Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2023/11/06 Leave a comment
Another good analysis, bringing in the Quebec dimension:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government this week took a baby step toward recognizing its immigration policy needs some fixing by halting future increases in the number of permanent newcomers the country intends to accept.
…
Source: Ottawa’s latest immigration plans fail to move the needle, on housing and in Quebec
2023/10/20 Leave a comment
As I have also argued, “The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.”
Paying a price for their fixation on higher levels of immigration while ignoring the impacts on housing, healthcare and infrastructure:
Don’t look now, but the Liberals are starting to win some policy debates on the housing crisis. It just might be too late for the politics.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals spent much of 2023 getting hammered about the high price of houses, skyrocketing rents and mortgage spikes. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was making hay, and gaining ground, lambasting Mr. Trudeau by channelling the resentment about 30-year-olds living in their parents’ homes and families struggling to afford one.
For most of the year, the Liberals hemmed and hawed and declared that all the things they had already done were the greatest ever – as if they couldn’t see the problem nearly everyone was feeling.
But if you tuned into Question Period on Monday, there was Housing Minister Sean Fraser knocking back Conservative attacks with shots of his own, claiming, albeit apocryphally, that the Tories plan to raise taxes on rental units.
Liberals could, and did, claim that private-sector actors have endorsed some of their new housing measures. Four major developers said they plan to build more than 10,000 rental units between them because of the federal government’s September move to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing. Mortgage lenders have said the tripling of the Canada Mortgage Bond Program will make a significant difference for builders.
Where the Tories were landing blows at will a few months ago, now Mr. Fraser was jousting gamely, responding to a Peterborough Conservative MP’s arguments that Liberal “inflationary spending” forced interest rates higher by pointing to a multimillion-dollar housing announcement in her riding. Though the Tories kept picking the fight, the Liberals were starting to win some of the rounds.
But if the Liberals are starting to get a grip on the issue in Question Period, it comes at a time when no one is watching. Not many people watch Commons debates, and this week, the public attention paid to Parliament was devoted almost entirely to speeches about events in the Middle East.
It’s not clear, anyway, if the Liberals can still rebuild credibility after letting the housing debate get away from them.
Their late-summer epiphany came when the public outcry was rising high and Liberal poll numbers were falling low. Their biggest new measure – that GST break – was something the Liberals promised to do in 2015 but didn’t.
Even so, the Liberals suddenly boosted housing policy on a bigger scale, with real potential. The deals Mr. Fraser is signing with cities and towns for money from Ottawa’s Housing Accelerator Fund could move the dials, too, if municipalities make rule changes that, for example, allow more triplexes to be built.
Mr. Fraser now likes to point out that the Liberal bill provides more extensive housing tax breaks than a bill Mr. Poilievre tabled in September – hence the minister’s disingenuous claim that the Conservatives would raise taxes on housing.
The Liberals now have better policy that will make a difference. But it might not change the politics for Mr. Trudeau’s government.
For starters, Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives have had some success in making people believe that government deficit spending – and big Liberal spending, during the pandemic’s peak and now – is the cause of inflation, and therefore the cause of high interest rates.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland can argue that inflation is global and declining, and Canada’s deficits and debt are lower than most industrialized countries. And while the Liberals have been profligate spenders who showed little regard for controlling costs, there’s no reason to believe a Conservative government would take office and bring in spending cuts that would make interest rates rapidly tumble.
But those are arguments. People feel inflation. And they keep feeling it even when the pace of price increases starts to slow. Many felt the struggle of paying a high cost of housing exacerbated by a shortage of supply, and now are feeling the pinch of higher interest rates through mortgage bills or higher rents. The Bank of Canada’s rate increases seemed to park declines in Liberal poll numbers.
The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.
So now the Liberals have regained their footing in the fight over who can address the housing crisis but it is still a government eight years into power hoping to win a political argument over who has the best solutions for years in the future. Mr. Fraser is starting to win debates in the Commons on housing policy, but it might be too late to make Canadians feel things will change.
Source: The Liberals win points on housing policy, but it might not change the politics
2023/09/21 Leave a comment
Madhany makes the classic mistake of conflating concerns over high immigration levels with being anti-immigration. Most of recent commentary, mine included, cannot be characterized as anti-immigrant as it largely questions absorptive capacity (e.g., housing, healthcare, infrastructure), poor economic outcomes of any recent arrivals and how high levels of both permanent and temporary residents are not improving Canadian productivity.
Moreover, by claiming that this questioning labels immigrants as scapegoats and fanning “the flames of bigotry and hate,” it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than acknowledging high levels are part of the problem and these issues impact upon immigrant and non-immigrant alike.
As an immigrant, a daughter of immigrants, and now the leader of an organization dedicated to helping newcomers thrive, I’ve seen the many ways that investing in the success of new Canadians pays dividends. More recently, however, I’ve seen something more troubling: immigrants, refugees, and international students positioned as scapegoats and blamed for a very real housing crisis. This dangerous discourse needs to stop. The narrative at its root is not only inaccurate—the housing affordability crisis is a complex, systemic issue abetted by poor planning and political finger-pointing—but it is also actively harmful. It fans the flames of bigotry and hate. It also threatens the health of the Canadian economy, in both the immediate and long term.
My family came to Canada when I was a teenager. I remember even then, decades ago, how difficult it was for my family to find an affordable place to live. In Kenya, my dad had been a successful businessman. He was fluent in English and had an impressive accounting background. But as a newcomer who lacked Canadian work experience, he was denied all but the most menial jobs. At one point, he took a job cleaning washrooms at a golf club to support our family.
Even at that early age, I knew there was something wrong: people shouldn’t have to struggle so hard to give their best or build a future in their new country. That knowledge shaped my career and life. Since then, I have dedicated myself to welcoming newcomers. I began as an employment counselor, became a career public servant, and now serve as the managing director and deputy executive director of an organization that, on the one hand, evaluates academic credentials so people can put their skills and talents to work in Canada. On the other hand, we work with scores of Canadian partners to shape policy, design programs, and provide philanthropic funding to eradicate the barriers that keep newcomers on the sidelines, struggling to contribute their skills even to fields like health care, where workers are so desperately needed.
Instead of exploring how we can dismantle barriers for newcomers and all Canadians, we’re seeing increased discourse blaming newcomers for the housing affordability crisis. To be clear: limiting immigration or international student numbers will not fix the housing crisis, nor did rising numbers create it. These issues loomed for decades with no real action taken or effective policy solutions in place to address them.
Others with housing policy expertise have recommended promising solutions to this problem. These include zoning regulations that favour multiplex dwellings in cities; regulation of large real estate investors who, in 2019-2020, owned as much as 29 per cent to 41 per cent of housing in several provinces; and a focus on ensuring the availability of more rental properties in our cities—as well as ways for immigrants to more easily prove their credit histories so that landlords will rent to them. But rather than tackle the housing crisis head-on, influential voices are putting the blame squarely on immigrant communities.
We’ve got to flip the script. Let’s recognize the essential role that newcomers and various cultural communities play in building a brighter future for our entire nation. After all, immigrants will play a key role in ensuring that Canada’s workforce and tax base continue to grow, and that Canada continues to succeed on the global stage. Consider this: by 2030, five million Canadians are projected to retire, and the worker-to-retiree ratio will drop down to only 3:1. Without immigrants, we haven’t a hope of filling 800,000 job vacancies (and counting). Indeed, immigration accounts for almost 100 per cent of Canada’s labour force growth. By 2032, it’s projected to account for 100 per cent of Canada’s population growth.
Recognizing newcomers’ economic value is one thing. Solving our housing woes is another. One potentially viable action plan would be for cross-sectoral Canadian leaders to organize a multi-sectoral roundtable capable of tackling the housing affordability crisis with the nuance and specificity that it demands. Models for this—including the Refugee Jobs Agenda Roundtable—exist and are effective.
Regardless, it is time to dispense with false narratives and look for real solutions. Canada needs immigrants and needs them to succeed. When everyone is welcome, everyone wins.
Shamira Madhany joined World Education Services as managing director Canada and deputy executive director in 2018, after more than two decades of public service. She has extensive experience working with licensing bodies, settlement agencies, and higher education and post-secondary sectors in Ontario.
Source: It’s time to dispense with false narratives and look for real solutions to Canada’s housing crisis
2023/09/18 Leave a comment
Coyne acknowledges (partially) that high immigration levels are part of the problem but only partially so. And when exactly did we have higher immigration rates, as a percentage of the population, since the settling of the West?
It’s a shortage of houses, not a surplus of people. Now everyone’s convinced the problem is high immigration. No doubt there’s some truth in this, in specific markets – the extraordinary, seemingly unanticipated surge in the number of foreign students enrolling in Canadian universities and colleges has overwhelmed the supply of student housing. Maybe a pause there would help.
But we had higher immigration rates in the past without igniting a housing crisis. And prices were already at stratospheric levels long before the immigration surge of the past two years. I don’t disagree that made things worse, but it’s the long-term decline in the supply of new housing that has set us up for this.
2023/09/14 Leave a comment
Good hard hitting look at the government’s economic and related immigration policies. Money quote: “… like believing Christmas dinner will be made easier if you invite more people because they can help with the washing up.”
Sharp contrast to the Andrew Coyne piece below “hallelujah for all those extra people, and let’s have lots more,” which reminds me of voodoo supply side economics and the Laffer curve:
The House of Commons resumes sitting Sept. 18. One of its first orders of business should be to debate the government’s economic growth strategy, which is failing and needs a rethink.
In the five years to 2019, Canada’s real GDP per capita growth was an anemic 0.5 per cent per annum. Since 2019, it has been the fifth-weakest of 38 OECD countries – and per capita GDP growth has even turned negative over the past year.
For the second quarter of 2023, year-over-year GDP growth was 1.1 per cent. But population growth was 3.1 per cent, the highest since 1957-58, after the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis. Thus, in per capita terms the Canadian economy is shrinking by 2 per cent year-over-year.
Canada is one of the few advanced countries where real incomes are lower than before the pandemic. Real GDP per person is $55,170, compared with $56,379 in 2019, meaning the economy is generating $1,200 less income per person, or $2,830 less income per household, than it was four years ago.
We estimate Canada will not recover its 2019 income per capita until at least 2027, based on the federal budget’s projections for GDP growth and likely population growth. The OECD forecasts that Canada will be the worst-performing advanced economy over both 2020-30 and 2030-60, with the lowest growth in real GDP per capita. The principal reason is that Canada is expected to rank dead last among OECD countries in productivity growth over most of 2020-60.
Young and aspirational Canadians face 40 years of stagnant average real incomes. The only way to feel confident about future living standards is to avoid looking at the data.
Several of the government’s core policy beliefs are misguided. The first is that freewheeling government spending, untethered by the defined limits of a credible fiscal anchor, is not “consumption” but rather “investment” that raises real incomes. The data say otherwise.
A related belief is that government programs are what entice companies to become more innovative and productive, rather than signals from well-functioning, competitive product markets and discerning customers. The government has relied on households and business taxpayers to fund subsidies for preferred recipients and has massively expanded the bureaucracy without much to show for it other than shrinking the relative size of the private sector. That is a recipe for a low-productivity, low-wage economy.
A third belief is that “ever-increasing” immigration is an economic panacea. The academic literature overwhelmingly finds that the level of immigration has a negligible or neutral overall impact on indicators that determine a country’s living standards: labour productivity, real wages, the employment rate, the population’s age structure and, crucially, GDP per capita.
Ramping up immigration to fill low-wage jobs instantly increases demand for things that take years to build, such as housing (especially rentals), roads, schools and hospitals. We have no idea how provinces and municipalities can be expected to quickly address the needs of 800,000 extra temporary residents arriving in the past two years – people they did not know were coming – along with 920,000 additional permanent residents. Our concern is compounded by the revelation that Statistics Canada has undercounted – by one million – the number of temporary residents already here. The federal government’s immigration strategy is like believing Christmas dinner will be made easier if you invite more people because they can help with the washing up.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” wrote Mark Twain. Demonstrably, federal policies are yielding “prosperity-free” economic growth.
We believe Canada needs an economic policy agenda focused on raising average living standards. The country would benefit from modest (and co-ordinated) fiscal and monetary policy restraint to dampen inflation, alongside a productivity-focused agenda to expand the economy’s supply-side capacity, expedite business investment and innovation, scale domestic firms and ensure Canada can supply the world with responsibly produced natural resources and manufactured goods.
This will require overdue reforms to our inefficient tax and regulatory systems. Such a policy agenda would aim to cool demand and enhance supply, bringing them into balance. Critically, this would lift rather than reduce or stagnate average real incomes, as is happening under the federal government’s current approach.
David Williams, DPhil, is vice-president of policy at the Business Council of British Columbia. Jock Finlayson is the council’s senior policy adviser.
Source: Canadians face 40 years of stagnant incomes – government’s economic strategy is failing
Coyne:
By now the consensus has more or less become set in stone. Why are housing prices in Canada so high – fifth highest, relative to income, in the OECD? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s because we’re taking in too many people. Supply and demand and all that. Common sense, really.
The same goes for our stagnating standard of living. Canada’s GDP per capita is no higher than it was in 2017; labour productivity, having fallen for five consecutive quarters, is back to where it was in 2014. That, too, we are told, is on account of there being too many people about. Again, simple math, right? More labour relative to capital equals less investment per worker equals lower productivity. QED.
Or health care. Wait times are now three times what they were 30 years ago. Must be because of all of those immigrants.
It’s true that Canada’s population has been growing over the past year or two at rates that exceed recent experience: a million more people last year, probably at least as many this year.
Of course, that’s coming off a relatively slow year in 2021, when the population grew by only 200,000 and change, but still: We’re looking at an average population growth rate, over the past three years, of nearly 2 per cent annually. And yes, most of that has been the result of immigration.
Of course, 2-per-cent population growth isn’t especially high by historical standards. From 1946 through 1982, that was the average growth rate; throughout the 1950s, indeed, it was well in excess of that mark. I do not believe the 1950s are commonly associated with either sluggish growth rates or housing shortages.
For that matter, soaring house prices and lagging productivity growth – and health care wait times – have been issues in Canada for many years, long before population growth began to take off. As they are in other advanced countries, with stable or even falling population numbers.
So perhaps the case that Canada, of all places, suffers from Too Many People may not be quite so self-evident as it may have first appeared. If GDP per capita is straggling, is it because of the denominator (population) or the numerator (GDP)? If housing prices are soaring, is that because of the demand, or the supply? Is the problem too many people, or too little of the investment and housing needed to support them?
It would be one thing if the supply of either were running flat out – if investment or output or housing starts were at record or even unusually high levels, but still could not keep up with the torrid growth in population. But such is not the case.
I suppose it’s possible to connect the relative stagnation of per capita GDP over the past several years to the surge in population over the last two. But it’s surely at least as significant that GDP growth itself has slowed markedly throughout. At roughly 1.5 per cent a year, after inflation, GDP growth since 2014 has averaged less than a third of what it was in the 1950s.
The same with housing. Maybe you can put the current level of house prices down to the number of people living here. Or maybe we should look at the number of houses. At 424 housing units per 1,000 residents, economists at Scotiabank have observed, Canada has the lowest supply of housingof any G7 country.
Why? Because the supply of housing in recent decades has slowed to a trickle. Housing starts, at roughly 260,000 annually, are lower now, in absolute terms, than they were in the early 1970s, when our population was barely half what it is today. Adjusting for population, the rate of housing starts is a third less than it was in the 1960s and 1970s (600 per 100,000 population versus 900).
If we were still building as many houses, proportionately, as we did then, we’d be adding more than400,000 units a year, and no one would be talking about a housing shortage. We’re not overpopulated, we’re underhoused.
It’s just too simple, in other words, to look at the number of people, or the growth rate, as our neo-Malthusians would have it. It’s certainly true that an increase in population, given a fixed quantity of investment or housing, will lead to increased pressure on these resources. But these quantities aren’t fixed, or certainly needn’t be. If they are, it’s worth asking why – notably, what contribution ill-considered policy might be making to this.
As, in fact, we now are. What can be said about population growth is that it makes the costs of bad policy more apparent. If it means we are now beginning, at long last, to have a serious conversation about the barriers to investment and housing construction that have bedevilled this country for decades, then hallelujah for all those extra people, and let’s have lots more.
Source: It’s not that we have too many people. It’s that we have too few houses
2023/09/11 Leave a comment
A number of weak commentaries trying to change the narrative on immigration and pressures on housing (along with healthcare and infrastructure). None of these address the time lags in approving new housing.
Starting with the more intelligent analysis by Carolyn Whitzman, who notes the policy failures in housing policies (but fails to recognize the failure of immigration policies) and the need for better data:
As the country’s housing crisis intensifies, there’s been a lot of finger-pointing: at foreign investors snapping up residential real estate, at municipal governments and prohibitive zoning by-laws, and now, at immigrants and international students, the latest group thrust into the spotlight for exacerbating the crunch.
Canada is, by far, the fastest-growing country in the G7. We passed the 40 million mark in June, after the population surged by over a million in 2022. Nearly all of those new Canadians were temporary and permanent immigrants. The international student population has also skyrocketed—we’re on track to welcome 900,000 international students this year, three times as many as in 2013.
Although Canada’s major political parties have been careful not to blame newcomers for housing challenges, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that “volume is volume, and it does have an impact,” in reference to the influx of immigrants. The federal government, which is not backing down from its recently increased annual target of 500,000 new permanent residents by 2025, is also considering a cap on international students as a way to ease the pressure.
But limiting immigration isn’t the solution, says Carolyn Whitzman, housing policy researcher at the University of Ottawa and expert adviser to the University of British Columbia’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project. In fact, since current estimates of housing need don’t take into account millions of Canadian residents, as well as projected newcomers, we have a woefully uninformed picture of the situation. “Immigrants are an easy target,” says Whitzman. We spoke to her about why we’re so eager to shift the focus to immigration, the dearth of data on who actually requires housing, and the urgent need for a national social housing program.
A growing chorus of people are openly blaming immigration for the housing crunch. What’s your take?
Even if Canada stopped immigration tomorrow, we still couldn’t serve the population who live here. Nearly 1.5 million Canadian households are in what’s called “core housing need,” which refers to households that are living in unaffordable, overcrowded or otherwise uninhabitable homes, where an affordable and adequate home is not available in their area. Millions of other Canadians—homeless people, students, people in congregate housing like long-term care and group homes—aren’t even factored into core housing need. How will their need for low-cost homes be helped by restricting immigration or foreign students? Where’s the evidence? Immigrants and international students are an easy target.An easy target, sure, but won’t ever-increasing numbers of permanent residents and international students put additional strain on the housing market?
Yes. So will the formation of new households, including young adults moving away from home or couples divorcing.Why has the focus of the housing crisis conversation shifted so abruptly to immigration?
It appears to me to be a sign of desperation. Immigrants have always been blamed for the housing crisis. Look back 100 years and people were against building boarding houses because they were scared of foreigners moving in and endangering their families. Nowadays, politicians are blaming foreign investors for housing shortages, too. I’m very impatient about people pointing fingers at immigrants for the housing crisis, because it has very little to do with immigration and a lot to do with government policy.Which government policy?
That’s the problem—there hasn’t been a national housing policy since the early 1990s. That’s when the federal government decided it was a provincial or territorial responsibility, and in the case of Ontario, the province punted it to municipalities. There are more and more international students each year who need places to live, but colleges and universities are provincially regulated. Immigration, on the other hand, is a federal responsibility. There needs to be coordination between federal, provincial and municipal governments. And that needs to start with an accurate sense of who needs housing, where, and at what price.Do we have that information?
Partially. We know that new migrants are among the groups most likely to be in core housing need. Our data from UBC’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project shows that in 2021, 16 per cent of new migrant households—those who moved to Canada since the last census in 2016—were in core housing need. That’s higher than the Canadian average of 10 per cent. Refugee claimants were the most likely households to be in core housing need, almost one in five. But the census only tracks housing need in private, non-farm and non-student households.So we don’t have data on students?
No. The federal government has zero information on student housing needs, international or otherwise. In 1991, when the measure for core housing need was created by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and Statistics Canada, the decision was made to leave out students because it was considered a “temporary situation of voluntary poverty.” As a result, we don’t have any information on what students can afford to pay, whether they’re overcrowded or living in mouldy basement apartments. That’s unusual for a developed economy like Canada. France, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany—every country I know of with strong non-market housing programs builds student housing into it.Why the lack of data?
I think it goes back to the ’90s, again, when the federal government backed out of housing policy. It’s been three decades of people passing the buck.A classic tale of Canadian federalism.
I won’t disagree with you there.And yet the federal government is looking into a possible cap on the number of permits issued to international students.
I believe we need evidence-driven policy instead. A good example is the Rapid Housing Initiation, which was first proposed as a COVID-19 relief measure in 2020. The initial target was 3,000 very affordable, rapidly constructed (or renovated) homes for the homeless. About 4,700 homes were constructed or under construction within 18 months. It was renewed in 2021 and 2022—the total number of units created is expected to be over 15,500 units. It needs to be an ongoing program.The Liberals did introduce a national housing strategy in 2017, which promised to restore Ottawa’s involvement in building social housing. And legislation was passed in 2019 designating housing a human right.
Sure, but look at the national housing strategy. It literally has nothing to say about students. Do they not exist? Are they not part of the housing market?You mentioned the fact that new migrants are more likely to be in core housing need. How else are they impacted by the housing crisis?
Asylum-seeking families, for instance, tend to be larger households, and there’s a critical shortage of rental housing that has three bedrooms or more. Also, new migrants traditionally moved to the inner city, where there are social services and other resources. But there’s no affordable housing there anymore, so migrants are moving to areas that aren’t near services or jobs or public transit, and most don’t have Canadian driver’s licences on arrival. All that exacerbates settlement issues, like isolation and unemployment. The federal government needs to think about an integrated policy between immigration and housing.It sounds like you’re on the same page as Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who said that the government should “tailor its policies on immigration and housing to acknowledge the link between the two.” What would that look like?
For one thing, we’d be able to project population increases over the next 10 years. Remarkably, the 2017 national housing strategy we’ve referred to has targets that don’t include the impact of population growth through immigration.The CMHC projected that we’ll need 5.8 million homes by 2030 to reach affordability. Do figures like that take immigration into account?
They don’t, though I do know that the author of that report is planning to publish a follow-up to revise that figure in light of current immigration projections. We can’t plan for housing if we don’t know how many people are coming in. Canada is a rich country and a smart country—we have the highest rate of individuals with higher education in the world. So if we’re a rich, smart country, and we can’t solve the housing crisis, what are we even doing?Speaking of solving it, you’ve got a new book coming out next year, How to Home: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. Spoiler alert, but how do we fix it?
We need a calculation of supply shortage that doesn’t just tell us we need X million units, but actually gets into what kind of housing and where. We have one of the lowest rates of social housing in the world. And we’re going to have to scale up purpose-built rentals, rather than condos, again. That kind of fell off the cliff in the ’70s. Back then, during another period of high immigration, we were literally building more housing than we are today because we had a national housing social housing program and purpose-built rentals.What is one pragmatic step the government could take?
Enable purpose-built rentals again, with some conditionality. In other words, you can’t have a 30-storey building in the middle of the Greenbelt, for instance. There needs to be some conditions around location, price point and environmental sustainability. There were measures in place in the ’60s and ’70s that led to the construction of most of our current purpose-built rental stock—meaning most apartment buildings are 40 to 60 years old, which is a whole other problem. But we need a social housing program. We haven’t had one for three decades, and we’re seeing the impact of that.Is a federal social housing program in our future, realistically?
Absolutely. The federal government promised a new co-op housing strategy in the 2022 budget. Sources tell me it’s ready to roll. I’m not sure why it hasn’t yet, but every single major federal evaluation of the national housing strategy has asked why a non-market, social housing program isn’t part of the plan. Everyone from Scotiabank on down is saying you need to start by doubling social housing. It’s the most direct way to start building the housing that people need most.How do we quickly build a lot of homes?
In the post-war period in Canada, housing patterns were used—the CMHC literally had Type A, Type B, Type C stamped on the front of their “victory houses.” That happened in Sweden, too, with the Million Homes Program in the 1960s and ’70s. Kitchens and bathrooms of a predetermined size were built off-site. That helped streamline construction—and led to the pre-eminence of Ikea, by the way. There are currently a whole bunch of modular housing providers who have expanded with the new rapid housing initiative, and that’s a positive thing Canada could export. There’s a big advantage to going modular and building off-site, particularly in northern climates where the construction season is shorter. It’s really problematic if construction workers can’t afford to live in the cities they’re building.Last year, Canada’s purpose-built rental apartment vacancy rate hit 1.9 per cent, its lowest level since 2001.
The best metaphor I can think of is the credits from The Simpsons, where everyone’s running for a seat on the same sofa. We have students running toward the sofa, seniors looking to downsize running toward the sofa. People who would have been able to buy homes in a previous generation are also in the race. So if we want everybody to have a seat, we need to build more sofas and make sure that they’re the right kind.
Source: Stopping immigration won’t fix Canada’s housing crisis
Anna Triandafyllidou argues that the housing needs can be accommodated by basement apartments and rooms but without any supporting data on their availability or the degree to which it helps homeowners pay their mortgages.
In recent months there has been a heated debate about Canada’s housing affordability crisis and the role of international students in the mess.
Some argue that, particularly in Canada’s big three (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver), international students drive up rents because they are prepared to rent rooms in larger apartments or houses, and even share rooms with flatmates, bringing the overall possible rent of a unit to levels that are totally unaffordable for a local family.
In many smaller cities and towns, the sheer numbers of international students are also said to put pressure on housing, as there are simply not enough units for rent, regardless of the cost.
The question thus arises whether the average Canadian family is worse off because international students are creating an impossible rental market.
It is my contention that this is not the case, and I would actually argue the opposite: International students are saving both the average Canadian homeowner (and mortgage holder) and the Canadian banking system. How is that?
International students are high-paying and often exploited tenants in basement apartments and spare bedrooms across Canada’s large and smaller cities. Some are indeed contributing to competition in the market. But the housing crisis began long before the current surge in international students, and many of them, rather than competing with domestic renters, are living in arrangements that Canadians would not be seeking anyway.
Moreover, the rents that international students pay are allowing Canadian families to survive the Bank of Canada’s string of interest-rate hikes and their galloping mortgage payments. This, in turn, helps the banking system, as it grapples with the rising risk of defaults.
Recent reports show that, as the central bank tries to tame inflationwith higher borrowing costs, several Canadian banks have allowed borrowers to extend their mortgage amortizations to more than 55 years in an effort to keep the loans afloat and allow households to keep up their payments.
Anecdotal evidence suggests many families are renting not only their basements but their bedrooms to international students. In many cases, parents and children have squeezed into one or two rooms to leave the spare rooms for renters. Networking often works through friends and extended family, as many homeowners prefer to have a student from their own ethnic and/or linguistic background, to make sharing the home easier for everyone.
These rentals play a crucial and still unaccounted role in keeping households afloat now that their mortgage payments have grown sharply in less than a year.
While this is not a long-term solution for the housing affordability crisis, nor a strategy for international student migration, these insights point to a few ideas that could help in the short and medium terms.
Colleges and universities should be asked to arrange affordable accommodations for their incoming international students as part of the study permit application process. Such accommodation arrangements can include tailored schemes where, for instance, seniors are paired with students, offering full board for a reasonable price while the student helps by doing chores and grocery shopping or befriending the older person.
Young families could also be paired with international students and receive tax breaks on the rental income they make.
Provincial governments should provide strong incentives for colleges and universities to build more student residences.
International student migration needs to be reconsidered in Canada in some ways. We need to identify both bad practices (such as overexploiting international student streams as a revenue and sustainability strategy with little educational value) and bad actors (brokers and postsecondary institutions that prey on international students and their families, selling false promises for a path to migration). We also need to offer adequate services and protections to international students, including access to health care and clear pathways to job prospects.
But we must remember that international students are not the cause of Canada’s housing crisis – and that many households would be a lot worse off without them.
Anna Triandafyllidou is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Source: As mortgage costs rise, it is international students’ rent keeping households afloat
2023/09/08 1 Comment
Ignored then and no sign yet of meaningful action today:
North America’s foreign-student system is no longer a humanitarian endeavour to lift up the planet’s best and brightest, and support the developing world.
Instead, it’s become a commercial competition full of marketing rhetoric, which is creating chaos in higher education.
That’s what the West’s leading experts in international education told me 10 years ago.
They were describing how governments and post-secondary institutions were adopting an increasingly cynical attitude toward foreign students.
Philip Altbach, Hanneke Teekens and Jane Knight were ahead of their time in lamenting how international education was turning into a “cash cow” for public and private universities and colleges in the U.S. and especially Canada, where there are at least eight times more per capita than in the U.S.
While the concept of international education continues to have upsides, it’s now becoming obvious to many in Canada that the foreign-student system is creating hard times, especially for students from abroad. Even the Liberal government, long in denial, is starting to admit it.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government acknowledges it has pumped up the number of foreign students in Canada to, officially, 900,000. That compares to 225,000 in 2013. And experts say Ottawa’s number is a serious undercount.
The Liberals are still not necessarily admitting the obvious: That governments and post-secondary institutions are addicted to foreign-student spending and fees, which are four times higher than those of domestic students. Ten years ago, foreign students brought $8 billion into Canada, now Ottawa estimates it’s up to $30 billion.
The main problem, however, that has suddenly drawn more attention to foreign students is the out-of-control cost of housing, particularly renting.
International students, say housing analysts, are hiking competition for places to live. The average rent for a one-bedroom in Canada has jumped to a worrying $1,800, according to Rentals.ca. Vancouver is the most extreme in the country, at a devastating average of $3,013. A one-bedroom in Toronto is $2,592.
Foreign students are an expanding factor in such expensive housing — and it’s hurting the study visa holders themselves, who, according to both social media and the mainstream media, are increasingly feeling taken advantage of.
Even Canada’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, last month used the word exploited. And he finally admitted universities and colleges are bringing in far more students than they could possibly provide housing for.
That was before Benjamin Tal, chief economist for the CIBC Capital Markets, told Liberal cabinet ministers the government is dangerously undercounting the number of temporary residents, particularly foreign students, in Canada.
While the government, and Statistics Canada, state there are more than one million non-permanent residents in Canada, Tal’s calculations show there are at least one million more missing from the count. “Housing demand is stronger than what official numbers are telling you and that’s why we’re approaching a zero vacancy rate.”
The government’s calculations, Tal said, have ignored that many foreign workers and students don’t leave the country when their visas expire. They stay on in hopes of applying to become immigrants. Census methods for surveying foreign students, he added, are misleading.
Giacomo Ladas of Rentals.ca says, “International students do add pressure to the rental market,” even while he emphasized it’s not their fault.
“There’s such a supply and demand issue in the rental market right now and they add to this imbalance. The study permits for international students have increased by 75 per cent in the last five years. So, that’s a huge influx of people coming in and nowhere to put them.”
Delegates at a recent Union of B.C. Municipalities’ housing summit heard how rapidly foreign students and other non-permanent residents are adding to demand for housing.
The number of non-permanent residents and newcomers to Metro Vancouver has in five years almost doubled, delegates were told. Foreign students and other recent arrivals own eight per cent of all homes in Metro Vancouver, and account for 25 per cent of renters.
Canada’s housing minister received a lot of media attention in August when he responded to a reporter’s direct question by saying he wouldn’t rule out a cap on international students.
But since then both he and Immigration Minister Marc Miller have backtracked, and Trudeau has warned not to “blame” foreign students.
Miller admitted Canada’s “very lucrative” foreign student system “comes with some perverse effects, some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen to be a backdoor entry into Canada.”
Whatever the Liberal cabinet is starting to admit in the past month, however, the public would be naive to expect any real reforms.
In addition to anxiety over the housing crisis, many economists also worry international students are being taken advantage of by employers to keep wages down. An earlier StatCan study showed up to one out of three foreign students aren’t attending school.
While some representatives of universities and college, especially private ones, are trying to shut down debate by accusing critics of blaming study visa holders for high housing costs and low wages, the reality is those raising concerns can be seen as standing up for people on study visas.
Many people are aware of a high suicide rate among international students, including alarms raised by funeral homes. The largest cohort of foreign students, by far, now comes from India, and it is often South Asian voices in Canada who are pointing to their victimization, including employer abuse and sexual harassment by landlords.
And Vancouver immigration lawyers such as Richard Kurland and George Lee add the federal government’s decision to allow unlimited international students is setting up many for future immigration disappointment.
Canada is building far too big a pool of people who will be highly qualified for permanent resident status, they say. Not everyone can win the immigration points-system competition, which has an annual cutoff.
The trouble is a lot of vested interests are eager for the foreign-student gravy train to keep chugging along, regardless of the unintended suffering it causes — including for students desperate for a place to live.
Source: Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago
2023/09/06 1 Comment
Sponsored content or infomercial? That being said, issue is more with the private colleges and colleges that subcontract than with universities:
Thousands of students are arriving on university campuses across the country in the coming days, some living on their own for the first time, some travelling from countries far and wide, and others commuting from home. It is a time of excitement but also of apprehension as Canada is facing an affordable housing crunch.
Universities across Canada have long provided affordable housing for their communities. They’ve also been innovative in managing a growing demand, from getting shovels in the ground quickly for new builds, to repurposing existing buildings, to developing innovative configurations for changing population needs.
We see examples already under way today: Construction has begun for the University of Windsor’s new residence in a public-private partnership with a real estate and development company. McMaster University is opening a new residence in Hamilton, Ont., dedicated to housing graduate students and their families, while another new residence building is set to include space for students and older adults to socialize and learn together, in partnership with the university’s Institute for Research on Aging. The University of PEI will open a new student residence this fall in a space that was first used for the Canada Winter Games. A new residence at the University of Victoria has met the requirements for LEED V4 Gold and Passive House status, “the most rigorous global building standards for sustainability and energy efficiency,” says the university. It also incorporates Indigenous design elements and teachings.
But more needs to be done. Solving the housing crisis requires collaboration among all levels of government. It requires the federal government to meet its commitments to reduce homelessness, construct new homes, and provide Canadians with access to affordable housing that meets their needs. And, it requires the federal government to support community partners, like universities, which can deliver the housing Canada needs.
Here’s where the federal government can start: expand student housing through low-cost financing, broaden eligibility for housing programs through the National Housing Strategy, and open the door to a more collaborative approach to affordable housing projects.
One way governments can incentivize the creation of new housing is by offering loans with favourable terms and interest rates for targeted building projects. The National Housing Strategy’s Rental Construction Financing Initiative does just that, encouraging the construction of sustainable rental apartment projects through low-cost loans.
But retirement residences and student housing don’t qualify. With both an aging population and more students attending postsecondary institutions, we must incentivize the construction of purpose-built rentals that meet Canada’s changing needs. A low-cost loan fund specifically for universities would help to expand student housing and bring down demand for rentals in surrounding communities.
To meet the housing strategy’s target of 160,000 new affordable homes by 2028, Canada must invest in projects and ideas that will move us forward faster. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Housing Accelerator Fund and Rapid Housing Initiative are working, but we are still far from our goals. More can be done to leverage the unique strengths of universities and other community partners. Universities are well-positioned to help the government quickly deliver for Canadians, with access to land and simplified approval processes.
People around the world see Canada as a destination for opportunity, inclusion and freedom. Our world-class education system attracts students from across the globe to Canadian universities. Our commitment to ambitious immigration goals must be accompanied by an ambitious housing plan.
Higher education serves us well by strengthening our communities and our national economy. In the face of a national housing crisis, universities should be part of the solution.
Philip Landon is interim president of Universities Canada.
Source: Let’s match Canada’s immigration goals with an ambitious housing plan
2023/09/05 Leave a comment
I am less concerned than Delacourt given that it is possible to discuss levels of permanent and temporary migrants and their impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure without being xenophobic. After all, both immigrants and non-immigrants are affected and with the exception of the PPC, all parties understand the need to be careful.
In the case of the Conservatives, it is partly the fear of being labelled as racist or xenophobic by the Liberals but of greater importance is the 51 ridings in which visible minorities are the majority, many who are immigrants themselves.
As I argued in Has immigration become a third rail in Canadian politics?, I believe it is possible to have such a discussion and would argue that we court greater risks by not having this discussion. But we shall see:
If politicians in this country are going to be seized with housing in the coming months — as they are all promising — they’re going to have to learn to tread carefully around the minefield of immigration.
Blaming immigrants for the housing crisis in Canada is something that all political parties say they’re keen to avoid, yet there have already been risky remarks on that score, across the board. And there will probably be more.
New Housing Minister Sean Fraser embarked into that perilous territory a few weeks ago when he said Canada might need to crack down on universities attracting foreign students without the means to house them properly.
Fraser, to be clear, said he wasn’t blaming the students and indeed stressed: “we have to be really, really careful that we don’t have a conversation that somehow blames newcomers for the housing challenges.”
That didn’t stop Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre from accusing Justin Trudeau’s government of whipping up resentment against immigration.
“I think Justin Trudeau would love Canadians to blame immigrants for the housing crisis that he has doubled. But immigrants are just following the rules that he put in place. So how can we blame them and not him?” Poilievre told reporters.
Meanwhile, Ontario Premier Doug Ford continues to pin the housing crisis in his province — not to mention his Greenbelt scandal — on the desperate need to accommodate Ottawa’s abrupt increase to the number of newcomers to Canada.
“I didn’t know the federal government was gonna bring in over 500,000 (newcomers),” Ford said at a testy news conference this week.
“I didn’t get a phone call from the prime minister saying, ‘Surprise, surprise. We’re dropping these many people in your province and by the way, good luck, you deal with them.’”
To hear Ford tell it at that news conference, most of the unhoused people in his province are people who weren’t born in Canada. He talked of a phone call he got from a new Canadian in danger of losing his house and about the refugees and asylum seekers sleeping in church basements.
As my Queen’s Park columnist colleague Martin Regg Cohn put it, “if tolerance is truly his goal, the premier is playing with rhetorical fire … It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn being blown from Ford’s bully pulpit.”
Much has been made over recent years about how Canada has avoided the anti-immigration backlash that has arisen during the Brexit debate, not to mention Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016 in the U.S.
It is a testament to tolerance in this country, most certainly, as well as to the fact that political success has often hinged on who best can attract the cultural communities in Canada. That was part of Stephen Harper’s big break from opposition to power and then a majority from 2006 to 2015, and it was the flirtation with anti-immigrant sentiment (barbaric cultural practices) that helped get the Conservatives booted from power.
Little wonder, then, that Poilievre walks quickly backward from any argument with the Liberals over immigration numbers. The current Conservative leader hasn’t minded lifting a few pages from Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada — globalist conspiracies included — but he hasn’t joined the “no mass immigration” chorus of the Bernier crowd.
Trudeau was asked at the cabinet retreat last month in PEI whether he was worried about the housing crisis taking a dark turn into anti-immigration sentiment. He said the housing crisis also includes a labour shortage; that for every suggestion that Canada doesn’t have enough homes, there is the reply that Canada doesn’t have enough people to build them. “That’s why immigration remains a solution.”
Most Canadians, or at least many of them, would say it’s possible to have a political debate this fall about housing without reopening a conversation into how many is too many when it comes to newcomers.
But the foreign interference fixation, which dominated political debate in the first half of this year, bodes ill for that kind of optimism. At many points in that debate, one could well have concluded that Chinese interference was the only kind of meddling we should be worried about. Some Chinese Canadians expressed justified concern that the whole foreign meddling conversation was going to make any kind of political involvement from them suspect. I continue to wonder why there wasn’t similar outrage being voiced about Russian meddling or even Americans messing around in Canadian politics.
This is all to say that when political debates get intense, as the housing one is shaping up to be, it can create collateral cultural damage. Right now, all the politicians are saying they can keep anti-immigration talk out of the housing crisis. We’ll see whether they’re up to that this fall.
Source: Is Canada’s housing crisis about to take a very dark turn?
2023/09/04 Leave a comment
Arguably, already run out given time lags in increasing supply and likely reluctance by government to freeze or reduce levels of permanent and temporary residents:
Whether talking about shacks or sidesplits, Pierre Poilievre has owned the housing affordability file from the time he became Conservative leader one year ago. This is not because he has all the answers, or warms hearts with his words. It’s because he gives the issue the time and weight it deserves.
After a cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island where housing was the key focus, it appears the Liberals are finally grasping the practical and political urgency of the situation, as Mr. Poilievre long has. They are listening to what people have been saying in the country’s largest cities for years – and is now being said from Charlottetown to Kingston to Kelowna: The cost and scarcity of housing in Canada is bonkers.
At least in words, there appears to be greater recognition of that from newly minted Housing Minister Sean Fraser. He has added shifts of tone on housing since the Liberal cabinet shuffle in July.
He’s saying reasonable things such as: Maybe the federal governmentshould be more thoughtful about its international student program that has seen “explosive growth” and driven up housing costs in postsecondary communities. And it should start to use the power of the $4-billion Housing Accelerator Fund, first promised by the Liberals two years ago, with some political gusto.
In an interview with The Globe, Mr. Fraser added something new to the list: that his government has put a new focus on housing affordability for the middle class.
“This is now not just a crisis for low-income families,” Mr. Fraser said.
“This is a crisis for seniors who are looking to retire under very different circumstances than existed even a few years ago. It is a crisis for students who cannot find a place they can afford to live within an hour commute of the campus. And it is a crisis for young people who are seeking to get into the market who often have two people working in the household, and still can’t afford a place to live.
“It’s not reasonable for us to maintain an exclusive focus, or even a primary focus, that only speaks to low-income social housing.”
This reflects the truth that rents are up across the country, as demand grows and higher interests weigh on pocketbooks. Where I sit in Calgary, relatively affordable by other big city standards, rents are up an average of 16 per cent, year-over-year. The typical price of a home in the country is more than $760,000. The Canadian public is not going to be particularly patient in waiting for the 5.3 million homes economists say the country needs to build by 2030 to solve the affordability crisis.
Mr. Fraser said Canada is looking at a total capital spend that could exceed a trillion dollars to hit that housing target – “not an amount of money that most people can conceive of.” This will have to come both from the private and public sectors.
But it’s needed, not only in the real world, but also in the political sphere. Young people, according to recent polls, are increasingly disenchanted with the governing party. Some believe the Liberals aren’t doing enough on climate change, a concern exacerbated by a summer of wildfires. But economic anxiety about out-of-control costs, especially on housing, is likely an even bigger reason.
Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research, told CTV the Liberals’ popularity is down overall but plummeting among younger voters, the demographic that’s helped Prime Minister Justin Trudeau win past elections. The latest Nanos polling shows the Liberals in third place among Canadians aged 18 to 29 years old with 16 per cent support, compared with the Conservatives and the NDP with 39 per cent and 31 per cent respectively.
Polls are just a snapshot in time, but the trend isn’t good for the incumbents. Although the election is likely two years away, the problem requires complicated solutions and time is not on their side.
Mr. Fraser refutes Conservative claims that the Liberals weren’t paying attention or were negligent as the housing situation worsened. The last two years have been exceptional, he said. “What’s happened in the last couple of years in particular is there has been a shift in the housing continuum in terms of where the intense need is.”
As the former immigration minister, Mr. Fraser appears keenly aware his current and past portfolios have some overlap. He speaks of not decreasing immigration to address housing pressures, but becoming more thoughtful about it.
The country needs new people and workers, and has a moral imperative to welcome refugees. But the Liberals have boosted Canada’s immigration and non-permanent resident numbers to historic levels – and sometimes undercount those who are here. Canada’s ranks are growing quickly, and a BMO analysis earlier this year said that for every 1 per cent of population growth, housing prices typically increase by 3 per cent.
“The people we want to bring in want to stay for the rest of their lives. Let’s plan for it. And then let’s target the people who can improve the quality of life that not only their family gets to enjoy in Canada, but to improve the quality of life for Canadians who’ve lived here for generations, by addressing some of these social challenges – in particular around housing and health care.”
Even before Parliament resumes on Sept. 18, Mr. Fraser said he intends to act by “actually leveraging the federal spending power to incentivize change at municipal levels.” In short order, there will be an announcement on the municipalities that will receive help through the vaunted Housing Accelerator Fund.
BMO has also raised concerns about “an investor class” that’s increasingly dominating the real-estate market, as opposed to the people who actually live in the homes. Mr. Fraser said investors have a key role to play in creating housing units, but he is worried about homes being held by investors that remain vacant.
Ottawa will soon change the financial equation for home builders to get more units built, he added in the interview. Although the minister wouldn’t go into specifics, economists have said it’s time to waive or defer the sales tax developers incur for purpose-built rentals to incentivize new building.
All and all, Mr. Fraser said Canadians should expect to see aggressive action by the federal government to get more homes built, across the housing continuum. The question is not only whether this large task can be accomplished but also whether the Liberals, late to urgency on this issue, can catch up to the Conservatives on the political front.
Source: Liberals are late to housing, and time is running out
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Multicultural Meanderings 