@charlesadler: Affordable housing — or else

2023/09/01 Leave a comment

Another voice jointing the chorus:

“I think we need to do some serious thinking here.” — Housing Minister Sean Fraser discussing the idea of putting a cap on the number of foreign students in Canada, Aug. 21 in Charlottetown, P.E.I.

Let’s begin with a fact of life that most Canadians are unaware of — about 800,000 foreign students are now living in Canada.

The minister for housing revealed the number. The key reason is university economics.

Tuition for foreign students is substantially higher than it is for Canadian citizens. And universities are always looking for money.

There is no easier place to find it than young people around the world seeking a university education in Canada.

Most of these students are not living in university campus housing. There isn’t nearly enough of that housing stock available. So they compete for mostly rental housing with millions of Canadian citizens.

Eight hundred thousand is the kind of number that is forcing the housing minister and his government to do some “serious thinking” about limiting the number of foreign students Canada admits every year. There is no doubt the government is also revisiting its immigration targets.

The government plans to bring in an estimated 500,000 immigrants every year. But if we continue to have a dearth of housing in this country, we have to take seriously the idea of bringing in fewer people.

It’s axiomatic that politics cannot change the math.

But the math can and does change politics.

The most credible information on housing statistics comes from the federal Crown corporation known as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). CMHC figures say the country will need to build nearly six million new housing units in Canada in the next seven years to accommodate our population growth. One out of three will be rentals.

There is a multitude of reasons we may not hit those targets.

Ironically, one of those reasons might be any decision to slow down immigration. Canada’s construction trades rely heavily on immigrant workers.

The sad truth is many countries do a good job of encouraging their citizens to take up various trades. Canada is not one of them. But if we continue to have more newcomers than places where we can house them, we will continue to have a housing crisis in this country.

In some cities, rents are becoming outrageously expensive. As is always the case in conversations about the price of shelter in Winnipeg, we have it good relative to places like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, the three cities that have been largely responsible for electing the last three Liberal governments. But relatively good is not the same as actually good.

While the housing picture is murky, especially in Canada’s largest population centres, the politics could not be clearer.

Justin Trudeau’s government will be evicted by the voters two years from now unless steps are taken to reduce the growth in the price of homes and rent.

There is no point in pretending that housing is a one-size-fits-all issue.

We need different kinds of new housing for different people. For low-income people, we must build new government or co-op housing at affordable prices. The same goes for seniors who rely exclusively on their pension income to be involved in the housing market. The government has the means to create its own market for people without means, whether they are old or young.

The same goes for student housing. It’s no mystery where the students are. They’re on campus. And so apartment units have to be built close to campuses and rented out at rates that are lower than the free market in buildings that aren’t competing for the free market.

They’re owned by government agencies created for the needs of students, working-class families and low-income seniors.

Can the government do this in Canada? Of course they can. There is nothing I am suggesting that governments calling themselves liberal democracies or social democracies aren’t doing in many parts of the world.

After the Second World War, it made sense for the federal government to build housing across Canada for veterans returning home to young families. We’re in a cost of living war right now.

And for the government of the day, on this day and this year and next year and the year after that, it’s a political war for hearts and minds that it cannot afford to lose. The next election hinges on it.

More importantly, a less stressful quality of life for millions of Canadians, requires it.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

Source: Affordable housing — or else

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‘Culling’ bad actors capitalizing on tuition fees more effective than capping student visas in bid to fix housing crisis: immigration lawyer

2023/08/31 Leave a comment

Good long read. Insights from Nanos particularly of interest as well as suggestions by immigration lawyer Betsy Kane, albeit hard to implement given the various interests involved:

As politicians trade shots over who is to blame for Canada’s housing crisis, immigration lawyer Betsy Kane says “the finger-pointing” should be aimed at the schools actively recruiting “anyone and everyone who has the money to get here” without ensuring an adequate supply of student housing. Rather than capping the number of student visas, she says the government should instead tighten the criteria under which institutions are permitted to host them.  

However, NDP housing and immigration critic Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.) says a cap would simply be more of the Liberals “tinkering around the edges” of the housing crisis, and “if they want to point fingers, they should look at themselves in the mirror,” and admit that their current housing strategy is, at best, inefficient, and, at worst, a failure.

On Aug. 21, during the Liberals’ cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island, Housing Minister Sean Fraser (Central Nova, N.S.) suggested the federal government may need to consider a cap on its international student program, which has seen “explosive growth” since the Liberals took office in 2015. 

Currently, there are more than 807,000 international students with study permits in Canada, up from 352,330 in 2015.

“There are good private institutions out there, and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work that I try to do with [Immigration Minister Marc] Miller,” Fraser said, adding that “when you see some of these institutions that have five, six times as many students enrolled as they have spaces for them in the building … you’ve got to start to ask yourself some pretty tough questions.”

In an interview with CBC’s The House later that week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller (Ville-Marie–Le Sud-Ouest–Île-des-Soeurs, Que.) said Canada is on track to host around 900,000 international students this year, and while he did not commit to Fraser’s suggestion, he said a cap was not “the only solution to this.” 

Miller also cast blame on a number of “illegitimate actors” exploiting the system, and while he declined to “name and shame,” he said many of those actors were within the private market.

While Fraser cautioned against blaming newcomers for “housing challenges that have been several decades in the making,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, Ont.) accused the Liberals of doing just that.

“[Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] thinks if you’re afraid of your neighbours, you might forget that you can’t pay your rent. This is what demagogues do,” Poilievre said at an Aug. 23 press conference on Parliament Hill. “He wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants. He wants to divide people to distract from his failings.”

Kane, vice-president of government relations with the Canadian Immigration Lawyer Association, told The Hill Times it was “a bit unfair” to blame the high number of international students for putting pressure on the housing market.

“What we’re seeing is the result of colleges and universities leveraging the International Student Program in order to capitalize on the tuition that they’re able to charge,” Kane said. “As Minister Fraser said, we need to cut ‘the wheat from the chaff’ and figure out which institutions aren’t attempting to deliver high-quality education but rather to capitalize on the higher tuition fees.”

Kane said the government could reduce the number of students in other ways, including narrowing the eligibility or designating so-called “trusted educational institutions” that can demonstrate they are delivering programming that can translate to valuable labour market skills and job opportunities.

“By culling the number of institutions and increasing the financial wherewithal students must demonstrate to qualify, you’re in essence capping the number without capping all international students,” Kane explained, adding that the government could also look to tighten further the criteria for which programs of study are eligible to receive applications by international students.

“We don’t necessarily need more international graduates with a one- or two-year business administration diploma,” Kane said. “But we do need graduates in the trades and transportation.”

Additionally, Kane said those institutions should have a greater responsibility to ensure that there is sufficient housing to accommodate students, pointing to similar responsibilities imposed on employers looking to bring in temporary foreign workers. 

Kane also noted that a cap on international students and the Liberals’ targets for new permanent residents were “two different sides of the [immigration] coin.”

“There’s always a risk of a backlash to any type of newcomer … but many of the cohort of individuals being selected as permanent residents are already here as workers and students who can demonstrate that their education, language skills, and work experience will translate into helping our economy,” Kane explained. “So what the government is saying is that in favour of letting us achieve our overall permanent immigration goals, we may have to limit the intake of our temporary residents.”

‘Collision’ between increased immigration and housing market stress ‘a major risk’ for Liberals, says pollster Nanos

While a plurality of Canadians have historically supported greater immigration, Nik Nanos, CEO and chief data scientist for Nanos Research, said that a recent survey conducted by Nanos between July 30 and Aug. 3 for Bloomberg News suggests a majority of Canadians believe increasing the annual immigration targets from 465,000 in 2023 to 500,000 by 2025 would have a negative (42 per cent) or somewhat negative (26 per cent) impact on housing prices. Only one in five believe it will have a positive (eight per cent) or somewhat positive impact (12 per cent).

“Canadians are not against immigration, but they do understand that when you bring over [400,000] to 500,000 new people into the country every year, they have to live someplace,” Nanos told The Hill Times, comparing the immigration targets to adding the population of cities like Kitchener, Ont., every year.

“These are pretty significant numbers,” Nanos continued, adding that the average Canadian doesn’t need to be an expert on immigration or housing to know that those newcomers are going to put more pressure on the market.

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada needs to build 5.8 million new homes by 2030 to tackle housing affordability. The current pace of building puts the country on track to construct just 2.3 million homes by then.

“I think the collision of increasing the number of immigrants and the stress on housing is a major risk for the Liberals,” Nanos said, adding that the Liberals are primarily responsible for putting the two issues on their current path.

“The Liberals created this policy, so they have to take responsibility for the repercussions in terms of pressure on housing and other social welfare programs,” Nanos continued. “They need to work with the provinces and municipalities in order for this policy of bringing in more newcomers to work well and to have the least amount of disruption.”

‘Pointing fingers’ at newcomers, students no substitute for effective housing strategy, says NDP MP Kwan

Kwan called the apparent “change in tune” from Fraser since being sworn in “disconcerting.” While speaking to reporters outside Rideau Hall on July 26, Fraser “[urged] caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers.” Kwan said that trying to divert blame to any one group in need of housing is not the solution. 

“The problem is not new people; the problem is the government and a lack of programs and measures that need to be in place to provide housing to both Canadians and newcomers alike,” Kwan said. “Unless [the Liberals] face the music and admit what they are doing is deficient, and in some cases a complete failure, we’re going to keep having this problem.”

However, it is not just the current Liberal government that Kwan says bears responsibility for the current housing crisis, pointing to the actions of consecutive governments of both stripes in the early 1990s—first the Progressive Conservative government under Brian Mulroney and then Jean Chrétien’s Liberals—who began reducing spending on housing, and cut the federal co-operative housing program before eventually pulling the plug on building any new affordable housing units entirely.

Rather than capping the number of international students admitted into the country every year, Kwan said the government should require universities and colleges to provide affordable student housing.

“We know that international students pay exorbitant fees to apply and then pay a significant amount more in tuition fees,” Kwan said, noting the schools had come to rely on that source of income due to a lack of sufficient funding from the provinces.

Kwan said the federal government should play an equal partner with the provinces and schools in funding those student accommodations, and also suggested the Liberals could tie the number of permits an institution could receive to the number of homes they can actually provide.

However, Kwan said that would simply be more “tinkering around the edges” of the problem.

“What we need is the government to deliver on a real housing plan, and that means taking bold action to make real investments,” Kwan said, noting that the federal auditor general’s November 2022 report on the National Housing Strategy provided “riches of embarrassment.” 

She also pointed to testimony from CMHC president Romy Bowers at a Dec. 5, 2022, House Human Resources, Skills, and Social Development Committee meeting, where Bowers said the CMHC’s goal of all Canadians having a “home they can afford and [that] meets their needs” by 2030 is “aspirational.”

“It’s like our moonshot. It’s like our North Star that guides our activity. It’s likely that we’re not going to achieve it, but we feel that there’s a lot of value in trying for it,” Bowers told the committee.

Kwan said if that was Canada’s approach to homelessness and the housing crisis, “it isn’t a wonder that we’re failing.”

“[The NDP] is calling on the government to build more social housing, co-op housing, and community housing that once upon a time was built by the federal government, and we need to get back to doing that,” Kwan said, noting that building was only half of the solution. 

The second half would require increased efforts to safeguard the dwindling stock that Canada has left.

“Canada is losing low-cost rental housing stock to financialized landlords, buying up low-cost rental apartments only to subsequently reno- or demo-evict the current tenants,” Kwan explained, pointing to a recent study by Steve Pomeroy, a housing research consultant and senior research fellow in the Centre for Urban Research and Education at Carleton University. 

Pomeroy’s study found that while the National Housing Strategy included plans to build 16,000 new affordable units per year, four existing units were lost for every unit built. 

“We can’t build fast enough if that rate of loss is allowed to continue,” Kwan said. “We have to stop the bleeding.” 

The NDP is calling on the federal government to create an acquisition fund for non-profits to hold existing stock in a land trust in perpetuity, as well as a moratorium on acquiring those units by “financialized landlords.” Kwan said that Canada could follow the lead of nations like New Zealand that have introduced mortgage “escalators” that increase the required down payment on second and third homes, which would also have the added benefit of levelling the playing field for first-time home buyers.

“To fix the housing crisis, the right to housing needs to be principal, and the government needs to ensure they have a plan commensurate with that to deliver,” Kwan continued. “Minister Fraser said everything is on the table, and there’s no rock he won’t turn … how about tackling the hard stuff and not tinkering around the edges?”

Source: ‘Culling’ bad actors capitalizing on tuition fees more effective than capping student visas in bid to fix housing crisis: immigration lawyer

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Sun Editorial: Federal policies made housing crisis inevitable

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Recognizes role that provinces also play:

The way the Trudeau government talks about Canada’s affordable housing crisis, it’s as if the rapidly increasing number of international students and immigrants it’s admitting to Canada every year snuck up on it.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals came to power in 2015, Canada accepted 352,325 international students.

This year, according to Immigration Minister Marc Miller, the number will be about 900,000.

Miller told CBC’s The House on Saturday this isn’t just contributing to Canada’s affordable housing crisis, but also creating problems with “the integrity of the system, that has mushroomed, ballooned in the past couple of years.”

Now add the fact that when the Liberals came to power in 2015, 271,845 immigrants became permanent residents of Canada.

The Trudeau government’s plan is to boost that number to 465,000 this year, 485,000 in 2024 and to 500,000 in 2025.

Three Canadian banks have warned the federal government’s policy is misguided.

TD Bank said “continuing with a high-growth immigration strategy could widen the housing shortfall by about a half-million units within just two years.”

National Bank of Canada said “the federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing and demand.”

BMO said “heightened immigration flows designed to ease labour supply pressure immediately add to the housing demand they are trying to meet.”

The Trudeau government says it’s wrong to blame international students — on whom it may be considering a cap on admissions — and immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis.

Of course they’re not to blame.

The government is to blame for increasing their numbers so rapidly, with no coherent plan to house them, consistent with Trudeau’s view that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility. It’s not something that we have direct carriage of.”

To be fair, provincial and municipal governments share responsibility for housing with the federal government, which also says we need high immigration levels because of our low domestic birth rate to bolster the economy, including having sufficient workers to build homes.

But what’s also true is that issues the federal government has direct carriage of — immigration and international students — are contributing to Canada’s affordable housing crisis.

Source: EDITORIAL: Federal policies made housing crisis inevitable

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Rudyard Griffiths: Want cheaper housing? Boost supply—but reduce demand too

2023/08/28 Leave a comment

While he is oblivious to the temporary resident numbers, a rare call to reduce permanent resident numbers to earlier levels of around 300,000, the demand side of the equation. Valid points on the financialization of housing but likely untouchable given how it would affect current home owners :

Mike Moffat deserves congratulations for serving up some innovative and impactful policy ideas to address Canada’s gaping housing shortage. The federal cabinet would do well to zero in on his suggestions when he briefs them in Charlottetown this week for what is being billed as an important confab on the country’s housing “crisis.” The key point that government ministers need to hear more from Moffat on is reintroducing accelerated depreciation rates for rental housing. Government cannot and should not try to “solve” the housing shortage on its own. Large pools of private capital need to be attracted back into building rental housing and currently the incentives do not exist for this to happen on any meaningful scale.

What is striking about Moffat’s essay and much of the current conversation about housing is the relentless focus on increasing supply. It is as if the issue of housing demand has been erased from policymakers’ minds when it comes to tackling what has been rightly identified as one of the most complex and important issues facing the country.

Take immigration. Right now in Ontario we are adding every two years the population of Mississauga and building a city roughly equivalent in size to Cornwall. To state the obvious, this is completely unsustainable and likely unfixable in any reasonable period of time that voters could and should expect. Yet we know that returning immigration levels, and student and temporary worker visas, back to the twenty-year average of 300,000 people—versus the one million plus arrivals in the last twelve months—would have an immediate and salutatory effect on demand.

Immigration’s impact on housing looks like a live debate going into the cabinet meeting with the new housing minister (and former immigration minister) Sean Fraser publicly musing about putting a cap on the “explosive growth” of international student enrolments.

Let’s hope this is where government ultimately end ups or acknowledging the impact of record population growth on shelter costs. After all, expectations about the future matter as price signals in the here and now. They give buyers and sellers clues as to the direction of travel of a market, in this case, housing. Indicating to the market that demand via population growth will be slower for the foreseeable future would lower shelter prices today and is an easy win. 

Immigration of course is a sensitive issue that has many dimensions beyond economics and housing. But to argue that Canada wasn’t becoming more diverse and inclusive at annual migration levels a quarter of what they are today is preposterous. Also, migration isn’t the weather. It is a choice. It can be expanded or lowered according to the absorptive capacity of society. Right now that capacity, in terms of not only housing but a variety of other metrics such as health care and public infrastructure, is clearly beyond reasonable limits.

Missing also from the current discussion is some much-needed soul-searching about the role the federal government has played recently in stoking housing demand, and its corollary, a crisis of affordability. Much of the pandemic-era rise in shelter costs has its origins in a little-known mechanism called the Domestic Stability Buffer. This is the amount of capital that banks are required by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions to set aside to cover losses in the advent of a Black Swan-type event.

In the Spring of 2022, OSFI cut the DSB from 2.25 to 1 percent, providing Canada’s banks with a massive $300B in new lending capacity or 15 percent of total annual GDP. These funds overwhelming went into residential mortgage origination during the same period the Bank of Canada was slashing its overnight rate and pushing down borrowing cost by buying bonds hand over fist. The combustion of hundreds of billions in new capital and ultra-low rates explains much of the unprecedented runup in prices with average homes nationally now costing as much as average homes in Toronto in 2019. Think on that for a moment… 

As with immigration levels, OSFI made a policy choice. Some or all of the $300B in new lending capacity created out of thin air could have been mandated for corporate loans to create private sector jobs or fund new capital investment. But it wasn’t. Instead, OSFI joined the alphabet soup of other Ottawa financial organizations (CMHC, FCAC, etc.) and added to a policy environment already highly favourable to increasing shelter costs.

Part of this week’s cabinet deliberations should be a root-and-branch review of federal policy as it relates to the financialization of housing as an asset. What schemes genuinely help lower-income Canadians get into homes and rental accommodation? Which are in fact subsidies to higher-income Canadians, investors, the banks, and the real estate sector as a whole? Proof point: in what world does it make sense to have over forty percent of residential units in Ontario “investor-owned”, with some communities such as Windsor, Sudbury, and St. Catherines seeing that level approach 80 percent or more?

Here the biggest tool the federal government wields to increase housing affordability is the capital gains exemption on Canadians’ primary residences.

When this policy was instituted in 1971 it was never envisioned as applying to the housing market with an average home price at ten times the average national income. Nor was it meant to shelter millions of dollars of capital gains in luxury home sales in Canada’s major cities for the 1 percent. We need to have an adult conversation about this exemption. Is it really still in our national interest? Beyond its effect on shelter costs, are we OK with the large intergenerational wealth transfers it is increasingly facilitating? Transfers that allow the children of high-income families to “afford” housing in our largest cities, through nothing other than their birth, and price out the less fortunate. One-third of people don’t own a home, and don’t benefit from the subsidy—many not out of choice.

The cautionary tale for not using all the tools at our disposal to address our national housing crisis is what is happening right now to real estate in China.

The Chinese also took housing to their largest asset class by far and trebled, like Canada, over a generation, its contribution to GDP. They used similar tools such as cheap credit from government via the banking sector and tax subsidies to individuals and corporations to engineer a massive explosion of real-estate-related wealth.

Their entire real-estate-led economic growth model has hit a wall. High prices slowed family formation. Ever higher debt levels curbed purchases. The real-estate portion of Chinese GDP is now falling precipitously, and it seems Beijing has few if any tools left to prevent a deep recession that could end up structurally damaging their economy.

Canada has all the same raw ingredients to replicate the toxic housing and real-estate endgame China now faces. The stakes are high. We need bold action and yes there is a case for increasing housing supply. But let’s also think about the policy levers that we have to sensibly curtail demand and unwind the financialization of housing as an asset class. Both are factors that China’s experience indicates can quickly flip an unaffordability crisis into long-term, intractable economic malaise.  For all our sakes let’s hope the policy deliberations needed to avoid this “own goal” begin this week in Charlottetown.

Source: Rudyard Griffiths: Want cheaper housing? Boost supply—but reduce demand too

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Will reining in the number of international students in Canada help the housing crisis — or bring more harm?

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Some good comments by immigration lawyer Raj Sharma and if I do say myself, me:

Canada’s post-secondary education sector is pushing back on a proposed cap on international student admission, arguing it won’t help address the country’s current housing crisis but threatens the economy.

“Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages,” said Colleges and Institutes Canada, the largest national post-secondary advocacy group.

“We want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted.”

The group, which represents 141 schools across Canada, was responding to a suggestion by Housing Minister Sean Fraser at the federal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown to restrict the number of international students to help ease the housing crunch.

“That’s one of the options that we ought to consider,” the former immigration minister told reporters on Monday.

On Tuesday, Marc Miller, his successor, echoed the need to rein in the growth of international enrolment.

“Abuses in the system exist and must be tackled in smart and logical ways,” Bahoz Dara Aziz, Miller’s press secretary, told the Star. “This potentially includes implementing a cap.

“But that can’t be the only measure, as it doesn’t address the entire problem. We’re currently looking at a number of options in order to take a multi-faceted approach to this.”

The post-secondary educational sector has increasingly relied on revenue from international students to subsidize the Canadian tertiary education system after years of government cuts.

According to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, there were 807,750 international students in Canada at all levels of study last year, up 43 per cent from five years ago.

So much is at stake with international students, who pay significantly higher tuition rates than Canadians, contributing more than $21 billion to colleges and universities, local communities and the economy nationwide, creating 180,000 jobs.

Fraser’s remarks also marked a change from when he was overseeing Immigration and staunchly defended the Liberals’ record immigration levels and strategy to stimulate economic recovery through immigration.

“I find this a little bit disingenuous,” said Calgary immigration lawyer Raj Sharma. “The minister who’s talking about capping international students is the same minister that eliminated the 20-hour limit of working in a week for the international students.”

“It’s very odd for Mr. Fraser to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

While concentration of international students in particular urban hot spots has contributed to the rising rental costs and strained housing supplies in the GTA, the Lower Mainland in B.C. and parts of Alberta and the Maritimes, Sharma said the housing challenges predated the influx.

International students have become such an integral part of the immigration system and the Canadian economy that it’s hard to just turn the tap on and off, he said.

Canada has made it a policy a decade ago to attract more international students and eased the rules by offering postgraduate work permits and a pathway for permanent residence.

International students have been touted as ideal immigrants because of their Canadian education and employment credentials. However, critics have warned that international education has been misused as a shortcut for those only here for a shot at permanent residence.

“There’s a lot of stakeholders, a lot of vested interest in keeping international student intake high. These students are exploited from basically before they come to Canada and then after they come to Canada up until they become permanent residents,” said Sharma.

“So there’s employers that are using them as cheap labour. These international students are causing even concern among various diasporic communities that they’re driving down wages.”

The immigration minister’s office said it recognizes the important role international students play in local communities and to Canada’s economy, but something has to be done.

“To tackle these challenges around fraud and bad actors, we also have to have some difficult conversations with the provinces around the threats to the integrity of the system, and outline the perverse incentives that it’s created for institutions,” Aziz said.

“We must also reward the good actors because there is so much real value in the international students program, and those who do it well are essentially mentoring the future of this country.”

The surge of international students is only part of the problem as the number of temporary foreign workers and work permit holders are also going through the roof in recent years, said Andrew Griffith, a retired director general at the federal immigration department.

The number of temporary foreign worker positions approved through a Labour Market Impact Assessment annually have skyrocketed from 89,416 in 2015 to 221,933 last year, according to federal data.

The numbers don’t include the hundreds of thousands of international graduates who have open work permits, refugee claimants pending asylum and those who arrive from more than two dozen countries that have shared mobility agreements with Canada.

“They picked international students because they probably calculated it’s the easiest group to go after. There are enough stories about abuse that it’s a way to get into Canada,” said Griffith.

“It’s by no means a slam dunk, but it does signal that the government is starting to realize that there are some impacts of large immigration. You can’t just expand immigration and expect that society will automatically adapt.”

Griffith said any immediate relief to the housing market won’t be felt in at least a year until the next round of intake because it’s already September and incoming students have been issued student visas or are in Canada.

In Ontario, international students accounted for 30 per cent of the public post-secondary student population and represented 68 per cent of total tuition revenue in the 2020-21 school year, said Jonathan Singer, chair of the College Faculty Division of OPSEU, which represents 16,000 college professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians.

Singer said any cap on international students would need to be accompanied by a model of stable and predictable post-secondary provincial funding. When such a funding model was last in place in Ontario, he added, the schools had no need to seek out a number of international students that they or the province couldn’t manage.

“One role they shouldn’t have to play is filling in the fiscal gaps left by an erosion in public funding,” Singer explained. “Our colleges and universities need to ask how many international students they have the resources to accommodate — including supports related to housing, academics and health care, including mental health.”

Although education is a provincial jurisdiction and admissions are the responsibility of the schools, both Sharma and Griffith said the federal government does have the leverage to raise the bar for language proficiency and financial assets in granting visas to students as a control mechanism.

“If you increase the quality of the intake and necessarily that may result in a decrease in the hard numbers,” said Sharma. “But instead of capping it, I think it’s time for us to optimize it and ensure that we’re getting the best bang for our buck.”

Colleges and Institutes Canada said its members have long recognized housing shortage challenges and have fast-tracked the development of new residences and approvals for building accommodations. It has also asked Ottawa to invest $2.6 billion in a new Student Housing Loan and Grant Program.

Source: Will reining in the number of international students in Canada help the housing crisis — or bring more harm?

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Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis 

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Expect other provinces will join the chorus given all rely on international students to fund post-secondary education. Education organizations already also chiming in:

The Quebec government says it won’t accept a cap on the number of international students it can admit, rejecting one of the options the federal government is considering as part of a plan to tackle a national housing crisis.

Universities and colleges, meanwhile, said they were surprised and troubled, respectively, by the suggestion, which was first raised by Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser at a Liberal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown on Monday.

Quebec’s reaction indicates that attempts to limit international student admissions could create conflict with the provinces. They have jurisdiction in areas of education and their postsecondary institutions have come to rely on lucrative international tuition fees.

“Quebec does not intend to impose a cap on the number of foreign students in its jurisdiction. Although issuing study permits is the responsibility of the federal government, education is the exclusive power of Quebec. It’s up to Quebec and its educational institutions to determine the number of people they can accommodate,” said Alexandre Lahaie, a spokesperson for Quebec Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette.

Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller confirmed his government is strongly considering a cap on the number of international students Canada accepts. But Mr. Miller stressed that such a measure alone won’t fix the housing crunch.

“This will be a multipronged approach. A cap is something we’ll definitely entertain,” Mr. Miller said on Tuesday.

The number of international students in Canada soared past 800,000 in 2022, more than twice as many as when Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. Some experts have said the influx of students in need of lower-cost rental accommodation has contributed to rising rents in some cities, at a time when construction of new housing has been inadequate.

More than half of all international study permits issued in 2022 went to students at Canadian colleges, a sector that has surpassed universities as the top destination for international students.

In a statement, Colleges and Institutes Canada, which represents publicly funded colleges, said it is “troubled” by the suggestion of a cap on international enrolment.

“Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages. Furthermore, we want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted,” Colleges and Institutes Canada said in a statement.

Michael Sangster, president of the National Association of Career Colleges, which represents private colleges, said his members are willing to work with a cap, if that’s what the federal government decides, or with a trusted institution model, another proposal the federal government has floated that could see institutions with a good track record receive preference in permit processing.

“The students that are coming to our institutions, many of them are training to become tradespeople to build the homes we need. So we’re in a bit of a catch-22 right now, but we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Sangster said.

Philip Landon, interim president of Universities Canada, an umbrella group representing nearly 100 institutions, said the idea of a cap on international university students is concerning and something universities don’t believe is necessary.

“Universities seek to attract talented students to Canada and have been doing so in a responsible way with responsible growth rates,” he said.

Mr. Landon called on the federal government to make low-cost financing available to universities to allow them to build more residence spaces.

Mr. Miller said the government is already in talks with postsecondary schools about what they can do to guarantee more housing availability. He said provinces also need to be at the table, as they’ve benefited greatly from the international student program.

He said it has become “very lucrative” for some schools, adding that the economic impact of international students in Canada is more than $20-billion a year. While he said much of that is good, there is also “some abuse in the system.”

The international student program is a temporary resident immigration stream that isn’t subject to the yearly caps or targets that Ottawa sets for permanent resident immigration streams.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Tuesday that the premiers have not raised the need for a cap on foreign students with him. He added that while they talk often about the need for more housing, the premiers have also made clear they need more immigrants to fill labour shortages, including in the construction industry.

Mike Moffatt, the founding director of the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute and one of the authors of a new report on housing supply, spoke to the federal cabinet behind closed doors on Tuesday.

He said the increase in foreign students has had knock-on effects in the housing market that have helped turn a rental crisis into a home-ownership crisis.

In the area around Fanshawe College in London, Ont., for example, neighbourhoods once occupied by young families have “turned into a sea of student rentals” bought up by investors, he said.

“Domestic and international students are the biggest victims of this, not the cause of it,” he said.

“This is a systemic failure, I would say of both the federal and provincial governments and as well the higher education sector.”

Source: Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis

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Clark: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Indeed. As it is for an annual immigration plan that includes temporary workers and international students:

You have to agree with Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s assertion that the answer to Canada’s housing crisis isn’t new political branding. Still, it would be nice if the federal government had a plan.

The good news is there are signs that the Liberal government is putting together what could be the rudiments of a plan. But it needs an actual plan. And it needs to come to grips with the screaming urgency.

So perhaps the best exercise for the Liberal cabinet retreat taking place in Charlottetown this week would be having all ministers dip their heads in vats of ice water before and after their briefings about the housing crisis. You know, so everyone there feels the kind of shocking wake-up call that should be motivating them now.

It sounded promising when Mr. Fraser, freshly appointed as Housing Minister on July 26, outlined some of the government’s thinking about increasing the housing supply – and even said he thinks the government is thinking of capping the rapidly increasing number of international students coming to Canada. But then he said a decision on that is “premature” right now.

The problem is that Mr. Fraser is mixing up the concepts of “premature” and “overdue.”

The feds have missed a window to cap – and reduce – those numbers for this school year.

Let’s note here that Mr. Fraser is quite right when he says that we should be careful not to “somehow blame immigrants for the housing challenges that have been several decades in the works in Canada.”

That’s absolutely true. We should blame governments. They failed to plan.

Immigration itself isn’t the cause of the problem: It is good for Canada, and international students can be an especially good thing. But successive governments, federal and provincial, encouraged a boom in numbers, especially international student numbers, without planning policies to encourage housing for them.

One of the people briefing the Liberal cabinet Tuesday was economist Mike Moffatt, who has been doing the academic equivalent of waving his arms trying to get governments to pay attention to the problem. “We are in a crisis and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now,” he wrote in The Hub this week.

Mr. Moffatt’s diagnosis boils down to the fact that the population grew quickly in recent years, especially in Ontario, but the pace of home-building was a lot slower. Few places for a lot more people means house prices and now apartment rents skyrocketed.

The rapid population growth went a little under the radar because it was not just an increase in permanent immigrants. The number of temporary residents has ballooned. In 2015, there were 352,325 international students. In 2021, the number was 617,250. The following year, 2022, it was 807,260. But there weren’t a lot more student residences and apartments for rent.

Now the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates Canada needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to make housing affordable again. So it’s good the Liberals are talking about policies to encourage more home-building. Mr. Fraser unironically noted that the Liberals campaigned on some of them in the past two elections. In fact, they promised to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing back in 2015. It’s time to step it up.

It’s true successive federal governments are to blame. Municipal administrations and provincial governments are to blame for a lot of it, too. All for a lack of planning.

Now the plan is urgent, and it will have to include short-term measures like cutting back the number of international students. A government that doesn’t craft such a plan will create more poverty and damage many Canadians’ standard of living. And despite Mr. Fraser’s words, it is not at all clear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is shaking off the complacency.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he hadn’t heard talk of the idea of capping the number of international students and hasn’t spoken to premiers about it.

Mr. Trudeau, who was criticized three weeks ago for saying housing is not a primary federal responsibility, provided a nonsensical explanation for that on Monday when he said his point was that his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, had “completely walked away from housing.”

And sure, we have to expect politicians will make points about politics. But this is a bigger issue now, and it’s time to pull together a plan.

Source: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

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Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Hard to disagree with Prof Moffatt but how realistic is that his recommendations can or will be implemented in the short-term. Much more complex that rolling out pandemic income benefits and complex jurisdictional issues and a federal government that has “Deliverology” implementation issues.

But a really good article by which government action (or inaction…) can be judged. And while I am being repetitive, need to address the demand side (permanent and temporary migration) along with the supply side:

A war-time-like effort is needed for Canada to build the 5.8 million homesthe Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) estimates need to be built by the end of 2030 to restore affordability. This goal can only be achieved through a robust industrial strategy, as a “more of the same” strategy is doomed to fail in at least three different ways.

The first failure point is speed. The CMHC target requires Canada to triple homebuilding in a short period, and we cannot scale that construction sector that quickly without innovation. The second is labour shortages. Canada needs a robust housing workforce strategy to increase the talent pool from electricians to urban planners, but that will not be sufficient. Housing construction must experience rapid productivity increases. The third is climate change. Simply tripling what we are doing now will not be compatible with Canada’s climate targets due to emissions from construction and land-use changes. Furthermore, we must ensure that what gets built is resilient to a changing climate.

A federal industrial strategy can address all of these by changing what we build and how we build to make the process faster, less labour-intensive, and more climate-friendly. The government can begin by curating a list of climate-friendly, less-labour-intensive building methods that exist today in Canada but need support and expansion financing to grow, such as mass timber, modular homes, panelization, and 3D printed homes. 

Next, a strategy is needed to create a market for these technologies. The CMHC can facilitate this by creating a free catalogue of designs as they did in the 1940s. This catalogue would include designs for various housing types incorporating these technologies, from midrise apartment buildings to student residences, with diverse designs appropriate for different climate conditions. Builders using these designs could be fast-tracked for regulatory approvals, such as ones from the CMHC, since the building design had already been approved.

Government can act as the first customer for these projects, further accelerating uptake. It can build homes to address the estimated 4,500-unit shortage for Canadian Armed Forces families. Social housing can be built with the use of an acquisition fund. Colleges and universities should be given funding and instructed to build on-campus student housing to support a rapidly growing population of international students or risk losing their status as designated learning institutions, which would eliminate their ability to bring in those international students.

Tweaks to the tax system will be needed to help make these projects viable, from removing the HST on purpose-built rental construction to reintroducing accelerated capital costprovisions. The approvals process at all orders of government must be streamlined, and agencies must be staffed up to address backlogs, such as in the CMHC’s MLI Select program. Building codes will need to be amended to be compatible with these technologies, and zoning codes will need to be amended to allow for more as-of-right construction, such as in New Zealand, where six-story apartment buildings are permissible as-of-right within 800 metres of any transit station.

The federal government cannot alter municipal zoning codes, but it can offer incentives to do so. It could set up a set of minimum standards (call it a National Zoning Code), and any municipality that altered its zoning code to be compliant could be given one-time per-capita funding to spend on infrastructure construction and maintenance, no other strings attached. For example, a $200 per-capita fund would give the City of Toronto an additional $600 million to upgrade infrastructure and cost the federal government a maximum of $8 billion should every municipality in Canada sign-up. It could also follow Australia’s lead, which is giving states an extra $15,000 for every home built over a target. These incentives would not only cause provinces and municipalities to approve more homes, but they would also give them the infrastructure funding holding up current homebuilding. 

We should view this strategy as an investment, not a cost, as the economic opportunities are enormous. New housing will allow workers to live closer to opportunities, and scaling up these technologies creates manufacturing jobs across Canada and new products to export worldwide.

The key to this industrial strategy working is speed. The federal government must avoid setting up new approvals processes and micromanaging the system. Instead, it should set straightforward standards, and as long as those standards are met, approvals should be granted and payments made. New infrastructure funding to municipalities should not be on a project application basis, as it slows the process, and cities know best what they need.

We are in a crisis, and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now.

Source: Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort

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Watt: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

2023/08/21 Leave a comment

But given the time lags involved in building new houses, even assuming the federal government provides funding, most municipal zoning restrictions are relaxed and service fees reduced where appropriate, any concrete results in terms of “shovels in the ground” will take a few years.

In other words, after the election. The federal and provincial (save Quebec) government fixation on increasing immigration, temporary and permanent, while largely ignoring the impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure, will deservedly come back to haunt the Liberal government if no change occurs to planned permanent immigration levels and unrestricted temporary migration (students and workers):

The revamped Liberal cabinet retreats to Prince Edward Island this week while their party languishes in polling and the Conservatives surge. Underestimate Trudeau at your peril, perhaps, but something seems to have become particularly challenging.

While it is difficult to put your finger on just what that something is, it has become clear that much of that something is Canada’s housing crisis.

Apart from the PM himself, perhaps no one feels the heat on the way to Charlottetown more than Sean Fraser, the new housing minister. Fraser got this job because the Liberals have embarked on a strategy to tie immigration (Fraser previously led this portfolio) inexorably to housing, supposedly using newly arrived skilled labour to build the houses we desperately need.

All well and good, but it doesn’t seem Canadians are having any of it. The problem is, most Canadians aren’t convinced this works — and with house prices swelling, interest rates rising, and immigration continuing exponentially, I fear by combining these issues so closely the Liberals risk sparking a major backlash against their record-setting immigration plans.

Fraser has outlined his answer to the conundrum: add more supply through incentives to local governments and increase immigration rates to, in part, provide the labour required for this.

The new housing minister tackles this after the prime minister bluntly argued, “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility.” On cleanup duty, Fraser later stated the federal government should be more active in developing and enacting housing policy, as it once was.

This, of course, is the right approach. Nevertheless, Fraser’s major challenge will be convincing Canadians that high immigration levels are good when many can’t afford homes.

This week, videos of Canadians tearily lamenting the cost of living went viral. The narrative that, after eight years in office, this government has left many — the very ones they promised to fight for — behind is beginning to set like cement.

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has taken the government to task on housing with brutal effectiveness. He has managed to own this rhetorical stance while still supporting immigration — making the disconnect between the Liberal’s immigration policy and inaction on housing even harder to ignore.

Under Fraser’s oversight, immigration increased exponentially but integration remained plagued with accreditation issues and failed to correspond with housing supply: the national housing strategy has only resulted in just over 100,000 homes. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation determined 5.8 million more are needed over the next decade. In 2022, our population grew by over a million.

The Bank of Canada also acknowledged recently that immigration drives up housing demand. As the problem becomes more acute, this is where people will focus — not on the “mirage of economic prosperity” immigration otherwise contributes to.

The Liberals, if they are to have any hope of winning the next election, must convince Canadians immigration is in their near-term interests and that it will result in more houses being built. That’s a tall order when voters are being priced out of even the remotest dream of owning a home. It’s a disconnect that also dissuades immigrants from wanting to come here in the first place.

By failing to acknowledge this and rectify the integration issues in our immigration system so newcomers can positively contribute to the housing supply, the Liberals risk allowing the social cohesion they so value to fray. And when that starts, the uniquely Canadian support for significant levels of immigration will fray with it.

That would be a terrible shame. No one needs a lecture on the fundamental role immigration has played in our past and the crucial role it will play in our future — much less that it is simply right.

What isn’t right is an approach to this issue driven by complacency and inaction rather than by a fundamental commitment — not just to policy statements but to actually building new homes.

Source: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

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John Robson: So we need more immigrants … to build homes for all the immigrants?

2023/08/17 Leave a comment

Robson captures the circular argument before his overall rant:

With the Australian government hiring a consultant for advice on dealing with consultants, Momus, the Greek god of satire, retreats helplessly from the stage. Which is too bad since we could use a satirical hand, or mouth, when told Canada’s minister of immigration says we must bring in an endless stream of immigrants to build houses for the endless stream of immigrants we’re bringing in to build … um … hang on a second.

Are Canadians incapable of constructing dwellings? I’m a journalist by trade, so presumptively as useful in real life as, say, a poet. Or a consultant. But I have built a sleeping cabin and helped on that most iconic of Canadian dwellings, a cottage. I have even mixed cement. And doubtless others in this land surpass me. Including pros.

The minister cannot possibly think absent mass immigration we couldn’t build any homes. Where did our existing stock come from? The real issue is whether the current flood of immigrants contains enough extra homebuilders to provide extra shelter for that flood and then some. Especially as the minister cannot possibly think Canadian immigration policy is structured to bring in hundreds of thousands of framers, joiners, engineers and guys who use “footer” in everyday conversation.

Of course it derives from the more general, insulting notion that Canadians are such shlumps that without new immigrants we won’t work hard or effectively at anything. And not just those of us born in this notorious land of slackers; the millions who have poured in over the past quarter-century, and their offspring, are evidently assimilated to our culture of sloth so rapidly they can no longer be bothered hoisting a two by four instead of a 2-4 or something.

It’s the demographic version of the “bicycle” economic theory popular in Japan, that if they stopped pedalling they’d fall over. Whereas Japan’s real problem, and ours, is a plunging birth rate as we increasingly regard life as a burden or, at best, a brief party followed by MAID when the music stops, not a precious gift to be passed on. And you can’t fix despair with immigration because you really will get assimilation to that anomie unless we find a fix from within.

Canadians are famously pro-immigrant. Possibly because we are so famously polite that we don’t dare question bringing in another 60-odd million people to turn our fabled environment into one continuous strip mall from Saint John to Surrey.

To dissent against mass immigration risks wild accusations of bigotry. But what doesn’t nowadays? Like the joke about the patient who calls every single Rorschach ink blot a nude woman, then when the psychiatrist suggests he has a sexual obsession retorts, “Hey doc, you’re the one showing all the dirty pictures,” our elites increasingly see white supremacy in every defence of our heritage then say “Hey Canuck, you’re the one obsessed with race.”

Not everyone goes as far as our prime minister with his claim of an ongoing genocide in Canada on his watch. But the federal cabinet did approve a state-funded pamphlet from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network declaring the Red Ensign a red flag for white supremacy because it “denotes a desire to return to Canada’s demographics before 1967 when it was predominantly white.”

Do the Trudeau Liberals not concede that someone from afar, not remotely white let alone predominantly, might regard Canada’s heritage of individual liberty, capitalist prosperity and resolute defence of freedom as something to be admired and embraced? That someone who does not look like me, or them, might take their children to the Vimy Memorial and shed tears over the fallen?

Apparently not. It only recently dawned on them, with Muslim parents protesting radical sex ed, that not every non-white person is automatically left-wing in every dimension. And the Liberals are still struggling with not every white person being a right-wing xenophobic clod, though Justin Trudeau himself is only occasionally cosmetically non-white. But trying to stifle real debate with nonsense about bringing in immigrants to build homes for immigrants we bring in to build homes for immigrants is insolent, particularly as the housing crisis gets worse, not better, as people pour in. (Toronto is nearly half foreign-born, for instance.)

Of course if you’re trying to immigrate to Canada you favour a relatively open border. But once you succeed, and realize this country is everything you hoped for plus lakes and loons, you might well decide that as soon as you bring in your immediate family we should reduce the inflow dramatically.

Even people who admired Canada from a distance need time to internalize the habits that make it what it is. Which are not sloth, incompetence and bigotry, it’s apparently necessary to add.

Or inability to use hammers.

Source: John Robson: So we need more immigrants … to build homes for all the immigrants?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

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