With rising rents and house prices making it increasingly hard to find an affordable place to live, some are pointing the finger at Canada’s record-level immigration rates.
Immigration is not the only thing putting a strain on the housing market. High interest rates, increasing building costs and red tape at the municipal level that can slow down or halt home construction are all part of the picture.
But to tackle the pressure being created by immigration, some are now openly discussing forging a public policy link between how many people Canada takes in each year and the state of the country’s housing stock.
“It’s very simple math. If you have more families coming than you have housing for them, it’s going to inflate housing prices,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre told an audience in Winnipeg recently.
Poilievre has offered few details on how a government led by him would handle immigration, but he did say it would take three factors into consideration.
“We have to bring the [immigration] numbers in line with the number of houses that are built,” he said. “The growth in immigration should not exceed the amount of housing stock we add, the number of doctors we add and the available jobs.”
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CBC News has asked the Conservative leader for more details of his plan to tie immigration to housing, but has yet to receive a response.
The Liberals also have acknowledged that the number of people coming into the country is making the housing crisis worse.
But experts and economists say that targeting immigration broadly won’t bring the cost of housing down. What’s required, they say, is a more nuanced approach.
Canada’s immigration picture has changed dramatically in recent years.
In the fall of 2022, the Liberal government announced its plan to increase the annual permanent resident target from 405,000 in 2021 to 465,000 in 2022, before stabilizing at 500,000 in 2024 — almost double the 260,411 permanent residents who arrived in 2014.
But new permanent residents are only part of the immigration story.
LISTEN: Making immigration work for Canada
Canada may cap temporary residents over housing strain, immigration minister says
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Immigration Minister Marc Miller acknowledged that the influx of non-permanent residents has added to Canada’s housing crisis and says the federal government is considering a cap, something critics say could hurt the economy and create a stigma against immigrants.
Statistics Canada reported a total population increase of 1,158,705 permanent and non-permanent residents as of July 1, 2023, a 2.9 per cent increase over July 1, 2022 and the highest population growth rate recorded for a 12-month period since 1957.
The agency said 98 per cent of that increase was due to immigration, while the remainder was due to natural increase — the difference between births and deaths.
Statistics Canada said that by the end of 2023, there were 2,511,437 non-permanent residents in the country — a class that includes international students and temporary foreign workers — compared to 1,305,206 in the fall of 2021.
Houses vs. households
Many housing experts say tying the official immigration target — even at the 500,000 per year level — to the number of houses built each year won’t make housing more affordable.
David Hulchanski, a professor of housing and community development at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, said new arrivals are free to live where they want — which may not be where housing is available.
“Are we going to require all immigrants to stay in place?” he asked.
Hulchanski said it’s also important to distinguish between households and homes because “the 40 million people in Canada don’t live in 40 million houses.”
Canadian households, he said, have an average of about 2.45 people. In Germany it’s just 2.14 people per household, while in Ireland it’s 2.73 people per household.
By that measure, he said, 500,000 immigrants would need about 204,000 homes in Canada, 233,000 homes in Germany and just 183,000 in Ireland.
CMHC said housing starts were down seven per cent over 2022 in population centres of 10,000 or more, with only 223,513 new starts in 2023 compared to 240,590 in 2022. (Colin Butler/CBC News)
CMHC figures released this week show housing starts are down seven per cent since 2022. Hulchanski said that still amounted to 223,513 new starts last year, enough to accommodate incoming permanent residents.
Other pressures are driving down the number of housing starts: high interest rates making home ownership less affordable, the increased cost of building materials due to inflation and supply chain disruptions lingering from the COVID-19 pandemic, and zoning laws at the municipal level that make it harder to build homes.
Hulchanski said it’s important to remember that “homes are not households” and tying immigration to the availability of housing assumes all immigrants are the same, with the same housing needs.
People immigrating to Canada through the family reunification stream are, he said, more likely to live with family members than to seek separate housing. Some immigrants come as complete families and will live together, he said, while others may be wealthy and able to afford housing at inflated prices.
“The challenge with actually having a policy that links the number of immigrants to houses is that households don’t equal immigrants,” he said. “There’s a big disparity there.”
Immigrants vs. international students
Still, Hulchanski and other housing experts see a clear link between non-permanent immigration and housing availability.
The massive recent spike in non-permanent residents, they say, has had a substantial impact on housing affordability.
In 2011, for example, the number of international students in the country was just shy of 240,000. Late last year, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Canada was on track to host as many as 900,000 international students in 2023.
“We exponentially increased demand [for housing],” said Stephen Pomeroy, a professor and housing expert at McMaster University.
“Temporary foreign workers and students don’t come to buy homes. They rent. So we’ve had a massive demand impact on the rental part of the housing system.”
WATCH: Canada may cap temporary residents, immigration minister says
The Current19:29Making immigration work for Canada
The federal government is facing criticism that it has hiked immigration targets in recent years, without ensuring there’s enough housing and other essential services to support a bigger population. Matt Galloway talks to economists who say immigration is an important part of Canada’s future prosperity, but the policies around it need more nuanced thinking.
Pomeroy said that while the annual immigration target has been well managed, provincial and federal governments have lost control of non-permanent resident programs that bring in students and temporary workers.
Housing Minister Sean Fraser admitted as much this week in Halifax when he told reporters “the temporary foreign workers program, and in particular the international student program,” were making the housing crisis worse.
Fraser singled out colleges that do not grant degrees but rather provide diplomas to international students.
“There are some institutions in different parts of this country that, I have the sincerely held belief, have come to exist just to exploit the program for the personal financial gains of the people behind some of these schools, if we can call them that,” he said.
Pomeroy said cutting as many as 700,000 international students out of the system would reduce rental pressures in some areas without hurting the universities that have come to rely on the high tuition fees such students pay.
Irfhan Rawji is chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, which helps settle new immigrants in Canada. He told CBC Radio’s The Current this week that if Canada’s immigration intake is going to be tied to housing, targeting the right kind of immigration is critical.
“Do we need 800,000 students studying skills maybe this economy doesn’t need, living in houses that we don’t have? Of course that’s not sustainable, but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he said.
Rawji said he worries about Canada losing the economic value that immigrants entering through the permanent resident program deliver.
The right mix
“I think what’s happened probably since the 1990s is that different corporations in Canada, business lobby groups, have seen more immigration as just an unambiguously good thing,” said Christopher Worswick, economics chair at Carleton University.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce says building more homes is preferable to cutting immigration.
Pascal Chan, the chamber’s infrastructure and construction director, told CBC News the chamber sees immigration as good for business and wants to see it focus on attracting skilled workers.
“Looking at restricting demand versus looking at increasing the supply to get to the levels we need to be, I think that the focus should really be on increasing that supply as well,” he said.
Hulchanski said that to bring the cost of housing down, Canada has to help people at the lower end of the income scale.
“If you ask any housing researcher now, any place on earth, how do you house low income people? Well, the market can’t do it,” he said.
He said only four per cent of Canada’s housing stock is social housing — dwellings that are supported in whole or in part by government funding. Social housing accounts for 18 per cent of the United Kingdom’s housing stock and 17 per cent of housing in France.
While social housing makes up only three per cent of the housing stock in Germany, that country offers significant breaks to developers building social housing and props people up with financial incentives.
Hulchanski said that focusing on immigration as a cause, and promising to reduce it in order to bring housing costs down, is “just another way of avoiding the real discussion, that we need systemic change.”
“In this case, the solution would be saying we’re going to increase social housing from, say 4 per cent to 16 per cent of the mix, or 20 per cent of the mix,” he said.
MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick RCMP say two youths have been arrested after an emergency alert was issued Monday evening about someone carrying a gun in the province’s southeast.
Caledonia Region Mounties say they were first called out to Main Street in the community of Salisbury around 7 p.m. on reports of a shooting.
A 48-year-old man was found at the scene suffering from gunshot wounds and he was rushed to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police say in the interest of public safety, they issued an Alert Ready message at 8:15 p.m. for someone driving a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck and reportedly carrying a firearm with dangerous intent in the Salisbury and Moncton area.
Two youths were arrested without incident later in the evening in Salisbury, and the alert was cancelled just after midnight Tuesday.
Police are still looking for the silver pickup truck, covered in mud, with possible Nova Scotia licence plate HDC 958. They now confirm the truck was stolen from Central Blissville.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Golf Canada has set an impressive stretch goal of having 30 professional golfers at the highest levels of the sport by 2032.
The World Junior Girls Golf Championship is a huge part of that target.
Credit Valley Golf and Country Club will host the international tournament from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, with 24 teams representing 23 nations — Canada gets two squads — competing. Lindsay McGrath, a 17-year-old golfer from Oakville, Ont., said she’s excited to be representing Canada and continue to develop her game.
“I’m really grateful to be here,” said McGrath on Monday after a news conference in Credit Valley’s clubhouse in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s just such an awesome feeling being here and representing our country, wearing all the logos and being on Team Canada.
“I’ve always wanted to play in this tournament, so it’s really special to me.”
McGrath will be joined by Nobelle Park of Oakville, Ont., and Eileen Park of Red Deer, Alta., on Team Canada 2. All three earned their places through a qualifying tournament last month.
“I love my teammates so much,” said McGrath. “I know Nobelle and Eileen very well. I’m just so excited to be with them. We have such a great relationship.”
Shauna Liu of Maple, Ont., Calgary’s Aphrodite Deng and Clairey Lin make up Team Canada 2. Liu earned her exemption following her win at the 2024 Canadian Junior Girls Championship while Deng earned her exemption as being the low eligible Canadian on the world amateur golf ranking as of Aug. 7.
Deng was No. 175 at the time, she has since improved to No. 171 and is Canada’s lowest-ranked player.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” said Liu. “We don’t really get that many opportunities to play with people from across the world, so it’s really great to meet new people and play with them.
“It’s great to see maybe how they play and take parts from their game that we might also implement our own games.”
Golf Canada founded the World Junior Girls Golf Championship in 2014 to fill a void in women’s international competition and help grow its own homegrown talent. The hosts won for the first time last year when Vancouver’s Anna Huang, Toronto’s Vanessa Borovilos and Vancouver’s Vanessa Zhang won team gold and Huang earned individual silver.
Medallists who have gone on to win on the LPGA Tour include Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont., who was fourth in the individual competition at the inaugural tournament. She was on Canada’s bronze-medal team in 2014 with Selena Costabile of Thornhill, Ont., and Calgary’s Jaclyn Lee.
Other notable competitors who went on to become LPGA Tour winners include Angel Yin and Megan Khang of the United States, as well as Yuka Saso of the Philippines, Sweden’s Linn Grant and Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand.
“It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be on the LPGA Tour,” said Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, of how Canada’s golfers in the World Junior Girls Championship can be part of the organization’s goal to have 30 pros in the LPGA and PGA Tours by 2032.
“Events like this, like the She Plays Golf festival that we launched two years ago, and then the CPKC Women’s Open exemptions that we utilize to bring in our national team athletes and get the experience has been important in that pathway.”
The individual winner of the World Junior Girls Golf Championship will earn a berth in next year’s CPKC Women’s Open at nearby Mississaugua Golf and Country Club.
Both clubs, as well as former RBC Canadian Open host site Glen Abbey Golf Club, were devastated by heavy rains through June and July as the Greater Toronto Area had its wettest summer in recorded history.
Jason Hanna, the chief operating officer of Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, said that he has seen the Credit River flood so badly that it affected the course’s playability a handful of times over his nearly two decades with the club.
Staff and members alike came together to clean up the course after the flooding was over, with hundreds of people coming together to make the club playable again.
“You had to show up, bring your own rake, bring your own shovel, bring your own gloves, and then we’d take them down to the golf course, assign them to areas where they would work, and then we would do a big barbecue down at the halfway house,” said Hanna. “We got guys, like, 80 years old, putting in eight-hour days down there, working away.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEW YORK (AP) — Fenway Park has the Ted Williams seat. And now Citi Field has the Grimace seat.
The kid-friendly McDonald’s character made another appearance at the ballpark Monday, when the New York Mets unveiled a commemorative purple seat in section 302 to honor “his special connection to Mets fans.”
Wearing his pear-shaped purple costume and a baseball glove on backwards, Grimace threw out a funny-looking first pitch — as best he could with those furry fingers and short arms — before New York beat the Miami Marlins at Citi Field on June 12.
That victory began a seven-game winning streak, and Grimace the Mets’ good-luck charm soon went viral, taking on a life of its own online.
New York is 53-31 since June 12, the best record in the majors during that span. The Mets were tied with rival Atlanta for the last National League playoff spot as they opened their final homestand of the season Monday night against Washington.
The new Grimace seat in the second deck in right field — located in row 6, seat 12 to signify 6/12 on the calendar — was brought into the Shannon Forde press conference room Monday afternoon. The character posed next to the chair and with fans who strolled into the room.
The seat is available for purchase for each of the Mets’ remaining home games.
“It’s been great to see how our fanbase created the Grimace phenomenon following his first pitch in June and in the months since,” Mets senior vice president of partnerships Brenden Mallette said in a news release. “As we explored how to further capture the magic of this moment and celebrate our new celebrity fan, installing a commemorative seat ahead of fan appreciation weekend felt like the perfect way to give something back to the fans in a fun and unique way.”
Up in Boston, the famous Ted Williams seat is painted bright red among rows of green chairs deep in the right-field stands at Fenway Park to mark where a reported 502-foot homer hit by the Hall of Fame slugger landed in June 1946.
So, does this catapult Grimace into Splendid Splinter territory?
“I don’t know if we put him on the same level,” Mets executive vice president and chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg said with a grin.
“It’s just been a fun year, and at the same time, we’ve been playing great ball. Ever since the end of May, we have been crushing it,” he explained. “So I think that added to the mystique.”
