Buying a house may remain out of reach for many Canadians for the foreseeable future, with mortgage costs unlikely to fall enough to offset lofty home prices and weak spending power, economists and real estate agents say. 0 Even with expectations that Bank of Canada will keep cutting rates in the coming months, the issue of home affordability - which has strangled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers - is unlikely to fade before the next election.
The mandate for the Liberal minority government ends at the end of October 2025, but an election could come well before then, with the Conservative opposition spoiling to end Trudeau’s nine-year run at the top.
“You won’t get back to an affordable range for housing on a sustained basis for a decade,” Tony Stillo, director at forecasting and analysis group Oxford Economics, said last week at a conference.
You’d be amazed how many people don’t understand that causation. For example, most people I talk to IRL about this don’t know that most homeless drug users started using after they became homeless. Instead, they think the homeless became addicts first and spent their rent money on drugs. Once they’re made aware of that and the fact that a housing-first approach is actually less expensive than the costs of homelessness (shelters, law enforcement, etc.) almost everybody I’ve discussed this with agrees that ensuring everybody has housing is the best approach. Mind you, they will rarely agree that everybody’s house value needs to come down, but it’s a start.