Cuenco: Trudeau’s cynical immigration racket

2023/08/05 Leave a comment

Bit of a rant with some valid critiques of both major political parties and the institutions and people that support them:

When Canada’s population hit the 40 million mark earlier this summer, it was celebrated as a milestoneand a “signal that Canada remains a dynamic and welcoming country”, in the words of the country’s chief statistician. The Washington Post, among other foreign observers, cited this as evidence that “Canada is booming like it never has before”. It failed to mention, however, the recent closure of Roxham Road on the New York-Quebec border, an entry point for many thousands of irregular refugee border crossings since 2017.

These two policies — the population-growth plan and the border-crossing closure — may seem antithetical, but they are very much related. Together, they illustrate Ottawa’s distinctive approach to immigration. Notwithstanding the progressive rhetoric of its leaders, Canada has actually been quite proactive at restricting most uncontrolled migration through its “bureaucratic wall”, while ensuring through a highly selective strategy (which includes the lauded “points system”) that the majority of the newcomers who do arrive through controlled channels are, relatively speaking, well-off, well-educated and hailing from middle-class backgrounds.

In this way, Canada has been able to scoop up “the best and the brightest” from all over the world, which explains why immigration has historically always been a popular policy. In fact, this arrangement has been so politically stable that a viable anti-immigration party has yet to emerge at the national level, bucking the trend in other Western democracies.

Yet there are reasons to believe that a reckoning is in store — though not because Canadians’ cultural attitudes to immigrants have soured, as has happened in most European nations. Indeed, they are more likely to think of surgeons rather than Salafists when they look at who’s coming through their migration streams. If a countermovement against the status quo is to come, it will stem from a single factor: there will be nowhere for newcomers to live.

This may sound like a strange thing to say for the world’s second largest country by landmass, but most Canadians live in a handful of cities and, amid a global housing crisis, Canada ranks as among the absolute worst nations in the developed world for affordability. It has the highest household debt and, astonishingly, the lowest number of housing units per 1,000 people in the G7. Needless to say, the housing bubble has greatly reduced Canadians’ quality of life and made already pricey metropolises such as Toronto and Vancouver impossible to live in for those who are not already solidly affluent. And it shows: homelessness has exploded and sprawling tent cities are now a distressingly common sight. With circumstances as dire as this, how did policymakers in Ottawa figure it would be a good idea to welcome 1.5 million new residents by 2025?

A big part of the answer is that it’s all going according to plan. For the main overriding (if unsayable) goal of Canadian policymaking across all levels of government is to do everything possible to boost real estate values and rental prices rapidly and radically for the benefit of established homeowners and investors — and to the detriment of everyone else.

This cleavage, a primarily economic rather than a cultural or identitarian one, pits older home-owning Canadians from the Boomer and Gen X cohorts against struggling Millennials and Gen Zs; landlords against renters; long-settled immigrants against those fresh-off-the-boat: in other words, the insiders against the outsiders.

And it is clear where the loyalties of Canada’s political classes lay. The Nimby orthodoxy favoured by the insiders is evident in everything from steep development charges baked into municipal regulations — which make the cost of building houses prohibitive — to lazy, sticking-plaster solutions such as rent relief schemes, which simply funnel money into landlords’ pockets while doing nothing to address the underlying problems of housing undersupply. Once viewed in relation to this out-in-the-open conspiracy — the Great Canadian Racket — the government’s immigration targets, as well as its student visa policy, start to make sense.

For this purpose, Canada specifically wants prospective immigrants who are financially endowed, not penniless refugees; and it is able to draw in those candidates through its selective policy controls, whether they’re coming in as immigrants or as international students with enough funds to cover exorbitant rents and tuition fees.

The plight of international students is particularly tragic. Bright-eyed applicants to Canadian institutions from India and elsewhere are lured in with promises of a first-world education, only to be suckered into overpriced degrees while being cooped into horrendous housing conditions and forced to compete for menial gig work. Though Canada is not alone in experiencing this kind of steady glut of foreign entrants to its universities, it’s been conspicuous in its refusal to consider the extent of the exploitation involved — unlike in Britain, for instance, where authorities seem at least to have acknowledged the issue. While Canada has set about poaching high-skilled foreign workers from the US, a Toronto international student was found living under a bridge. Ottawa’s response to this and other horror stories seems to be: come on in!

This careless approach of importing boatloads of wealth-bearing immigrants to juice up the economic growth numbers, driving up rents for everyone and lowering the cost of labour, has been referred to by one housing policy commentator as “human quantitative easing”, an appropriately Orwellian-sounding name. Canada’s embrace of it has led to a perverse contradiction whereby its official monetary policy — namely, successive rate hikes to tame inflation (meaning increasingly costly mortgage payments for new homeowners) — is being offset by its unofficial “Human QE” policy, which, of course, exerts an inflationary effect.

If there is one ray of hope, it is that the immigrants and students themselves are beginning to rise up. Because of the genteel, middle-class character of many of these newcomers, they often have amour-propre — a keen sense of one’s own worth. The words of a Punjabi architect who decided to move back home are emblematic: “I respect myself too much to stay [in Canada].”

The ruling Liberals have all but abdicated moral responsibility on the issue, with Trudeau going from lofty rhetoric about “housing is a human right” to declaring that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility”. And though carrying a kernel of truth at an abstract, technical level, his words nonetheless struck many as offensively tone-deaf. After all, Trudeau’s willingness to confront the provinces on issues such as carbon pricing merely highlights his studied indifference on housing.

This negligent stance is reinforced by members of the government caucus, such as ex-housing minister, Ahmed Hussen, who recently insisted that housing “is not a political issue” after purchasing his second rental unit; and Vancouver MP Taleeb Noormohamed, who made millions buying and flipping houses. In any event, the Trudeau Liberals are cruising towards a well-earned defeat at the polls.

The bad news for Canadians is that the alternative, the Conservative Party of Pierre Poilievre, is no better. Much like Hussen and Noormohamed, Poilievre is a card-carrying member of the investor-rentier oligarchy (private investment is, of course, key to funding more construction but this class has gone about it in all the wrong ways, presiding over the hyper-financialisation of new and existing supply). The Conservative “plan” is apparently based on pushing cities to build more homes with carrots and sticks; and though phrased in colourful populist language (“Fire the gatekeepers!”), it is essentially a weak mirror image of Trudeau’s feckless initiatives. Poilievre’s bluster about fining cities that fail to comply — which Ottawa may not even have the power to do — would almost certainly just result in municipalities retaliating by jacking up fees and charges even more to pay the new fines.

Furthermore, Poilievre shows no sign of breaking with the status quo on immigration, refusing to contradictTrudeau’s immigration targets. There are two possible reasons for this, both of which could be true. The first is that Poilievre fears being tarred as “Trump North” and doesn’t want to risk losing the Conservatives’ long-cultivated relationship with multicultural communities (the subject of an admiring 2014 essayby Rishi Sunak) — even though the young people in those same communities are suffering just as much from housing scarcity and would greatly benefit from a slowdown in the rate of new arrivals. The second is that Poilievre is an anti-statist libertarian who worships at the altar of Milton Friedman, the US monetarist who helped make the case for immigration maximalism, when he argued it would supercharge growth and kill the welfare state. It could just be that Poilievre genuinely believes, on ideological grounds, that such heedless immigration targets are a good idea.

Canada faces a perfect storm: a population bomb and a housing crunch, both the consciously engineered products of national policy. Staving off disaster will require heroic leadership to chart needed course corrections on housing, immigration and student visas, while acknowledging the hard political trade-offs that need to happen: the insiders must incorporate the interests and demands of the outsiders, or trigger a complete social breakdown. In the past, Canada’s storied Laurentian elite excelled at this kind of astute brokerage politics and built a nation with it, but their courage and vision have now given way to the reign of cowardice and mediocrity.

Source: Trudeau’s cynical immigration racket

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Sun Editorial: Trudeau’s responsible for housing policy

2023/08/03 Leave a comment

Seems like Postmedia on a roll with this linkage:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claiming housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility flies in the face of everything he’s said about the issue since coming to power in 2015.

Seriously, what is he thinking?

Appearing in Hamilton on Monday to announce four affordable housing projects creating 214 new units, to which federal taxpayers contributed $45 million, Trudeau said: “I’ll be blunt as well. Housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility. It’s not something that we have direct carriage of. But it is something that we can and must help with.”

He blamed the previous Stephen Harper government for abandoning housing policy, accusing Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre of being a party to that decision.

He also said the Ontario government should be doing more.

We agree with Trudeau that all levels of government have a part to play in the issue of housing supply, but for him to claim affordable housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility, undermined his own message that, “of all the cost-of-living challenges … housing is the most expensive thing.”

If that’s true, given everything Trudeau has said about the importance of affordable housing since he came to power in 2015, it had better be a primary responsibility for him.

As for Trudeau not having “direct carriage” of the issue, he has direct carriage of immigration, where he’s rapidly increasing the level to 1.45 million new arrivals between 2023 and 2025, contributing to the surge in demand and higher costs for housing nationally.

Trudeau knows this. As he said Monday: “Right now we’re facing a real challenge around housing in terms of supply. There’s simply not enough places for people to live.”

On the campaign trail in 2015, Trudeau promised a “comprehensive National Housing Strategy” to “make housing more affordable for those who need it most – seniors, persons with disabilities, lower-income families and Canadians working hard to join the middle class.”

As of March, 2023, according to the feds, taxpayers have committed $33.69 billion to Trudeau’s national housing strategy, which will top out at over $82 billion in March, 2028.

Trudeau says this has helped almost two million families and individuals get the housing they need.

If he’s going to claim successes in federal housing policy, he has to account for its shortcomings as well.

Source: EDITORIAL: Trudeau’s responsible for housing policy

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Ibbitson: The Liberals must fix the housing crisis, before it undermines support for immigration

2023/08/01 Leave a comment

Indeed. But ramping up housing is harder than ramping up immigration, given the complexities and time lags. So unlikely Minister Fraser will be able to show concrete results before the election, begging the question why not pausing planned increases in immigration to allow housing etc to start catching up:

In last week’s cabinet shuffle, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promoted Sean Fraser, one of his government’s rising stars, from immigration to housing. His job in this new portfolio is to fix the problem he contributed to in his old one.

Mr. Fraser must find a way to ease this country’s critical housing shortage, a problem the Liberal government is stoking by bringing in more than a million newcomers a year to Canada.

High levels of immigration bring growth, energy and confidence to our country. But they also bring problems. Mr. Fraser must fix the worst problem of all, or risk undermining the Canadian experiment.

In 2022, Canada welcomed 437,000 new permanent residents. Add in temporary foreign workers, international students and other non-permanent residents, and you have a population that is now growing by more than a million people a year, or 2.7 per cent, by far the highest growth in the G7. Today, we are 40 million people.

Statistics Canada estimates that “such a rate of population growth would lead to the Canadian population doubling in about 26 years.” Given that Japan, South Korea and most European countries are declining, or soon will decline, in population – thanks to low birth rates and little or no immigration – Canada a generation from now could be one of the larger developed countries, equal to or even ahead of Germany, France and Britain in population.

These new arrivals help ease labour shortages caused by retiring baby boomers. In 2010, 14 per cent of Canada’s population was 65 or older. Last year, it was 19 per cent. By 2030, it will be around 23 per cent.

The shortages are made worse by Canada’s falling total fertility rate (TFR), which reached a record low of 1.4 children per woman in 2020 – far below the replacement TFR of 2.1 children per woman.

Those who argue that Canada should increase its birth rate rather than rely on immigration to stabilize or grow the population are just wrong. Hungary, Singapore and the Nordic countries have adopted natalist policies to get their fertility rate up to 2.1. They and others have failed. Governments should always support women who want to have children and still preserve their career path. But that is a matter of social equity.

In most respects, then, this Liberal government’s policy of expanding Canada’s already robust immigration policy has been a good thing. But it also contributes to an acute housing shortage. A recent TD Bank report predicts that, if current trends continue, the gap between housing supply and demand could reach 500,000 units through 2025.

For Mr. Fraser’s part, “I can tell you that, 365 days a year, I will choose the problem of having to rapidly build more houses because so many people want to move to my community over losing schools and hospitals because so many people are leaving,” he told Maclean’s magazine when he was still immigration minister.

Now “the problem of having to rapidly build more houses” is his to solve.

Because he’s a Liberal, Mr. Fraser will likely approach the problem through a combination of regulations and incentives. He would be wise to also steal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s approach: require municipalities to loosen restrictions on development as a condition of receiving grants.

In truth, everything is needed: converting vacant office buildings to condominiums, densifying existing neighbourhoods, increasing the supply of subsidized housing and, whether you like it or not, permitting suburban sprawl.

Thus far, Mr. Poilievre has avoided calling for limits to immigration. He recently told journalists that immigration targets should be “driven by the number of employers who have job vacancies they cannot fill with Canadians, by the number of charities that want to sponsor refugees, and by families that can reunite and support their loved ones here.” That could easily get you to a million new arrivals, permanent and temporary, a year.

Much is at stake. If Canadians attribute unaffordable housing to high levels of immigration, they may demand cutbacks.

That would be tragic. Whatever the challenges, new Canadians enrich this country. By coming here, they vote their confidence in Canada’s future and help to realize that future.

We should welcome a million new arrivals a year. We just need to find places for them to live.

Source: The Liberals must fix the housing crisis, before it undermines support for immigration

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Sun Editorial: How to create a crisis in housing

2023/07/31 Leave a comment

Sun nails it more directly but avoids the option of freezing or reducing levels:

Hello, newly minted Housing Minister Sean Fraser and congratulations on your promotion. Ditto Marc Miller, also recently arrived in the Immigration portfolio after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s seismic shuffle this week.

The left hand of Immigration seems to be unaware of what the right hand of Housing is doing. So shake hands and start working together.

The Trudeau government has what it calls an “ambitious” target of bringing in 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

According to its National Housing Strategy, the federal government is committed to building, “up to 160,000 new affordable homes” over the next 10 years.

You don’t have to be a math genius to see the problem. The government is committed to bringing in 1.4 million people over the next three years and has a plan to build only 160,000 new homes. That leaves approximately 1.2 million newcomers looking for homes. Certainly, the private sector will fill many gaps – if they’re allowed to.

We already have a housing crisis, with people under-housed or homeless and those who can’t afford a mortgage in this over-inflated economy the government has created.

No one is arguing that this country shouldn’t bring in newcomers. Canada was built on immigration. It’s our economic lifeblood. But the numbers have to add up. And these don’t.

Fraser said recently he would, “urge caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers.”

Fair enough. Now show us your logical and practical plan to house them.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland recently turned down Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s reasonable request for more federal funding to help deal with a massive influx of asylum seekers who were living on the streets.

Freeland set an adversarial tone for every big city. The federal government will bring in hundreds of thousands of newcomers to this country, dump them on cities, shortchange those communities and tell them to deal with it.

It’s not just housing. Where’s the funding for new schools, community centres and healthcare? The government is creating a crisis.

Trudeau needs to put his money where his mouth is – and fund those newcomers before they, too, are living on the streets.

Source: EDITORIAL: How to create a crisis in housing

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New housing minister says immigration can help address affordability, supply

2023/07/28 Leave a comment

Minister Fraser will learn that increasing housing supply is much more complex than raising immigration levels, with considerable time lags. Highly unlikely that any meaningful progress on the ground will be realized during the government’s mandate.

A cruel irony given his role as immigration minister in exacerbating the problem through high levels of permanent and temporary residents.

It is not a matter of “closing the door on newcomers” but rather more thoughtful immigration policies and levels that don’t worsen further housing, healthcare and infrastructure for new and old Canadians alike, and that take these into account when setting levels:

Canada’s new housing and infrastructure minister says closing the door to newcomers is not the solution to the country’s housing woes, and has instead endorsed building more homes to accommodate higher immigration flows.

Sean Fraser, who previously served as immigration minister, was sworn in Wednesday morning as part of a Liberal government cabinet shuffle aimed at showcasing a fresh team ahead of the next federal election.

He comes into the role at a time when strong population growth through immigration is adding pressure to housing demand at a time when the country is struggling with an affordability crisis.

“The answer is, at least in part, to continue to build more stock,” Fraser told reporters after being sworn in.

“But I would urge caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers.”

Instead, the minister said immigration would be part of the solution to the housing challenge.

“When I talked to developers, in my capacity as a minister of immigration before today, one of the chief obstacles to completing the projects that they want to get done is having access to the labour force to build the houses that they need,” he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to hand over the federal housing file to the Nova Scotia MP has been praised by experts who say that the Liberals need a strong communicator in charge as Canadians deal with an affordability crunch.

As part of the shakeup, the housing file has been merged with infrastructure and communities. Fraser said the goal is to look at housing and infrastructure projects together, rather than in isolation.

“If we encourage cities and communities to build more housing where infrastructure already exists or where it’s planned to be, we’re going to be able to leverage more progress for every public dollar that’s invested,” he said.

Ahmed Hussen, who became housing minister in 2021, has faced criticism for his handling of the file as the housing crisis worsened across the country.

Hussen is staying in cabinet as minister of international development.

“The selection of Sean, I think, is a recognition that the job requires fundamentally an energy and urgency and a passion in order to be able to effectively compete with the message that (Conservative Leader) Pierre Poilievre has put forward,” said Tyler Meredith, a former head of economic strategy and planning for Trudeau’s government.

Meredith said the choice to shift Fraser from immigration to housing also signals the federal government knows the two files are linked.

“If they lose the argument on housing, they will lose the argument on immigration, and they will then lose what is frankly, some of the some of the most effective pieces of their economic strategy,” Meredith said.

Canada’s population grew by more than one million people in 2022, a pace that experts say is adding pressure to housing demand. That, in turn, pushes up prices even further.

A recent analysis by BMO found that for every one per cent of population growth, housing prices typically increase by three per cent.

The Liberals have been taking a lot of heat from Poilievre for the state of the housing market. He’s blamed Trudeau’s government for the crisis, as well as municipal “gatekeepers” for standing in the way of new developments.

Poilievre has focused on the need to build more housing and has not weighed in on whether Canada needs to change the number of people it lets into the country.

The Conservative leader has also been particularly focused on speaking to young people struggling with affordability, commonly referring to the “35-year-olds still living in their parents’ basements” in the House of Commons.

Fraser, 39, acknowledged during the news conference that housing affordability is a major challenge facing younger Canadians in particular.

“It’s a real challenge for people my age and younger who are trying to get into the market, but it’s also a challenge for low-income families,” Fraser said.

“There’s no simple solutions, but if we continue to advance measures that help build more stock, that help make sure it’s easier for people to get into the market and make sure we’re offering protections for low-income families, particularly in vulnerable renting situations, we’re going to be able to make a meaningful difference.”

The housing crisis that once was associated with Vancouver and Toronto is now affecting all corners of the country, and experts say a shortage of homes is at its root.

The Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation has warned the country needs to build 3.5 million additional homes — on top of the current pace of building — to restore affordability by 2030.

Carolyn Whitzman, a housing policy expert and adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa, said the decision to combine housing and infrastructure is a good move.

“Housing is infrastructure. It’s essential, as essential as water and sewers and hospitals and schools, for the functioning of a society,” she said.

Whitzman also called Fraser a “fairly effective communicator” and noted his experience as immigration minister may also help inform his role in the housing file.

Source: New housing minister says immigration can help address affordability, supply

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Businesses are joining the growing chorus of concern about the high cost of housing in Ontario

2023/07/08 Leave a comment

Significant. But no mention of immigration pressures on housing:

Home prices in Ontario have reached a point where they are pulling money out of other sectors of the economy and creating more challenges for business, warns a new report from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce.

As Ontarians spend more on housing, the report says, they have less money for other goods and services. The situation has resulted in “wide-ranging” implications for business in the province.

“We’re well past the stage of recognizing that this is a crisis,” Ester Gerassime, one of the report’s authors, told the Star. “There are economic implications for the business community, for our budgets at various levels of government. So, it’s important that we get this right.”

According to the report, titled “Home Stretched: Tackling Ontario’s Housing Affordability Crisis Through Innovative Solutions and Partnerships,” the cost of housing is so high it’s even impacting the ability to build housing. It argues that many in the labour force are unable to afford to live in the same communities where housing is needed.

Additional pressures, such as supply chain issues, are further hampering the ability to build enough housing to meet demand, the report says. Along with the pressure on businesses, the prices are resulting in low-income earners being pushed out of their housing and, in some cases, into homelessness.

Meanwhile, Gerassime said, other business are having trouble attracting and retaining talent, as workers avoid the increasingly large patches of the province where they can’t afford to live.

“Lots of individuals are moving to other provinces, out of Ontario,” she said. “Part of that is (due to) housing affordability.”

The provincial government wants to build 1.5 million homes by 2031 to help alleviate the pressures of the housing market. But Gerassime said it will take a “all-hands-on-deck approach” to meet that goal.

Recommendations in the report include building a labour force able to construct more housing, preservation of affordable housing and supporting innovation to find new solutions to the housing crisis.

Last week Re/Max released a report pushing for 15-minute neighbourhoods in Canada. Such planning would result in a mixed use of housing for all income levels within a 15-minute walk, bike, or transit time to all necessities.

The OCC’s report also advocated for building the “right types” of mixed housing developments as another solution to ease the real estate crunch. Such housing needs to include supportive units as well, Gerassime said.

“Addressing the housing affordability crisis is the morally and fiscally responsible thing to do,” she said, quoting a recent report from the Mental Health Commission of Canada. “For every $10 invested in supportive housing, we’d see an average saving of almost $22 dollars in health, justice and social services.”

Source: Businesses are joining the growing chorus of concern about the high cost of housing in Ontario

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She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Housing example of lack of planning for impact of immigration:

Parul Yadav saw Canada as a pathway to her future.

The 23-year-old, who arrived in Toronto alone but bright-eyed in late 2021, had pored over post-secondary programs around the world from her home in Delhi, India, carefully selecting a public relations course at Humber College for its hands-on learning opportunities. Toronto, she was told, was a multicultural city — one where newcomers like her would be welcomed.

What she didn’t expect was a housing crisis, one that would become an ever-present stressor as she began her studies.

She struggled, during those first days in a Mississauga hotel, to even book an apartment viewing without local references who could vouch for her. Even studio apartments were too expensive. Feeling desperate as the first day of classes approached, she signed on for several months of renting a den without a door in a shared apartment.

Today, she has a single room in a basement where two other students rent rooms on the same floor, while their landlord lives upstairs. She counts herself lucky, given how many other international students she’s met who’ve fared worse in Toronto’s housing market.

“I know so may international students who are living in miserable, miserable conditions,” Yadav said, describing groups of two or even three students who she’s known to split single rented bedrooms.

It’s a problem she believes the country needs to reckon with — especially as it aims to boost immigration rates. If Canada and its post-secondary schools are attracting promising young learners, especially to campuses in major cities such as Toronto that are facing rental crunches, how can officials ensure the kind of housing opportunities students need to thrive?

The question of whether Toronto has adequate housing for its international students is, of course, a microcosm of an even broader question: Are we prepared to house all the new immigrants that officials see as vital for Canada’s future? A report from Desjardins Securities recently suggested the answer is no — noting that homebuilding will have to increase by at least 50 per cent nationally through 2024, or a difference of about 100,000 more units starting construction in each of the two years, to keep pace with the expected rate of population growth.

Just weeks ago, the country’s population hit 40 million people for the first time. In Toronto, the provincial Ministry of Finance has forecast the population will surpass 3.3 million people by 2031 and 3.6 million by 2041. International migration is the primary driver of net population gains, city hall housing secretariat director Valesa Faria wrote in a statement to the Star — though city reports have also noted Toronto’s rapidly aging population as a key demographic shift in the years to come.

The federal government hopes to bring in 465,000 permanent residents this year, Faria said, rising to 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025. International student study permits were also on the rise, she said, adding that the 550,150 permits issued last year represented a 75 per cent jump from five years earlier. These newcomers will bring skills and abilities that Toronto needs to sustain its “economic and social vibrancy,” she wrote. But it’s a reality that demands more housing.

“Toronto looks forward to supporting federal targets, however, it is imperative that these go hand-in-hand with new investments in affordable housing so that newcomers can find safe, secure and affordable homes to live successfully,” she wrote.

While being accepted for study in Canada does not guarantee a pathway to permanent residency, it is a common trajectory taken. The prospect of life in this country is a key lure of Canada’s international education strategy — which has uplifted the economy, created a steady immigration pipeline and offered a boost to the country’s colleges and universities amid declining public funding and domestic enrolment.

While schools have eyed increased enrolment in recent years, Faria sees student housing creation as failing to keep pace. Now, institutions such as Toronto Metropolitan University are putting new residence plans on ice, she said, directing blame on rising construction costs.

Student residences did not qualify for affordable housing funds, Faria added, and were therefore offered at market rent rates — which could be prohibitive for cash-strapped students. (Yadav, too, noted the cost of purpose-built residences often ruled them out as an option for her.)

The challenges of home affordability aren’t limited to international students, as students of all origins, in Toronto and beyond, often scramble to find affordable homes — like so many individuals and families with limited incomes. But city hall staff have noted newcomers at its colleges and universities are often making do with the lousiest living conditions, attributed in a recent city housing plan to “significantly” higher tuition and limits on their ability to work.

For Yadav, the doorless den she leased in late 2021 — after days of fruitlessly scouring Kijiji and messaging landlords — made her feel like she was walking on eggshells, with virtually zero privacy between her and her roommate. She tried to be out of the apartment as much as possible, and it wore on her mental health. “I remember I was always so stressed and always so low on energy that my friends would say, ‘Hey, is anything wrong with you?’” she recalled.

“It really does affect the relationships around you, the way you work, the way you study.”

After five months, she decided to test her luck again, with a budget that topped out at $1,500 per month, though she was hoping to keep closer to $1,000. But in Toronto, even studio units were going for higher rates. In the end, she found her single room in the basement of a house, which came with a $700 price tag and two other tenants sharing the floor. Yadav is grateful to have it — she said her landlord upstairs was kind, and really tried to offer students who’d newly arrived in Canada a “homey family environment.”

Many others she knew weren’t so fortunate.

Faria, the housing secretariat director, said international students, especially, can often be in the dark about their rights as a tenant — citing the findings of an ongoing working group tasked with probing student housing problems. “This presents a safety concern, as international students may be more vulnerable to predatory landlords and poor living conditions.”

One particular housing arrangement that has worried Toronto colleges and universities is the unregulated rooming house sector — an area where major changes are looming.

In December, council voted — after many years of debate — to legalize and license rooming houses citywide as of March 2024. This kind of rental, where tenants lease single bedrooms with shared kitchens and washrooms, often come with lower price tags than any other private market option and have long existed across the city. But they were illegal in Scarborough, East York and North York, and could be unlicensed in the old Metro Toronto and Etobicoke.

The idea of legalization, as staff proposed it, was to ensure rooming houses were safer and more regulated. In reports, staff pointed to devastating outcomes in the unlicensed market, with roughly 10 per cent of Toronto’s residential fire deaths from 2010 to 2020 in rooming houses — a grim count that would include the death of 18-year-old Helen Guo, an international student who’d just finished her first year of business management at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. Of the 18 rooming houses where fires caused death or serious injury, 16 were unlicensed. And along with seniors on fixed incomes and low-income households, immigrants and students were seen as the most likely rooming house tenants.

“Students, post-secondary institutions and community members all expressed safety concerns for students living in overcrowded and unsafe living conditions,” the staff report recommending cross-city legalization and licensing read, while also noting that some areas of Toronto located near college and university campuses had seen a particular concentration of student-aimed rooming houses “due to the lack of alternative affordable rental housing options.”

Faria, in her statement, noted that city staff have been asked to develop a post-secondary-specific housing strategy alongside academic institutions. The vision had to go beyond residences, she suggested, noting the city hoped to convince schools to plan new affordable housing for students, staff and faculty on land they own. “It is critical that the post-secondary institutions themselves commit to building new housing as part of their long-term strategic plans in order to attract top students and faculty, and to maintain a global advantage,” she wrote.

Looking back to when she first arrived, Yadav said she wished there was more transparency from schools in their recruitment materials for international students, making sure they knew not only what kind of rental market they would face, but potential traps and pitfalls to look out for when searching for a place to stay. She’d seen people fall for rental scams, having sent money from overseas for a house or room that didn’t exist.

That same openness about the housing reality could apply to officials in Canada’s immigration process, she suggested. “Just be more open and clearer about the crisis that’s going on.”

Yadav is now nearing the end of her two-year program at Humber — a time in which she immersed herself in a student union and found a part-time job with a PR agency that excites her about her future. She hopes to make the jump to a full-time role, and carve out a life for herself in the city. “I’m hoping my salary will be increased enough to sustain myself renting a studio. I’m not even thinking about a one-bedroom right now,” she told the Star one recent afternoon.

She’s seen too many of her fellow international students pack up and leave, not simply because they struggled to find their footing right away, but because — like so many other individuals and families citywide — they felt their long-term housing hopes were simply unattainable in Toronto.

“I know so many people that are moving out of Toronto or Ontario after living here for five, six years because they cannot afford a house. They’re going to Calgary, they’re going to places like Saskatchewan,” Yadav said. “So many people are moving out — even out of Canada and going back home to their countries. Everything comes down to the housing conditions.”

It’s the kind of conclusion she hopes officials take heed of as immigration continues to flow.

“They’re just inviting people in — and they don’t have the right resources to support them.”

Source: She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

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Canada’s housing policy is failing citizens and newcomers alike

2023/06/30 Leave a comment

Need also to question the demand side of the equation, which includes high levels of permanent and temporary residents:

Canada recently reached a milestone of 40 million people after growing by more than one million people in one year for the first time in 2022. But while we’re adding people at record levels, the same can’t be said about homes.

According to recent research, while the number of people Canada-wide has accelerated in recent years, the number of housing units completed has stagnated and even fallen to levels well below previous peaks. Specifically, from 1971 to 1980, Canada’s population grew by 283,737 people annually on average while an annual average of 226,524 housing units were completed.

By comparison, from 2013 to 2022, Canada’s population grew by 427,439 people annually on average yet only 196,872 housing units were completed annually on average. Put differently, during the 1970s, roughly four housing units were constructed for every five new people in Canada, compared to slightly less than one housing unit constructed for every two new people in recent times.

In short, fewer homes are being built for a larger, faster-growing population.

These dual trends spell trouble for many Canadians, especially those already struggling to find affordable housing. The severe imbalance between the number of homes available and the number required have squeezed many renters and would-be homebuyers who increasingly find themselves bidding for a dwindling supply of available units.

The result? Higher rents and home prices, and not just among the “usual suspect” communities in the greater Toronto and Vancouver areas, but in small- and medium-sized cities across the country. Last year, communities including London, Ont., Waterloo Region, Peterborough, Ont., Hamilton, Ont., Kingston, Gatineau, Quebec City and Halifax all saw their rental vacancy rates (a measure of rental unit availability) fall below 2 per cent, which places them in the same league as Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. And when vacancy rates fall, rents rise.

Canada’s shortage of housing has negative consequences for almost everyone, from the most vulnerable individuals and families to employers struggling to find workers. It also hurts newcomers to Canada – the single largest group contributing to Canada’s population growth. Most new arrivals to Canada rent their homes, leaving them especially exposed to rapidly tightening rental markets. Rising rents and worsening availability hamper their prospects – and indeed the prospects of all renters or would-be homeowners – of achieving upward mobility, arguably one of Canada’s main draws.

Thankfully, solutions are available, although policymakers must act big and act fast. There’s tremendous opportunity to open up more neighbourhoods to help achieve the levels of homebuilding required to adequately house a growing Canada. Several cities have already started implementing policies making it easier to add housing units. For example, Edmonton is overhauling its zoning bylaws to allow more housing options citywide, including duplexes, secondary suites and small apartments in current low-density residential areas. Similarly, Toronto City Council recently adopted plans to allow up to four units per lot citywide without the need to rezone. And elsewhere in Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia, provincial and local governments are making similar changes.

However, such policies are only the first of many necessary steps, and their effects will only be felt over the longer term so there’s no time to waste.

As Canadians and policymakers ponder our 40 million demographic milestone, they should give honest consideration to Canada’s worsening housing situation. In the right circumstances, a growing population can bring numerous benefits – economic, cultural and more. By not allowing homebuilding to keep up with population growth, however, governments across the country have hampered prosperity for both existing Canadians and newcomers. Governments, especially municipalities, must change the way they plan for and approve the millions more homes we need today and in the future if we’re to restore the promise of a thriving Canada with upward mobility.

Josef Filipowicz and Steve Lafleur are senior fellows at the Fraser Institute.

Source: Canada’s housing policy is failing citizens and newcomers alike

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Canada: Staff Concluding Statement of the 2023 Article IV Mission [immigration and housing linkage]

2023/06/22 Leave a comment

One sentence but noteworthy reference to desirability of breaking down silos between immigration and housing, even it the likely participants are unlikely to consider the fundamental question of whether levels of permanent and temporary residents are too high:

Finally, actions are needed to promote housing supply and address affordability concerns. In the context of rising mortgage rates and the sharp increase in immigration, additional policy steps are needed to boost housing supply and promote housing affordability. While the Housing Accelerator Fund, introduced in the 2022 budget to provide incentives for municipalities to expand housing supply, is a step in the right direction, more needs to be done to expedite permitting and promote densification. Consideration could also be given to creating a permanent discussion forum for relevant stakeholders, including federal, provincial, and municipal officials responsible for both housing and immigration, as well as representatives of the construction industry and advocacy groups.

Source: Canada: Staff Concluding Statement of the 2023 Article IV Mission

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Blaming immigration for the country’s housing crisis disguises the real problem, analysts say

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

In denial. Not the only reason for the housing crisis but definitely a significant contributing factor:

It’s an argument that comes up time after time whenever there is a discussion about the housing crisis that plagues Metro Vancouver or anywhere else in Canada.

If Canada can’t house the people who already live here, we should stop letting more people into the country.

On Friday, the country’s population hit 40 million, with nearly all of last year’s growth due to immigration. The federal government has signed on to allow up to 500,000 newcomers into Canada annually by 2025.

Source: Blaming immigration for the country’s housing crisis disguises the real problem, analysts say

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