A new condo site under construction in Montreal, June 9. Rapid population growth has not been just an increase in permanent immigrants. The number of temporary residents has ballooned. In 2015, there were 352,325 international students. In 2021, the number was 617,250. The following year, 2022, it was 807,260. But student residences and apartments for rent have not kept pace.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
You have to agree with Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s assertion that the answer to Canada’s housing crisis isn’t new political branding. Still, it would be nice if the federal government had a plan.
The good news is there are signs that the Liberal government is putting together what could be the rudiments of a plan. But it needs an actual plan. And it needs to come to grips with the screaming urgency.
So perhaps the best exercise for the Liberal cabinet retreat taking place in Charlottetown this week would be having all ministers dip their heads in vats of ice water before and after their briefings about the housing crisis. You know, so everyone there feels the kind of shocking wake-up call that should be motivating them now.
It sounded promising when Mr. Fraser, freshly appointed as Housing Minister on July 26, outlined some of the government’s thinking about increasing the housing supply – and even said he thinks the government is thinking of capping the rapidly increasing number of international students coming to Canada. But then he said a decision on that is “premature” right now.
The problem is that Mr. Fraser is mixing up the concepts of “premature” and “overdue.”
The feds have missed a window to cap – and reduce – those numbers for this school year.
Let’s note here that Mr. Fraser is quite right when he says that we should be careful not to “somehow blame immigrants for the housing challenges that have been several decades in the works in Canada.”
That’s absolutely true. We should blame governments. They failed to plan.
Immigration itself isn’t the cause of the problem: It is good for Canada, and international students can be an especially good thing. But successive governments, federal and provincial, encouraged a boom in numbers, especially international student numbers, without planning policies to encourage housing for them.
One of the people briefing the Liberal cabinet Tuesday was economist Mike Moffatt, who has been doing the academic equivalent of waving his arms trying to get governments to pay attention to the problem. “We are in a crisis and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now,” he wrote in The Hub this week.
Mr. Moffatt’s diagnosis boils down to the fact that the population grew quickly in recent years, especially in Ontario, but the pace of home-building was a lot slower. Few places for a lot more people means house prices and now apartment rents skyrocketed.
The rapid population growth went a little under the radar because it was not just an increase in permanent immigrants. The number of temporary residents has ballooned. In 2015, there were 352,325 international students. In 2021, the number was 617,250. The following year, 2022, it was 807,260. But there weren’t a lot more student residences and apartments for rent.
Now the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates Canada needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to make housing affordable again. So it’s good the Liberals are talking about policies to encourage more home-building. Mr. Fraser unironically noted that the Liberals campaigned on some of them in the past two elections. In fact, they promised to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing back in 2015. It’s time to step it up.
It’s true successive federal governments are to blame. Municipal administrations and provincial governments are to blame for a lot of it, too. All for a lack of planning.
Now the plan is urgent, and it will have to include short-term measures like cutting back the number of international students. A government that doesn’t craft such a plan will create more poverty and damage many Canadians’ standard of living. And despite Mr. Fraser’s words, it is not at all clear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is shaking off the complacency.
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he hadn’t heard talk of the idea of capping the number of international students and hasn’t spoken to premiers about it.
Mr. Trudeau, who was criticized three weeks ago for saying housing is not a primary federal responsibility, provided a nonsensical explanation for that on Monday when he said his point was that his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, had “completely walked away from housing.”
And sure, we have to expect politicians will make points about politics. But this is a bigger issue now, and it’s time to pull together a plan.