We don’t have too many immigrants, we have too many houses being wasted as “InVeStMeNtS” and too many rich fucks not paying taxes choking out the economy and social services.
Ah yes. Where you say “no immigrants” and people go “you’re racist” and the fact is that it’s as it was said: too many immigrants. Nothing racist about it. We can’t sustain this size of population.
From a housing perspective, yeah, there are currently too many. That’s a policy failure not related to immigration itself though. The housing problem could be easily solved and then this level of immigration would make sense.
Even assuming infinite money, Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s. This means we have roughly the same number of skilled and experienced carpenters, roofers, plumbers, etc that work in new builds.
This means that if tomorrow we passed legislation eliminating every single bureaucratic red tape AND convinced developers to build everywhere they have land to do so, we would take years to catch up with the point where our houses:population ratio is back among the rest of the western world.
In addition, feds should be building housing to house every single person, unconditionally. On the topic of homelessness it’s the only way to reintegrate folks into society. Even if, say, 80% do nothing but shoot up in their free housing, it’s still cheaper for taxpayers when you consider the cost of taking care of folks on the street and the problems that causes. And just by building housing stock you’re making good entry level jobs that don’t require university education.
And this may be controversial, but non-Canadians should pay a higher mortgage rate. Finland does this and they have probably the best housing situation on the planet. They are actually the ones who pioneered the idea of unconditionally housing everyone, IIRC.
Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s.
Yes but we also weren’t taking 1 million newcomers per year in the 90s. If you want these immigration numbers you need to have a plan to make it work.
I can agree it would help, but we’re at an all time low for housing to population. A Fraser institute study, so there’s a definite conservative bias to their presentation and info, but it shows how long this has been coming.
In theory, we should be okay - Fraser report shows were at 424 housing units per capita, and most households are an average of 2.4 people, which means in theory wevs got enough housing.
But comparison to other countries show that, in general, we need about 10% more houses (closer to the 471 G7 average) in order to feel more balanced. Most other European countries have more
I agree with all your proposals, but they all require land/housing already built OR the people available to build them, and THAT would be the real bottleneck
Near me there are TONS of empty places, the developing is not the issue. Nobody can afford them. Hell I don’t even own and the place next to me sat empty for 3 months because it was going at an absurd rent for the size.
I agree that’s part of the problem, but see my comment below. Stats show we have an all time low for housing:people compared to our past and compared to most other western countries.
To fix it, for sure we need scaling property tax rates and higher empty/vacant housing taxes, but my point is that even if we forcibly removed 2nd or 3rd houses from every single person/corporation, as well as taking any empty/vacant housing, and distributed it, we still wouldn’t have enough to be on par with our historical rates OR other western nations
Just 10 per cent of Canadians who think there is too much immigration say their concern is that Canadians will become “a minority” in their own country. Only eight per cent say new immigrants don’t adhere to Canadian values and just four per cent believe that immigration is bringing criminals to the country. Eighteen per cent worry that immigrants are taking jobs from Canadians.
Most Canadians are not anti immigrants, they are anti housing crisis and anti healthcare strain. The former is the results of capitalist decision making/lobbying, latter is the results of cuts in government budget for healthcare (a favorite policy of libertarian/conservative parties) and extreme bureaucracy and aversion to innovative healthcare management designed for efficiency (this is a problem in many parts of the world, and we all know Canadian governments, provincial or federal, are not known for their efficiency).
The lack of technocrats in government is a massive issue. Holland (fed) and Dubé (QC) both worked in financial services before going into politics. Dix (BC) worked as a journalist, and it’s unclear what Jones (ON) was doing before politics. Why aren’t doctors, nurses, healthcare management experts (i.e., people who actually ran hospitals and worked with doctors) getting elected and taking those positions?
Not like it worked well with Barette or Couillard. The reality is that the people that want the position shouldn’t have it, and the people that don’t want the position should have it.
Power attract the people that shouldn’t be in power. Simple as that.
Not all doctors make good politicians (for example, I doubt that Dr oz would be a good choice as a secretary). But good health ministers are more likely to come from a healthcare background, although you may have really good non-experts doing a ministers job.
I was a bit too sarcastic in my OP. I agree with you that someone with a background in what they administer is a boon.
But my point still stands. In almost all cases, the people vying for power positions are the wrong people for the job.
So the right person, someone that would be less influenced by power, needs to get chewed by their party and raise through the ranks. And if after all this ordeal, they still have their voice left in the party, then they make great minister.
Yeah, but if we said “Half of Canadians are sick of late-stage capitalism’s worst feature” it wouldn’t go down as well with the people who buy and sell advertising.
It has nothing to do with capitalism. The housing crisis is created by ignorant or lazy stakeholders looking at short term gains instead of long term prosperity.
Costco plays the same capitalist game as Loblaws. Why is it that the former is so appreciated while the latter is hated by many?
We can look at housing the same way. Why isn’t anyone providing high quality housing for a low price, focusing on accessibility and efficient use of funds instead of building expensive luxury apartments. Sure that’d drive down prices for existing homeowners, but the revenue would be much higher since they can now sell to a much broader group that can afford to take a smaller mortgage. They could build in low density area (e.g. Milton is 1/10th of Toronto), and bet on the growth that would go with creating self-contained areas easily accessible to Toronto via the Go train.
Instead, we get the Weston’s of developers: price gouging, expensive developments, low appeal to newcomers/younger folks.
It’s pretty hard to make it up in volume with housing. So it behooves builders to build houses that are as profitable per man-hour as possible. The solution that worked before was government housing. It increases the supply, which lowers prices. It also can put in government-managed caps for price, which puts downward pressure on the prices charged by private homebuilders. This in turn puts pressure to not build as many luxury homes, because the market for them becomes people who want luxury homes and not people who want homes and are willing to buy a luxury home to do so. And that causes an increase in capacity to build less luxurious homes because the house you can sell now is generally more valuable than the house you can sell 3 or 6 months from now.
This isn’t an easy solution. It took us 40 years to get into this mess, and it’s going to take a good while to get out of it.
Edit: also, capitalism tends to put pressure towards profits now more than more profits later, and generally gives no incentive for making the world a better place. Capitalism directs you to charge as much as the market will bear, and the smaller the supply of new homes, the higher a price the market will bear. So this is absolutely a failure of capitalism, and it’s unlikely capitalism will fix it. Only a fool (or an altruistic, and capitalism paints both with the same brush) would go out of his way to devalue his own product. This doesn’t apply to Costco because, as I initially pointed out, making it up in volume is well within their capability.
You can drastically reduce man hour and material cost when you design houses with efficiency in mind though. It takes significantly less engineering to build a 4-floor building compared to a 40-floor skyscraper, which requires digging large holes, carefully installing a central structure, and the work becomes progressively slower when you are near the top. They are also a huge liability long term due to the complexity of the design, making its present value lower. In a real “free” market, all this would be priced in, but it’s likely that the industry is controlled by a small number of well funded groups with strong influence in politics (allowing them to get permits and contracts).
Well, this certainly explains why there are so many building below 4 storeys compared to taller ones, but since most people live in those smaller buildings, I’m not sure what that has to do with the discussion. Moreover, luxury and height don’t have any real correlation - there are any number of brutally utilitarian hi-rises as well as lavish single-storey homes. And yet, marble tiles aren’t much harder to install than Terra cotta, but will make the house fetch a disproportionately higher price on the market. Hence why granite countertops, for instance, are very popular in new homes and renos right now.
Simple and easy are two different words. “Start doing something you used to do almost half a century ago and wait 5 to 10 years, and multiple potential changes of government, for tangible results,” is pretty simple, but I wouldn’t say it’s easy. I’m also certain none of the pundits will say, “Look at all the money they spent, and we still have a housing crisis,” followed by, “Sure we fixed one housing crisis, but look at all the people who lost money on the purchase of their homes!”
All excellent points, and you’re right, I really meant “simple”, not “easy”.
My comment was really intended to highlight the narrowing of the solution space regarding housing. When houses became products and investments, we collectively decided the government had no place in building them aside from indirect nudges: zoning, various forms of incentives, etc.
Maybe it’s time we accept that the free market has simply failed and we need to look beyond neoliberal orthodoxy for solutions.
That’s not an easy shift! Not at all. But IMO it’s a necessary one.
As an aside, it’s not like this is new. “It’s a Wonderful Life” highlighted this exact problem. Their only mistake is they assumed a benevolent capitalist (George) would come along and fix the problem. But that ain’t how the real world works.
Yeah after all the multiculturalism propaganda of the last 40 years, your average Canadian is either brainwashed or unwilling to say enough is enough out loud.
Enjoy either never owning a home or hearing people bitch about they can’t now till forever, between the tight market and depressed wages and high taxes driving anyone with talent south. They imported the population of Saskatchewan in a little over one year. that’s not sustainable, that’s literal idiocy.
Because of multiculturslism though? Seeing people doing things their immigrant heritage passed down to them irritates you, they should be doing the things your immigrant heritage passed down to you instead?
Economics Explained recently did a video reviewing Canada’s immigration policies. Most advanced economies have low birthrates and make up for it with immigration. Accepting an immigrant is (economically) much better than someone having a baby. A baby needs decades before it contributes to the economy. An immigrant is often educated and skilled in a desired field and will immediately contribute to the economy.
However, Canada might be the first country to stumble upon some downsides to immigration. Mainly, student visas might not contribute as much to the economy as once thought, Canadian immigrants leave to work in the US at incredibly high rates, and Canadian metropolitan cities are some of the most expensive to live in worldwide and immigration is exacerbating the issue (the issue isn’t immigration though, it’s a focus on building single detached family homes over high density housing).
Just don’t scroll down into the comment section. It’s mostly just people being racist. I sincerely hope those comments aren’t coming from Canadians. (The channel also did a video on why African countries struggle economically a few days later and the comment section was even worse)
Unfortunately we have what is basically a MAGA crowd too. In fact, some of them are dumb enough to actually use the term and wear stuff with MAGA on it. Yes, technically Canada is part of America, but I bet if you ask them if it covers Mexico or South America, they would either have not even thought of that or be unsure how to answer, as it wasn’t part of the videos they watched that made them mad.
I don’t disagree with the general claims you made, and I’m not commenting on the veracity of the specific linked video, but in general EE isn’t a reputable source for economics knowledge or analysis. If that’s news, check Money & Macro’s critique on a couple of EEs videos. It’s a clown show.
40K nets around 32K in Ontario. 1 bedroom rent in Toronto’s suburbs is over 2K. That’s 24K per year. 24K / 40K = 60% of gross income to housing. 24K / 32K = 8K leftover after housing. 8K / 12 = $666 per month for all else. This number falls to $333 on minimum wage. Monthly transit pass is $156. If you live outside TO proper, you often pay for two passes. Mississauga’s is $131. A cheap phone bill with data that could somewhat replace Internet is $35. Internet connection is $50+. Have you gone to a grocery store recently? Better not have any unplanned expenses.
With that said everyone in my town has been incredibly kind and welcoming of me and my family. We are native english speakers from the US and white though so we can pass for local as long as we dont say “prah-cess” instead of “pro-cess” or talk about the weather in Freedom Degrees instead of Celsius.
If you aren’t willing to accept the commonly agreed-upon definitions, which have acknowledged limitations and uncertainties, then why are you bothering to distinguish differences of distribution based on those definitions in the first place?
It is incorrect to think of economic activity as a limited resource that must be defended against the rapacious outsider. Economic activity is not only consumed by people, but also created by them. Value is a product of human labour. In fact, Canada should be looking to increase it’s population rapidly so that the market that exists here can develop enough of a gravity of its own that we aren’t so reliant on the US market.
Outsourcing and automation have been far, far more impactful with regards to wages. NAFTA (now CUSMA) as well has hollowed out a lot of our economy so that the only real growth sectors are resource extraction which feeds the US market, and real estate. Protectionism is a bit of a dirty word however I think it’s necessary to develop industries where we can create value-added products out of our own natural resources, and ultimately build a much more varied and healthy economy. And we need far more people than we are birthing locally to do that.
The new economic activity created by human labor requires resources from nature. More metal for cars, more hair spray for hairdos. More concrete for buildings and more corn for cinemas. Economic activity can expand under conditions of no significant resource constraints. Unfortunately we’ve hit a resource constraint in the most in-demand locations - housing - due to all the known causes like zoning, etc. Regardless of the causes, it’s a constraint that increases the costs across the economy and swallows value, but it is felt the most by the lower parts of the wage scale. It may be wise to balance that while solving the resource constraint in order to avoid destabilization. People will vote against the precarity of their housing situation whether it negatively affects other priorities or not and for a good reason. Keeping the roof over ones head in a country with non-functional safety nets against homelessness is top priority. And so the results of the survey sounds pretty rational to me. I think this sentiment would go away if we build a shit ton of non-market plattenbautens in the major metropolitan areas.
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