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.
That urban sprawl mechanism getting nixed is one of the better things to occur. Since maintaining roads, electric and water lines, fire safety coverage and so on are government expenditures this densifing initiative they have going is actually pretty on point.
Problem is the government doesn’t want to upset the applecart for those who invested in the family home by cratering their portfolios so they are doing everything they can to mince around homeowners so the initiative to cool the market is the softest most delicate corrections they can manage. That sort of approach is gunna take a long time to work and is going to be vulnerable as hell to NIMBY counter initiatives. It’s good to see the government is getting more creative with time but until everyone recognizes that property investing was built on risks one signed on when you bought the sort of big actions needed aren’t going to serve up a fix unless the bubble bursts on it’s own.