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.
I think it’s the result of treating immigrants as a resource.
For example, international students pay significantly more than domestic students, so the federal and provincial governments don’t have to finance post-secondary institutions properly. Meanwhile, post-secondary institutions get a much larger pool of students to draw from who pay so much more. It’s win/win for politicians and administrators: someone else funds post-secondary institutions.
But the politicians and the schools don’t have to worry about infrastructure for the students. We get situations like the one I linked to in the post: not enough housing and programs that don’t offer the academic quality the students were promised.
I guess it’s always been that way in Canada. But I thought we’d left that shit behind.
It just seems so obvious how unsustainable it is. I just feel like there has to be another angle I’m missing. Like he knows the vast majority of immigrants will end up in the GTA which will collapse under the pressure and make Doug look bad enough to give the Liberals a chance? I don’t know.