John Ivison: Warnings about too many international students were clear. The Liberals ignored them

2024/02/15 Leave a comment

Says it all:

…Miller has since reduced the number of international student visas by 35 per cent to around 364,000 and plans to limit the number of hours they can legally work to around 20. But that is the response of a government taking action after finding the stable empty and the horse long gone.

If Miller really wants to fix the problem, he should block students from working at all off campus and should make clear to everyone that there is only one route to permanent residency: that is, through the comprehensive ranking system that awards points based on skills, education, language ability and work experience. That way Canada will get the best and brightest through the front door.

To be clear, foreign workers and students are not to blame for all the housing market’s woes. Land costs and development charges have risen tenfold in the past two decades. Mortgage interest costs were up 30 per cent last year. All of these things operate independently of what is going on with the arrival of non-residents.

But as has been noted by innumerable experts, you can’t add a million-and-a-half people and only build 300,000 new homes.

It’s clear that the minister responsible was warned there would be unintended consequences to messing with the student program’s integrity — and there were.

There is a reason why Pierre Poilievre owns the housing issue, even after the Liberals have purloined some of his ideas.

That is because the Liberals are viewed as being culpable for creating the mess we’re in. Judging by Fraser’s testimony, they deserve the discredit.

source: John Ivison: Warnings about too many international students were clear. The Liberals ignored them

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Wells: The end of the high-value economy [immigration aspects]

2024/02/15 Leave a comment

The usual insightful and acerbic Paul Wells:

….We are going to go on a bit of a stroll today, so before I go further I should emphasize that I see nothing wrong with students from anywhere taking jobs as baristas or dog walkers. I think jobs at pubs or with Uber are a valuable part of the international student experience, and I congratulate Edvoy for their success in connecting young people with Canada’s community colleges and its gig-worker economy. 

But surely all this is useful context for the news that Sean Fraser was told in 2022, while he was immigration minister, that removing the 20-hour weekly cap on work international students could perform would “detract from the primary study goal of international students… circumvent the temporary foreign worker programs and give rise to further program integrity concerns with the international student program.” With that information in hand, Fraser took the 20-hour cap off anyway.

That’s because Fraser attached more value to the first thing the memo said, which was that increasing hours worked would help alleviate labour shortages. In other words, immediate post-COVID Canada was a place where the big problem was the limited number of people available to work. Bringing in more international students was a quick way to address that, and letting them work nearly full-time would help too. 

Ontario became Ground Zero for the rapid increase in enrolment for college students. That’s because Ontario premier Doug Ford was transfixed with what he called a “historic labour shortage” and eager to attract more people to the province — from other provinces, from outside Canada, seriously, wherever. I was told at the time that when Ford and Justin Trudeau met soon after the 2022 elections in Ontario and Quebec returned the incumbents, the PM bonded with Ford by complaining about Quebec’s François Legault behind Legault’s back, because Legault was still trying to limit immigration while Ford wanted the roof blown off. 

A certain creative laxity in international-student visa distribution permitted the overlap between Ford’s interests, Trudeau’s and those of Ontario’s community colleges: Ford could address his labour shortage, at least at the lower end of the skills ladder (I assume international students are often highly skilled and eager to increase their human capital, but in the meantime they’re dog walkers). Trudeau could goose the economy during a shaky period when a lot of people were worried about the prospects of recession. And Ontario’s colleges could enjoy a revenue bonanza, at a time when most other sources of funding for Ontario higher education are capped. Alex Usher’s been covering that part all along….

Source: The end of the high-value economy

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Minister was warned lifting international student work limit could undermine program

2024/02/14 Leave a comment

More on the warning and former Minister Fraser’s policy failure:

Allowing international students to work more than 20 hours a week could distract from their studies and undermine the objective of temporary foreign worker programs, public servants warned the federal government in 2022.

The caution came in documents prepared for former immigration minister Sean Fraser as Ottawa looked at waiving the restriction on the number of hours international students could work off-campus — a policy the Liberals eventually implemented.

The Canadian Press obtained the internal documents with an access-to-information request.

Waiving the cap could help alleviate labour shortages, a memorandum for the minister conceded, but it could also have other unintended consequences.

“While a temporary increase in the number of hours international students can work off-campus could help address these shortages, this could detract from the primary study goal of international students to a greater emphasis on work, circumvent the temporary foreign worker programs and give rise to further program integrity concerns with the international student program,” the memo said.

Canada’s bloated international student program has been heavily scrutinized in recent months as part of a larger critique of Liberal immigration policies that have fuelled rapid population growth and contributed to the country’s housing crunch.

That scrutiny led the federal government to introduce a cap on study permits over the next two years, as it tries to get a handle on the program.

More than 900,000 foreign students had visas to study in Canada last year, which is more than three times the number 10 years ago.

Critics have questioned the dramatic spike in international student enrolments at shady post-secondary institutions and have flagged concerns about the program being a backdoor to permanent residency.

The memo said removing the limit for off-campus work would be in “stark contrast” to the temporary foreign worker programs, which requires employers to prove that they need a migrant worker and that no Canadian or permanent resident is available to do the job.

Fraser ultimately announced in October 2022 that the federal government would waive the restriction until the end of 2023 to ease labour shortages across the country.

The waiver only applied to students currently in the country or those who had already applied, in order to not incentivize foreign nationals to obtain a study permit only to work in Canada.

In December, Immigration Minister Marc Miller extended the policy until April 30, 2024 and floated the idea of setting the cap at 30 hours a week thereafter.

In an interview with The Canadian Press on Monday, Miller said he extended the waiver because he didn’t want to interfere with students’ work arrangements in the middle of an academic year.

“What I really didn’t want to do is impact students in a current year that have made their financial calculations about how they will sustain themselves and how they will be able to pay for the tuition and rent and food,” Miller said.

Miller said internal work by the department shows more than 80 per cent of international students are currently working more than 20 hours a week.

Waiving the number of hours international students could work was the right call given the labour shortages Canada was facing, but the policy was never meant to be permanent, he said.

Job vacancies soared to more than a million in the second quarter of 2022, but have steadily decreased since then as the economy slows.

Miller said he’s now considering making a permanent change to the cap that would set it somewhere between 20 and 40 hours a week.

“It’s not credible that someone can work 40 hours and do a proper program,” Miller said.

He said the goal is to come up with a cap that gives students the ability to get good work experience and help them pay the bills, all while not undermining their studies.

“So what does a reasonable number of hours look like for someone here studying, knowing that they are paying three to four times, sometimes five times the price of a domestic student?” Miller said.

“I think that’s above 20 hours.”

Source: Minister was warned lifting international student work limit could undermine program

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ICYMI: Tying immigration to homes a ‘good’ idea but not a fix-all: Housing minister – Global News

2024/01/18 Leave a comment

Apart from the irony of the former immigration minister waking up to the fact that his policies contributed to housing availability/affordability problems, it is valid to say it is not a “fix-all.” But it is an essential part of the mix, particularly in the short-to-medium term:

Fraser says temporary immigration programs are putting pressure on the housing system and creating a “serious issue we need to address.”

He pointed to the temporary foreign worker and international student programs. The federal government has said they are considering a cap on international student, but want to take a year to work with provinces first to try to find solutions.

“Enough is enough,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in announcing changes to the international student program last year. “If provinces and territories cannot do this, we will do it for them and they will not like the bluntness of the instruments that we use.”

Miller previously described the idea of a cap on international students as akin to “surgery with a hammer” during an interview with Global News

Fraser said the program has grown “by hundreds of thousands of people each year” in the last couple of years.

“There are some institutions in parts of this country, I have the sincerely held belief, have come to exist just to exploit the program for the personal financial gains of the people behind some of these schools, if we can call them that,” he said.

Source: Tying immigration to homes a ‘good’ idea but not a fix-all: Housing minister – Global News

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The Liberals win points on housing policy, but it might not change the politics

2023/10/20 Leave a comment

As I have also argued, “The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.”

Paying a price for their fixation on higher levels of immigration while ignoring the impacts on housing, healthcare and infrastructure:

Don’t look now, but the Liberals are starting to win some policy debates on the housing crisis. It just might be too late for the politics.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals spent much of 2023 getting hammered about the high price of houses, skyrocketing rents and mortgage spikes. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was making hay, and gaining ground, lambasting Mr. Trudeau by channelling the resentment about 30-year-olds living in their parents’ homes and families struggling to afford one.

For most of the year, the Liberals hemmed and hawed and declared that all the things they had already done were the greatest ever – as if they couldn’t see the problem nearly everyone was feeling.

But if you tuned into Question Period on Monday, there was Housing Minister Sean Fraser knocking back Conservative attacks with shots of his own, claiming, albeit apocryphally, that the Tories plan to raise taxes on rental units.

Liberals could, and did, claim that private-sector actors have endorsed some of their new housing measures. Four major developers said they plan to build more than 10,000 rental units between them because of the federal government’s September move to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing. Mortgage lenders have said the tripling of the Canada Mortgage Bond Program will make a significant difference for builders.

Where the Tories were landing blows at will a few months ago, now Mr. Fraser was jousting gamely, responding to a Peterborough Conservative MP’s arguments that Liberal “inflationary spending” forced interest rates higher by pointing to a multimillion-dollar housing announcement in her riding. Though the Tories kept picking the fight, the Liberals were starting to win some of the rounds.

But if the Liberals are starting to get a grip on the issue in Question Period, it comes at a time when no one is watching. Not many people watch Commons debates, and this week, the public attention paid to Parliament was devoted almost entirely to speeches about events in the Middle East.

It’s not clear, anyway, if the Liberals can still rebuild credibility after letting the housing debate get away from them.

Their late-summer epiphany came when the public outcry was rising high and Liberal poll numbers were falling low. Their biggest new measure – that GST break – was something the Liberals promised to do in 2015 but didn’t.

Even so, the Liberals suddenly boosted housing policy on a bigger scale, with real potential. The deals Mr. Fraser is signing with cities and towns for money from Ottawa’s Housing Accelerator Fund could move the dials, too, if municipalities make rule changes that, for example, allow more triplexes to be built.

Mr. Fraser now likes to point out that the Liberal bill provides more extensive housing tax breaks than a bill Mr. Poilievre tabled in September – hence the minister’s disingenuous claim that the Conservatives would raise taxes on housing.

The Liberals now have better policy that will make a difference. But it might not change the politics for Mr. Trudeau’s government.

For starters, Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives have had some success in making people believe that government deficit spending – and big Liberal spending, during the pandemic’s peak and now – is the cause of inflation, and therefore the cause of high interest rates.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland can argue that inflation is global and declining, and Canada’s deficits and debt are lower than most industrialized countries. And while the Liberals have been profligate spenders who showed little regard for controlling costs, there’s no reason to believe a Conservative government would take office and bring in spending cuts that would make interest rates rapidly tumble.

But those are arguments. People feel inflation. And they keep feeling it even when the pace of price increases starts to slow. Many felt the struggle of paying a high cost of housing exacerbated by a shortage of supply, and now are feeling the pinch of higher interest rates through mortgage bills or higher rents. The Bank of Canada’s rate increases seemed to park declines in Liberal poll numbers.

The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.

So now the Liberals have regained their footing in the fight over who can address the housing crisis but it is still a government eight years into power hoping to win a political argument over who has the best solutions for years in the future. Mr. Fraser is starting to win debates in the Commons on housing policy, but it might be too late to make Canadians feel things will change.

Source: The Liberals win points on housing policy, but it might not change the politics

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Canadian government won’t rule out changing immigration targets to address housing challenges, Fraser says

2023/09/12 Leave a comment

Odd that former minister of immigration is signalling possible changes rather than the current immigration minister. Whether deliberate strategy for the minister who was responsible for increases to take some of the possible heat over high immigration levels, or simply that he now understands (better late than never) the linkages between immigration levels and housing pressures.

Will only know whether this is just a series of trial balloons or a significant pivot with the release of the immigration levels plan later this fall:

Canada’s housing minister says the federal government isn’t ruling out changes to its ambitious immigration targets, but maintains the country should also focus on what it can do to increase housing supply when it comes to addressing current housing challenges.

“When we look to the future of immigration levels planning, we want to maintain ambition and immigration, but we want to better align our immigration policies with the absorptive capacity of communities that includes housing, that includes health care, that includes infrastructure,” Sean Fraser said in an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos on Sunday.

Fraser said he believes the federal government has “some work to do” with its temporary immigration programs, which currently operate on the basis of demand in an “uncapped way,” but doesn’t “necessarily” need to reduce the number of newcomers who become permanent residents each year. It’s common for almost half of those individuals to already be in Canada as temporary residents, he noted.

Before making any changes, however, Fraser said the federal government would have to consult with other levels of government — since deciding which institutions take in international students is within the purview of provincial governments — as well as institutions that have “a duty to play part of a role in housing the people who come here.”

He also stressed that conversations around addressing the country’s housing crisis should not solely revolve around immigration.

“It’s important that when we’re looking at the answer to our housing challenges, we also focus on what we can do to increase the supply,” the minister said.

“I think it’s essential that we remember that immigration remains one of Canada’s strongest competitive advantages in the global economy.”

Fraser introduced Canada’s ambitious immigration targets in November 2022 when he was the federal immigration minister, with a goal of bringing in 465,000 permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

At the time, he said the move was necessary to ensure Canada’s economic prosperity, by helping businesses find workers to fill in labour gaps and to attract the skills required in key sectors including health care, skilled trades, manufacturing and technology.

Academics, commercial banks, opposition politicians and policy thinkers, however, have been warning the federal government the country’s high-growth immigration strategy is exacerbating Canada’s housing crisis.

In a July report, economists from TD estimated that if the current immigration strategy continues, Canada’s housing shortfall could widen by about half a million units in just two years’ time.

The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation has estimated the country needs to build 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than it is currently on track for, to help achieve some semblance of housing affordability.

Fraser previously said putting a cap on the number of international students permitted to study in this country is one of the solutions the federal government is discussing when it comes to addressing housing affordability and rental availability.

But when speaking with Kapelos on Sunday, he said his preference is to continue to welcome “significant numbers” of international students “because the program is good for Canada, both in the short term and the long term when you create a pipeline of potential new citizens.”

Fraser said the federal government, along with its provincial and institutional partners, have to ensure that international students — many of whom have reported struggles to find affordable and adequate housing in Canada — are supported and communities have the capacity to “absorb them” when they arrive here.

“If we were going to shift the way that we operate, to set a target or to align the numbers with the housing capacity, it’s a monumental change in the way that Canada does immigration,” Fraser said.

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. But it does mean if we’re seeking to make a permanent change to the way that Canada’s immigration laws operate, we have to do it right.”

Welcoming people to Canada who are making a productive contribution to the country’s economy is “essential,” Fraser said, adding he doesn’t “want to lose that.”

Source: Canadian government won’t rule out changing immigration targets to … – CTV News

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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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Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Looking at vs doing something about….

Raj Sharma developed what I view as a neat little test as to whether the government is serious or not:

The federal government should reassess its policy on international students and consider a cap on a program that has seen “explosive growth,” putting pressure on rental markets and driving up costs, Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser said.

The number of international students in Canada has more than doubled since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, government data show. At the end of 2022, it sat at 807,260.

“The reality is we’ve got temporary immigration programs that were never designed to see such explosive growth in such a short period of time,” Mr. Fraser said Monday in Charlottetown. He noted that unlike the permanent resident immigration programs where the government sets targets each year, the study permit program is a temporary resident program that is driven by demand and doesn’t have a set cap.

He said the growth of the program for international students is happening in concentrated regions of Canada and is putting an “unprecedented level of demand” on the job market but even “more pronounced” demand on the housing market.

Asked if the government should cap the number of international students allowed in Canada each year, he said it’s an option Ottawa should consider.

Mr. Fraser did not provide any timeline for when Ottawa might lower the number of study permits issued. Asked if a change would be made this fall, he said Immigration Minister Marc Miller would have more to say at a later date.

Mr. Fraser spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a three-day cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island.

The affordability crisis pushing many Canadians to the brink, in particular owing to rising housing costs, is at the top of the agenda for the meetings. The government wants to come up with new ways to make the first-time homebuyers’ market more accessible and also address rental costs that are increasingly unsustainable for lower- and middle-income households.

Postsecondary schools in Canada have relied more and more on international students for their revenue streams because their tuition fees are much higher than the fees paid by domestic students.

Mr. Fraser said the federal government needs to work with colleges and universities to ensure those institutions also take responsibility for housing the record numbers of international students they’re accepting.

He also said the government needs to more closely scrutinize private colleges, some of which he suggested were illegitimate and taking advantage of the international student permit system.

Some of those schools “exist purely to profit off the backs of vulnerable international students,” Mr. Fraser said. He added that there are some “plaza colleges” that have up to six times more students enrolled than physical space for them in their buildings.

“Not all private colleges should be treated with the same brush,” he said. “There are good private institutions out there and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work.”

As part of the federal cabinet’s focus on the housing crisis, it will hear from two of the authors of a report released last week. That report says the spike in rental housing costs is in part attributed to the growth in young adults living in Canada, which is in part linked to the rise in international students

The authors call on the government to establish an industrial strategy for housing, saying that in order to restore affordability by 2030, the country needs to build 5.8 million more housing units, of which approximately two million should be rentals.

In Ottawa, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre blamed the government for the sky-high housing costs, noting the rapid rise has happened under Mr. Trudeau’s watch.

“Now he wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants; he wants to divide people to distract from his failings,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters on Parliament Hill.

Mr. Poilievre would not say whether he would lower immigration levels, and instead said that Ottawa needs to crack down on slow-moving municipal bureaucracies that make it harder to start construction projects.

In Charlottetown, the Housing Minister stressed the need to be “really, really careful” not to blame immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis. And Mr. Fraser dismissed Mr. Poilievre’s criticism entirely, saying the Conservatives are now promising what the Liberals have already campaigned on in past elections.

At a separate press conference, Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Cornwall, PEI, that immigration is a key part of the solution for Canada’s housing shortage because the construction industry needs more skilled labour.

“There’s much more we need to do on housing and we’re continuing to step up,” he said. “But we’re going to continue to be the open, welcoming, prosperous and growing country we’ve always been, because that has been something that has led to great opportunities and prosperity for all Canadians.”

Source: Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

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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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Long way home: Blamed for affordability crisis, Liberals look to pivot on housing

2023/08/15 Leave a comment

But a real pivot has to include both immigration and housing….

Chris Burke and his fiancée have been less than a year away from buying their first home for the past three years.

Saving for a down payment was the first challenge. Now, rising interest rates have kicked home ownership down the road again, stalling the couple’s plans to get married and have children.

“Any gains we make towards purchasing a house, we’re watching the goalposts move further and further away,” the 31-year-old Ottawa resident said.

Feeling “stuck,” as Burke put it, is a sentiment shared by many young Canadians who are increasingly pessimistic about their home ownership prospects.

For the federal Liberals, the growing discontent with the state of the housing market is becoming a political threat.

“I’m a former Liberal voter,” Burke said. “I certainly wouldn’t be voting for them this time around.”

Experts say the housing crisis poses a great risk to the incumbent government in the next election if it doesn’t take drastic action soon.

“This has become probably the most important both economic and political problem facing the country right now,” said Tyler Meredith, a former head of economic strategy and planning for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

“And especially given the significant emphasis the government has put on immigration and the relationship between immigration and the housing market, there is a need to do more.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has taken direct aim at the Liberals for the state of the housing market, highlighting the dramatic increases in home prices, rents and even interest rates.

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, the national average price of a home sold was $709,000 in June 2023, up from $455,000 in Oct. 2015, when the Liberals first came to power.

And the cost of getting a mortgage has soared, following a series of aggressive interest rate increases by the Bank of Canada in response to rising inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rent prices have also skyrocketed, with some cities seeing double-digit increases over the last year.

Trudeau has tried to deflect for the housing crisis, recently saying there are limits to what the federal government can do.

“I’ll be blunt as well: housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility,” Trudeau said during a housing announcement in Hamilton on July 31.

“It’s not something we have direct carriage of. But it is something that we can and must help with.”

His remarks were quickly blasted by Poilievre, who reminded people of earlier promises Trudeau had made on housing.

“(Trudeau) held a news conference … to tell you all he’s not responsible for housing. That’s funny, because eight years ago, he promised he was gonna lower housing costs,” Poilievre said in a news conference the next day.

Most experts agree that Ottawa isn’t solely responsible for the problem. But many say the federal government could still be doing more to alleviate the shortage of housing at the root of the affordability crunch.

The Canada Mortgage Housing Corp., the national housing agency, warned last year that the country needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to restore affordability.

If the current pace of building continues, then only 2.3 million homes will have been added to the housing stock by then.

There are several things experts say the federal government could be doing, such as better calibrating its immigration policy with housing and reforming tax laws to incentivize rental developments. It could also push local governments to get housing built faster.

The federal government has been hearing from stakeholders and housing experts on these potential solutions, as rumblings grow about a focus on housing in the coming fall economic statement and next year’s budget.

A senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss matters not yet made public, says the Liberals plan to take steps over the next year to get other levels of government, the private sector and the not-for-profit sector to build more homes.

Trudeau’s recent cabinet shuffle might be an early sign that the federal government plans to prioritize housing. The prime minister appointed one of the stronger communicators and a rising star on the Liberal bench, Sean Fraser, to take on housing and infrastructure as one, amalgamated file.

“The prime minister said something to the effect of, ‘I’ve got a big job for you to do,'” Fraser said in an interview.

Fraser said he hopes to help restore a housing market closer to the one he grew up with in small-town Nova Scotia: one where having a job was enough to buy a home.

“It might take a bit of time for us to solve the housing challenges that are before us,” he said. “But man, is it a challenge we’re solving.”

That challenge includes overcoming jurisdictional issues. Many of the policy levers that could help spur more housing development are at the provincial and municipal levels of government.

Urban planning, zoning laws and red tape are the purview of local governments, which have decision-making powers that can help or hinder housing development.

Ben Dachis, associate vice-president of public affairs at the C.D. Howe Institute, says the predicament the Liberals find themselves in speaks to the “insidious nature of consistent federal overreach.”

“The cautionary tale is that the federal government needs to stick with jurisdiction,” Dachis said.

But housing expert Carolyn Whitzman has a different take. The University of Ottawa adjunct professor says the federal government can’t turn its back on Canadians in the middle a crisis.

“The federal government: it’s where the buck stops,” Whitzman said.

“If housing and climate change are the crises that they’re certainly treated (as), the federal government is going to have to put on its big kid pants and actually deal with it.”

Source: Long way home: Blamed for affordability crisis, Liberals look to pivot on housing

Related article: Canada ‘absolutely’ can’t build more houses without more immigrants, minister says

Canada’s housing crisis “absolutely cannot” be solved without the aid of new immigrants who bring their skills here, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told reporters on Friday

“The federal government is making housing more affordable and bringing in the skilled workers required to build more homes,” Miller said in Montreal.

“Without those skilled workers coming from outside Canada, we absolutely cannot build the homes and meet the demand that exists currently today.”

Miller was asked by reporters if he was considering slashing Canada’s immigration targets, which are currently at historic highs, in response to a recent Bank of Canada report that new immigrants are adding to housing demand.

The minister said he was not.

“People coming to this country are resourceful. When they bring capital, they are able to acquire houses,” he said.

“If people are asking us to slash, what does that mean? Does that mean slashing the skilled workers that we need to actually build those houses? Slash family reunification, which can be devastating for the mental health and well-being of the families that are already here?”

Canada aims to welcome 451,000 new immigrants in 2024.

By 2025, the number is expected to go up to 500,000 new immigrants in one year.

Miller said around 60 per cent of new immigrants to Canada are economic migrants, many of whom are the kind of skilled workers needed to build more housing. Family reunification visas account for around 20 per cent of those migrating. The rest, he said, are refugees and asylum seekers.

“We have a humanitarian duty towards people that are fleeing war and persecution,” Miller said.

Last week, a spokesperson from Miller’s office told Global News that fulfilling Canada’s labour shortages is one of his key priorities, and a key goal of the government’s immigration targets.

“Strategies like Express Entry, and the historic Immigration Levels Plan, which is largely made up of economic migrants, are a great asset to our nation as they will directly help combat the ongoing labour shortage. This is especially true when it comes to the housing sector,” Bahoz Dara Aziz, press secretary to the immigration minister, told Global News.

“With provinces like Ontario needing 100,000 workers to meet their housing demands, it is clear that immigration will play a strong role in creating more homes for Canadians.”

The federal government increased its immigration targets in November 2022, and Miller has suggested those targets may need to keep rising.

The construction industry is short tens of thousands of workers, and experts say a coming wave of retirements could make the problem worse.

Meanwhile, Canada is millions of homes behind what’s needed to reach housing affordability this decade.

The job vacancy rate in construction is at a record high with around 80,000 vacancies in the industry,  CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal said in a recent note.

Those vacancies, which push up building costs and impede productivity, come at a time when the residential construction industry is under pressure to meet the demands of a growing population.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. forecasts a need for 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than the country is currently on track to build.

The number of new homes built, however, has been in decline, from just over 271,000 in 2021 to 260,000 in 2022. And in May this year, the annual pace of housing starts dropped 23 per cent month over month, leading the CMHC’s chief economist to predict that just 210,000 to 220,000 new homes will be built by the end of the year.

Last week, the federal government launched a separate stream of entry for newcomers with work experience in skilled trades.

“It’s absolutely critical to address the shortage of skilled trades workers in our country, and part of the solution is helping the construction sector find and maintain the workers it needs,” Miller said in a statement, making his first major announcement as Canada’s new immigration minister.

“This round of category-based selection recognizes these skilled trades workers as essential, and I look forward to welcoming more of these talented individuals to Canada.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said that by welcoming people in skilled trades such as carpentry, plumbing and welding, Canada can help its construction sector attract skilled workers.

But there remain questions about how the government can ensure those bringing the skill set to work in construction actually end up working in the sector and are able to navigate the certifications processes across the country.

Source: Canada ‘absolutely’ can’t build more houses without more immigrants, minister says

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