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It's not just Toronto and Vancouver — Canada's housing bubble has gone national – CBC.ca

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When people picture red-hot real estate markets, they most likely think of soaring prices for the condos dotting Vancouver’s skyline. They might also conjure up the bidding wars for massive mega-mansions in and around Toronto. 

But they’re likely not thinking about properties Barb Armstrong’s quiet bungalow in picturesque Perth Ont., about an hour southwest of Ottawa.

Even so, Armstrong’s four bedroom, three-bath home was swept up into a bidding war worthy of any big city this month. It sold for $150,000 over her asking price of $529,900 —and the offer didn’t come with any conditions.

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“It was quite a shock to see that that amount of money was coming our way for sure,” she said. “It was over our expectation and we were really blown away.”

Armstrong and her husband were lukewarm on selling at first, but a realtor friend explained how hot the local real estate market had become, with families from Ottawa and even as far away as Toronto drawn to Perth by its comparative affordability and bucolic lifestyle.

“We thought, ‘Well, jeepers, maybe we should go for it now,” Armstrong said. The couple listed their home in mid March. Thirty-five viewings later, they had 11 offers on the table. She says she feels like they won the lottery.

WATCH | Barb Armstrong describes the frenzy of offer night:

Barb Armstrong describes what it was like to sell her home in Perth, Ontario, recently, a frenzied process that ended up with here selling her home for $150,000 more than she was anticipating getting. 0:52

Half a country away, on Vancouver Island, Lars Reese-Hansen isn’t surprised to hear about buyers taking their best shot at getting into the market, however they can. He sold his 60s-era single family home in the Comox Valley last fall, and planned to buy elsewhere in B.C. this spring. 

He’s looking to downsize into something newer with less maintenance as he heads into retirement but he can’t find anything that fits the bill, even though he’s casting a wide net and is willing to compromise.

“Most of the places that I requested to view are sold before I actually get a foot out the door,” he said.

Reese-Hansen recently lined up four newly listed homes to see that he thought had potential. Just as he hopped in the car to drive down the highway to see them, his realtor called to say they were already gone.

Record high prices

Canada’s housing market is indeed flush with cash at the moment, with the national average selling price hitting an all-time high of $678,091 in February. That’s up more than 25 per cent from the same month last year, pre-pandemic.

Against all odds, the pandemic seems to have prompted a flurry of buying by Canadians spending more time at home than ever before.

While there’s a perception that high prices are mostly a problem in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, sales are booming just about everywhere, with bully offers becoming the norm.

Paul Martin, president of the Rideau St Lawrence Real Estate Board that covers Perth, Ont., where the Armstrongs live, says “the market just took off,” last year.

“We’ve seen our property prices jump close to 50 per cent in the area,” he said.

About a third of the new buyers are from Toronto, he says, despite the region being about three hours from the city. About half are from Ottawa, which is closer but still up to an hour away.

Realtor Paul Martin, who has been selling homes in the corridor between Toronto and Ottawa for more than 30 years, says he’s never seen anything like what’s happening right now. (Brian Morris/CBC)

One of the area’s major draws is extra space as more people ponder permanently working from home.

Underpinning the frenzy are record low interest rates, which are lower than they’ve ever been, built on the back of Canada’s central bank slashing its lending rate to practically zero to stimulate the economy out of COVID-19.

Pandemic exacerbated pre-existing problems

Economist Mike Moffatt, senior director at the Smart Prosperity Institute, an Ottawa-based think-tank, says low mortgage rates are key to what’s happening, but they’re not the only factor.

If it were just cheap lending, markets should be heating up fairly evenly across the country. But they’re not. Some smaller towns an hour or more outside the orbit of large urban centres are faring better in real estate than some big cities.

Though he lives in Ottawa, Moffatt hails from southwestern Ontario and he says affordability issues were a problem there even before the pandemic because of supply and demand issues. The area’s population was increasing largely from new immigrants and foreign students, and now pandemic-era low rates have poured gasoline on those fires.

“Cottage country places in southwestern Ontario — Woodstock, Ingersoll, Tillsonburg — those are the places seeing the big price increases,” he said.

The numbers back that up. According to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association, prices in Owen Sound are up by 29 per cent in the year up to February 2021. They’re up 39 per cent in Tillsonburg, by 36 per cent in Woodstock, and by 26 per cent in Guelph. All those markets have fared better than the Greater Toronto Area, where CREA’s House Price Index has risen by about 14 per cent in the same time frame.

“It’s fuelled by that the coupling of white-collar professionals who have a lot of money right now and globally low interest rates.” 

WATCH | Mike Moffatt explains why a hot housing market is bad for the economy:

Economist Mike Moffatt says high house prices are great for existing owners, but could be bad news for Canada’s economy overall if new buyers are priced out. 0:26

Buyers in small towns are finding themselves priced out of their own markets because local salaries can’t compete with the buying power of out-of-towners.

“We’re going to have a lot of both political and economic problems if we price an entire generation of young families from ever owning a home,” Moffatt said.

Back in B.C., the frenzy is so great that some people are resorting to buying without ever setting foot in their new homes. That’s what happened to Ean Jackson and his wife Sibylle Tinsel. They recently sold their home in Vancouver and were looking to downsize somewhere farther afield.

The couple settled on the tiny community of Powell River, B.C., about 100 kilometres up the coast. They have friends in the area so it was always a long-term plan, but their home sale sped up their timeline.

There were few houses available when they started looking, and what was there was hard to see given pandemic restrictions. “We couldn’t get up there in time to even see the place,” Jackson said in an interview.

So they did what millions of Canadians did while shopping for consumer goods this year — they shopped online and hoped for the best.

Vancouverites Ean Jackson and Sibylle Tinsel recently sold their home and hoped to downsize to a smaller town, but were surprised by the lack of inventory and prices in a hot market. (Mike Zimmer/CBC)

Their realtor was able to give them a walkthrough of the interior and exterior via video, and they liked what they saw enough to put down an offer.

Though they are excited for this new chapter, it “all feels very awkward,” Jackson said.

“It feels really strange. And we look at each other at dinner time just about every night and say, ‘Did we do the right thing? … Did we get ripped off? Or is this going to work out?”

Ultimately Jackson says he knows the answer to that last question is yes because they love what the area has to offer, but he does feel for new young families trying to buy in at current levels.

“You save up for three or four years, you get the price that you think, and then the house just got twice as expensive,” he said.

“I can’t see this lasting, though. It’s got to end sometime.”

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Child care in Canada: Trudeau unveils new help for providers – CTV News

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The federal government is launching a new loan program to help child-care providers in Canada expand their spaces, and will be extending further student loan forgiveness and training options for early childhood educators, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.

The prime minister unveiled a trio of child-care-centric commitments that will be included in the upcoming federal budget, with the aim of opening up more $10-a-day child-care spaces across the country, as the Liberals continue to work towards creating 250,000 new spaces by March 2026.

Specifically, the Liberals are vowing to offer $1 billion in low-cost loans and $60 million in non-repayable grants to public and not-for-profit child-care providers, so they can build or renovate their care centres. 

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This funding will be administered through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMCH), which Trudeau called “a common sense approach that will help child care be developed alongside housing.”

An additional $48 million is being earmarked for the next four years to extend student loan forgiveness — similar to the program offered to rural doctors and nurses — to early childhood educators, in an effort to incentivize more teachers to work in smaller communities. 

The federal government is also promising $10 million over the next two years to train more early childhood educators.

The prime minister, speaking in Surrey, B.C., alongside the minister currently leading the file, Jenna Sudds, touted the bilateral child-care agreements in effect across the country for seeing thousands of children placed in affordable spaces.

However, in recent months Canadian parents and care providers have sounded alarms about increasingly long daycare waitlists. And, operators in some provinces have threatened to withdraw from the lower-cost program because they’re struggling to make ends meet. 

Trudeau said while the government has funded 100,000 spaces so far and is aware of the challenges in rolling out this new national program, not enough families have access and not all provinces are moving as fast as they should. 

“I want to take a moment to talk to young moms, many of you millennials. You’ve grown up with so many pressures in this economy, the 2008 recession, COVID, climate change … and we want to make sure that everyone — especially moms raising kids — has the best chance to succeed and thrive,” Trudeau said.

“As Canada grows, as families grow, we want to make sure more kids can access high-quality child care… That’s what fairness for every generation is all about.”

The prime minister also got political, accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of opposing the program, despite the Official Opposition voting in support of a recently passed Liberal piece of legislation meant to enshrine in law a commitment to the Canada-wide early learning and child-care system, and the long-term funding needed to maintain it. 

Reacting to the news, NDP MP and critic for children, families, and social development Leah Gazan said the announcement was a “direct result of advocacy” by her party, care workers, unions, and women’s organizations.

She also pointed the finger at the Conservatives, accusing them of trying to stall the program and push for a “for-profit private system that parents can’t afford.” 

Liberal pre-budget strategy

Similar to how Wednesday’s rollout of renter-fairness-focused pre-budget news went, cabinet ministers are making echo announcements of the new child-care affordability measures across the country Thursday afternoon. 

This is all part of a new communications strategy the Liberals are employing in the lead up to the release of the April 16 federal budget.

Practically every day between now and when Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland releases the massive economic document, the Liberals are expected to tease out bits and pieces of the budget.

In an effort to stretch out their ability to market the measures within it, Trudeau as well as members of his cabinet will unveil new initiatives over the next two weeks, to the point that the vast majority of the budget will be public prior to budget day.

Traditionally, governments have held budget news — save for some pre-tabling leaks — for the day the document is tabled in the House of Commons post-daylong reporter and stakeholder lockup.

Kicking off this strategy on Wednesday, Trudeau issued a video across social media platforms indicating the overall theme for the 2024 budget will be “generational fairness,” a message meant to speak to millennials and Generation Z.

“When I first decided to run for office, one of my biggest motivations was working to create a Canada that young people saw themselves… As prime minister, I’ve never lost sight of that,” Trudeau said in the clip.

“You as a young Canadian are the heartbeat of our economy. You power our growth and you deserve an economy that gives you a fair shot at success. But, this moment we’re all living in is throwing big challenges your way… So we’re going to roll up our sleeves and work like hell. And we’re going to tell you about what we’re doing to fix it, over the next two weeks.”

While Trudeau’s 2015 election victory was credited in part to a historic surge in young people turning up at the polls, Poilievre has been chipping away at that Liberal voting bloc of those aged 43 and under, seeking to appeal to their current struggles to get ahead with his “powerful paycheques” and housing affordability arguments.

In November 2023, Trudeau tapped Max Valiquette, a marketing guru with self-described expertise in understanding younger generations, as his new executive director of communications.

“We’re witnessing a different communication strategy from the government. They’re implementing something they’ve not tried before. We’re not going to have a budget day on April 16. We’re going to have budget days between now and April 16,” said political commentator Scott Reid in an interview on CTV News Channel.

“Frankly, this government knows that it needs to break through, it knows that it needs to connect with Canadians… Is it going to turn around the polls overnight? No. Might they get a little bit more of a hearing than they otherwise would have been? Probably.” 

With files from CTV News’ Vassy Kapelos and Annie Bergeron-Oliver

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Ontario releases 2023 Sunshine List, top earner made $1.9M – CBC.ca

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Five employees at Ontario Power Generation are in the top 10 earners on the province’s so-called sunshine list for 2023, with the province’s highest salary nearing $2 million.

The annual sunshine list documents public sector employees with salaries over $100,000. In this year’s edition, there are 300,570 names, more than 30,000 higher than last year.

Kenneth Hartwick, CEO of the electricity Crown corporation, is in the top spot again with a salary of $1.93 million.

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Two other executives at the organization — chief strategy officer Dominique Miniere and chief projects officer Michael Martelli — made nearly $1.2 million and nearly $1 million, respectively.

You can find a list of the top 100 earners below.

The presidents and CEOs of the Hospital for Sick Children and the University Health Network are also in the top 10, earning around $850,000 each. So is Phil Verster, who is president and CEO of the provincial transit agency, Metrolinx, with a $838,097 salary.

Caroline Mulroney, president of the Treasury Board, highlighted other high growth areas in a release.

“The largest year-over-year increases were in the hospitals, municipalities and services, and post-secondary sectors, which together represented approximately 80 per cent of the growth of the list,” she said.

The list shows 17 professors or associate professors at the University of Toronto had earnings of $500,000 or more.

A statement from a University of Toronto spokesperson said the school competes with top universities and private-sector employers around the world for faculty members.

“This occasionally results in salaries above the usual range for a small number of faculty members.”

An Ontario Power Generation building.
Five employees at Ontario Power Generation are among the top 10 spots of the annual sunshine list for 2023. (Cole Burston/The Canadian Press)

Premier Doug Ford earned $208,974 last year. His chief of staff, Patrick Sackville, earned $324,675.

Matthew Anderson, CEO of Ontario Health, a provincial agency the Ford government created in 2019, earned $821,000. Meanwhile the public servant leading the Ministry of Health, deputy minister Catherine Zahn, earned $477,360, and Health Minister Sylvia Jones, $165,851.

There are more than 25,000 registered nurses on the list, including seven who earned more than $300,000 last year.

Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas, who was appointed to the top post in the province’s judiciary last May, earned $388,960.

The police chiefs of Thunder Bay, Daniel Taddeo, ($376,428) and Hamilton, Francis Bergen, ($374,492) were paid more last year than OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique ($373,472). Taddeo retired in April 2023. 

Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw, who took over the post in late 2022, earned $353,411. 

Organizations that receive provincial government funding are also required to disclose salaries for the sunshine list, so it includes top earners at some registered charities.

The chief executive of the True Patriot Love Foundation, Nicholas Booth, earned $421,149. The foundation funds support programs for veterans and military families. 

The president and CEO of the Canadian Red Cross Society, Conrad Sauve, earned $412,970, while the YMCA of Greater Toronto’s chief executive, Medhat Mahdy, earned $394,057.

Salaries of other key Ontario public figures include:

  • $826,539 for Ontario Pension Board CEO Mark Fuller.
  • $709,581 for Ontario Lottery and Gaming Association president & CEO Alfred Hannay.
  • $601,376 for Registered Nurses Association of Ontario CEO Doris Grinspun.
  • $596,392 for Dean of Ivey Business School, Western University, Sharon Hodgson.
  • $563,291 for LCBO president & CEO George Soleas.
  • $546,053 for Dean of the Faculty of Health Science, Queen’s University, Jane Philpott.
  • $533,112 for Royal Ontario Museum president & CEO Joshua Basseches.
  • $486,192 for University of Toronto president Meric Gertler.
  • $464,148 for Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore.
  • $455,091 for Chief Coroner Dr. Dirk Huyer.
  • $404,003 Art Gallery of Ontario director and CEO Stephan Jost.
  • $395,974 for former auditor general Bonnie Lysyk.

Adjusting sunshine list threshold

The sunshine list has been around for almost 30 years, always set at six figures and up. 

At Queen’s Park on Thursday, some members of provincial Parliament faced questions on whether the $100,000 starting point should be adjusted.

Green Party of Ontario Leader Mike Schreiner said it should be pegged to the rate of inflation, but others disagreed.

“I think that people think that $100,000 is still a lot of money, especially in an affordability crisis,” said NDP MPP Catherine Fife, who’s also the finance critic.

Government House Leader Paul Calandra said the government has no plans at this time to change the threshold on the sunshine list.

“I think it’s an important document that serves the people well in highlighting the salaries of our public employees.”

The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, enacted by former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris in 1996, compels organizations that receive public funding from the province to report the names, positions and pay of people who make more than $100,000.

The interactive chart below shows the top 100 earners on the list, based on both salary and benefits.

Search the complete Sunshine List for yourself here.

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1 dead, 2 critically injured after car crash in Montreal

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Montreal

Three people are in hospital with critical injuries after their vehicle crashed into a tree. Police believe they might be connected to two drive-by shootings that took place early Thursday morning.

2 drive-by shootings also took place overnight

an SPVM car near a taped-off crime scene
Montreal police are investigating a car crash possibly linked to two drive-by shootings. (Mathieu Wagner/Radio-Canada)

Urgences-santé say one person died and two others were critically injured after their vehicle hit a tree in the Rosemont neighbourhood.

Montreal police believe the crash may be linked to two drive-by shootings early Thursday morning.

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The first happened around 5 a.m. on Pie-IX Boulevard. Police say a car was shot at repeatedly and the driver, a 41-year-old man, was injured in the upper body. He was transported to hospital, but his life is not in danger, say police.

Shortly afterward, shots were reported in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, near the intersection of Saint-Joseph Boulevard and Henri-Julien Avenue. No one was injured.

Police say they are investigating to determine if there is a connection between the collision and the shootings. Montreal police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant says it’s possible those in the vehicle were involved in the shootings.

The province’s independent police watchdog is now involved.

with files from Chloë Ranaldi

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