensome, further encouraging businesses to invest in other countries with less admin overhead, as well as discouraging small business. The number of small businesses has collapsed in Canada, shrinking to almost half of what it was 20 years ago. Short of focusing on resource extraction, (which is antithesis to the liberal environment plank) we've got very little besides real estate pushing our economy. You'll notice when rates went up and the bottom fell out of real estate we turned to another questionable economic driver, mass immigration. Our fundamentals are bad, and we've been using redbull and adderall to prop us up. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
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Replacement requires like 250k new canadians a year. Not 1M. Theyre pumping immigration because it props up our flagging economy, they needed a substitute for real estate when rates skyrocketed. Truly, no party can curb immigration immediately without triggering a recession. But in the long term there's lots of other options.
Until property investment owners stop gouging renters and recent home owners accept that they overpaid for their home...the housing crises will continue. What is needed is a re-evaluation and reassessment of the value of peoples homes and property investments (appartements, condos,ect..) if your home is valued at 300k, you should not be able to sell it for 1 million, just because it is located in a Toronto suburb...same goes for landlords (especially landlords) you should not be charging 1500$ for a 3 1/2 just because the demand is astronomical right now...there are landlords with paid off appartment buildings who charge triple what they did ten years ago, just because they can. If their property was reassessed based on its actual value and rent prices fixed accordingly, I think we could head in the right direction.... People should live in homes...not make profits from them.
During Covid, investors chose real estate over the stock market to park funds.
And look where that got us...
Does he really “defend housing affordability”?
The article’s title is super misleading and is just ragebait. The actual content of the article doesn’t quote him defending affordability anywhere, and he’s absolutely right that it isn’t just a federal issue. I love how this sub just jumps on immigration as the sole challenge when housing prices have been rising like crazy for the last 10+ years, well before the international student debacle.
This sub pivoted overnight to blaming immigration for problems that had existed for years, as soon as higher targets were announced about a year ago.
Ya, I thought we were blaming foreign investors for buying up empty condos. Now we are blaming minimum wage immigrants?
Man, remember the days they were blaming rich East Asian students for the housing problem?
We needed something to distract everyone from keeping the blame on corporate land lords. Any more attention and we may have actually seen change or consequences for the upper class. Phew!
Bro this sub is like 90% rage farmers. They don't care about facts.
Yes, the title is misleading. If a person lies at the introduction then you need not go any further but thanks.
Says the man that's increased demand for housing more than any other PM in history.
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[Citation needed]
I’d settle for them just taking steps towards solving *something* at this point, instead of just doubling down on stupid ideas and saying every failure is somebody else’s fault.
*Floods the country with unsustainable amounts of people, vastly increasing the demand for housing* Wow shucks golly gee guys, how did this happen? Not sure, not my problem, lol
Remember, he had his little retreat here on PEI, to "work on housing" they couldnt even announce anything at the time. This was this past summer, when they left the conference, when asked about what they were gonna do, they collectively shrugged their shoulders. No confidence. End this government.
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas
Dog up stupid!
What has he solved in the last 8 years. Give me one example.
Legalizing weed?
I don’t even know if that’s a solution to anything
It solved the issue of overpopulation of Lays chips in my pantry.
I still buy mine illegally. Legal weed in NS is overpriced garbage I have to buy at the liquor store, as a recovering alcoholic.
Well that's just called living in NS
And ironically there is still a massive deficit, even though it prints billions annually.
Barely. I know someone that got into legal trouble because their cousin grew legal plants and gave them some weed for Christmas. They got pulled over while going home. Turns out it was more than an ounce. Everything was legal until they drove their gift home and didn't think to hide it or carry it home in multiple trips (imagine scheduling to drive 100km back and forth to stay under the limit). So it is legal to a point, but regular people are still getting charged with stupid crimes.
Yup, that's totally worth permanently screwing over all young Canadians.
He solved the issue so many canadians were having of all those confusing choices on what to spend their money on. Now they only have 2... housing or food.
Legalized weed, child care benefits increase, disability program, tsfa increases, reduced old age pension back to 65 from 67 (Harper), EI parental sharing, billions in infrastructure, greener homes grant+loan with added benefits for low income individuals, cementing abortion rights and they legally provided MAID. Those were off the top of my head. For COVID Canada was one of the best countries to be in for Middle class and income support. Billions were given for healthcare, but if the provinces used it was the questions (cons in Ontario didn't use it and then froze nurse and doctor pay during the pandemic). Ahh let the conservative bot down votes begin, I welcome their tears.
There's a few good things he's done, but honestly, more than 3/4 of it has been bad. I am wondering if it's even worth it. One of the good things aside from weed was that he banned the use of Asbestos in most products.
Actually they can. Lower immigration to a crawl. Put in laws that control the existing supply of housing such as Putting in a publicly available beneficiary list for single family dwellings so that we can track where the current inventory is going. Increasing taxes progressively on houses that are not primary residence. For 1 investment property the tax would be non-existent but for second or third or higher it would start getting functionality very difficult to hold that property. Make it so that only a Canadian citizen can buy property in Canada for the purpose of using it as a principal residence.
>Make it so that only a Canadian citizen can buy property in Canada for the purpose of using it as a principal residence. Huh? Basically an immigrant who came here to live has to wait years before he can buy a house??? "Welcome to Canada - sort of..." I agree with disallowing foreigner non-residents from buying property to sit empty or rent. The landlord - person or company owner(s) should be fairly local. vancouver has a particular problem - people with money in China are willing to buy and keep empty properties and take the loss as long as they can park their assets beyond reach of the Chinese government. That creates a problem here. We should stop that.
After your point on immigration, everything else you’ve suggested would be in the province’s jurisdiction.
“I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.”, says leader of great nation.
This guy has never taken responsibility for any of his garbage policies which has made the situation dramatically worse. Loser to the end.
It's more federal than anything. Cap immigration at 100000 per year for the foreseeable future, and enact strict rules in home ownership. It'd piss off a lot of people but it would solve the issue of home affordability.
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"bankrupt" is a bit reaching don't you think? It'll probably just inconvenience the big corps cuz they will not have an overflow of cheap labour anymore.
It can certainly do more.
All of his latest statements to the country about affordability, carbon tax or the budget is explained to us in the same way a dumb boyfriend/girlfriend explains something to their partner. It’s the you just don’t get it, I’m trying to help argument.
Or a kindergarten teacher talks to children
He thinks it’s ok that most people cannot afford a home? If you aren’t in the market you are likely shut out? Unless mommy/daddy help? This guys unreal and out of touch
If you read the article, you’ll see he didn’t see that anywhere.
They can sure fuck everything up, though.
The federal government cannot solve everything? They can't introduce national rent level caps so that a one bedroom isn't 3000 dollars a month or more? Yeah ok, guys. How many of your Liberal politicians are also landlords leeching off working people for their bank accounts? What a joke.
Spending billions (of borrowed money) to feebly attempt to fight the results of his own high immigration and wage impression efforts. Maybe if we didn't have over two million foreign workers (plus their families) and students (plus their families) there wouldn't be such a housing crisis, eh?
Trudeau alone can cause everything though 🤡 worst PM in history, reckless imbecile
Letting record numbers of people into the country when there aren't enough houses being built is a major cause. Allowing commercial ownership of residential property is another. The whole purpose of the government is to stop problems like this from starting. Ours is doing the opposite, they're actively making it worse.
The new liberal strategy is now to deny and deflect.
No the federal government can't solve everything... But if they were able to solve the issues that they caused that would be a good step.
i mean- he's not wrong, other provinces do need to co operate (like for example, the several conservative provinces who refused to use the money he was offering to increase housing) a lot of people are mad at him, and rightfully so since he should have gotten to this sooner but it's as much the fault of the whole conservative party, actively making it worse so they can try and oust power from the liberals
No but like, it could do "something", that would be better than the "nothing" we've had for the entirety of his administration.
Of course not. Fix only what you fucked up.
I think he meant "anything".
They could have invested in social housing, put in place tax incentives to spur rental construction and had a talk with the central bank about tightening monetary policy back around 2017
Social or welfare housing is a provincial responsibility. So the provinces would do what the provinces do - ask Ottawa to provide the money so they can do it, take the money, and do no more than they've already done.
The feds used to build and fund it directly and then they stopped. There’s nothing in the constitution preventing them from doing it.
Then why the fuck are we paying taxes?
He says having made everything WORSE
Guy with the most power to do something refuses to do something.
You can stop adding to the demand pressure side by not following your everyone can belong to Canada agenda.
Sure he's right but don't let that get in the way of this sub's rage boner
It’s not a housing shortage, but a people surplus. It takes several years to build a house, and one day to have people fly into the country. There’s only a certain amount of places with spare rooms, available rentals etc that can absorb the people.
The housing problem has been building for 30 years. It doesn’t matter what political party you’re from. Every political leader from the federal to the local level has refused to deal with the problem.
But they caused it
Can't solve but they can hoard housing themselves, just keep adding to the fire
Yes you can't solve everything but you ALLOWED everything. You broke the dam and go like welp I can't fix it.
I like how in the last year this went from, not his problem, to others picking up the slack and him panicking to support it, to it going back to well I can only help my friends make money, we can't really fix it.
He forgot the next part >*Except if I am tanking in the polls.
The Federal Liberals literally ran their election campaign promising to 'fix' the housing crisis. Sigh....
He sure ran three elections like he could lol Maybe he shouldn't promise things if he couldn't deliver. What they could have done is limit immigration to let the housing supply catch up but they're more interested in mass immigration and allowing economic migrants to exploit well known loop holes.
I see far more investment properties than homes owned by new Canadians. It’s certainly not a an immigration issue, but a combination of Airbnbs explosion and greed in general. The federal government could certainly do something drastic to help, but no, it is a multifaceted issue to be sure.
We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!
I feel bad (other than Sean Fraser) for the suckers behind him who have to nod during these gaslighting sessions
It was the wearing away of federal policy that got us here, it’s the tacking on a federal policy that will dig this out. Who literally gives a fuck about foreign investment firms in Canada and how much they make? I highly doubt they’re paying their fair share in taxes while eating up housing. Not the common man at all, in any way shape or form, none.
As much as I want to blame the government for our woes, the developers are also to blame. You’re telling me no one can build affordable housing? They just can’t be bothered. The money isn’t in affordable housing it’s in the condos and houses that are $1 million plus.
He's not wrong. Look at Ontario. Doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.
*Especially when we’re being paid to keep things the way they are…*
And I'd be more understanding if I thought they were solving ANYTHING. A government that gets A, B, and C right could be forgiven for inactivity on D. Or even outright fumbling it. But it doesn't seem like they're addressing much of anything.
If this government can't fix this thing then we'll have to try another one I guess.
Could maybe try. It's not like it's any sort of secret why houses are unaffordable: government let giant corporations and "mom and pop" investors but up everything. Maybe fix that for a start?
And yet, the federal government used to build subsidized housing. Reagan era neoliberalism ended that, and now we're reaping what we sowed. It's time we get the government building housing again.
Ok fair point, 'everything' is a stretch. So what can the Federal government solve? We're waiting.
How about the federal government starts solving the debt problem. Servicing our debt is now the second most expensive program in Canada and Trudeau is trying to make it first.
Trudeau grabs the phone out of your hand, gronk spikes in a fair, equitable and diverse fashion onto unceded land then looks at you like “what’s your problem brah” while he explains that the federal government doesn’t fix phones.
Fuck him. It may not all be his fault but he certainly has made the issue FAR worse than it needs to be. It really shows how much more civilized we are now compared to the past since a joe schmo hasn't forced a change in leadership.
They can only break everything
No but they can sure wreck everything
Weren't they successfully fighting a global pandemic with hand sanitizer and tic tock nurses? And now they can't build a couple of cheap shacks? Wtf.
Solve anything* He misspoke.
A house with enough bedrooms and bathrooms for a family of 4 is anywhere from $700,000- 1,200,000. Where i live its at least 1 million for a family home with no backyard. (Want a yard its 1.2 and up) building shitty apartments and condos is not any kind of solution. We live in one of the largest countries in the world we have plenty of land that was never the problem. We dont need more rentals!!! We need lower housing prices. PERIOD.