Ottawa’s plan to grant 500,000 permanent residencies per year by 2025 gave new fuel to the argument that there is not enough housing for new immigrants. The impetus behind it varies, from genuine concern about out-of-control rents to anti-immigration sentiment. In either case, the argument relies on simplified supply and demand notions that give governments an excuse rather than a push.
For decades, governments failed to build transit at the speed required and fund operations at adequate levels. When governments did invest, instead of building the needed infrastructure, they engaged in costly public-private partnerships that delivered clumsy results — like that UP Express train which is poorly integrated with the TTC system.
Bombarded daily with the facile explanation that house prices and rents are going up because there is not enough housing, some people wonder whether immigrants will make things worse. Here, too, the real issue is government inaction. Meanwhile, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation began paying less attention to creating affordable housing, focusing instead on the other part of its mandate: ensuring the efficiency of the housing finance market. In practice, that meant increasing access to mortgages, which inflated housing prices without adding a single person to the country.
The CMHC ought to stop playing Monopoly and get its hands dirty, aiding non-market providers to deal with high interest rates and be competitive in acquisition processes.
Worry about canadians first maybe?
Cut immigration by 98%. Canada is dying.
This is a joke right?
Love to see the stats of how many homeless in Canadian are born here, and how many were born in mud huts somewhere else.
The housing shortage stacks the deck against the lower and middle class, immigrants or not. This whole race baiting program is designed to ignore the real segregation which is between the haves and have nots, skin colour has nothing to do with it