The Globe is going with a pretty click-bait-y title. But, I’ve seen others call for coordinating federal immigration numbers with infrastructure planning by municipalities and provinces. It looks like National Bank is on the same wavelength.
“The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing supply and demand. According to Statistics Canada, the working-age population surged 238,000 in Q2. That was the largest quarterly increase on record and 6.8 standard deviations from the historical norm of 82,000 per quarter. Unfortunately, Canadian homebuilders can’t keep up with this influx. Housing starts for Q2 2023 stood at 62,000 units (or 247,000 annualized). At just 0.26, the ratio of housing starts to working-age population growth fell to a new and stands at less than half its historical average of 0.61 (the ratio is normally below 1 to account for the fact that there is more than one person per household). To meet demand, builders would need to break ground on 144,000 units per quarter (or 576K annualized), double the best performance ever!
At an absolute bare minimum, post-secondary institutions should show students have decent housing before visas are granted.
Last year was the first outlier year in decades. If ignore last year our population growth rate (births & immigration) has been pretty flat for decades.
This isn’t a new problem and it’s not now being caused by immigration. Provinces have been massively under investing in infrastructure for decades and the federal government can’t force them to start projects.
The current situation is essentially exactly what Canadian conservatives want, they control most of the provincial governments, and continue to cut spending on infrastructure & social programs. Then conservative media is blaming the failures on the federal government even though the federal government can only actually help if the provinces asked for it, and they have no reason to.
It’s incredible how effective the conservative owned media is at spinning a story.