Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s video on Canada’s housing crisis under Trudeau gov’t goes viral

‘Housing hell: How we got here and how we get out’ has been viewed more than four million times.

A video by Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Pierre Poilievre exposing the country’s housing prices and supply crisis, which a taxpayer watchdog said is being fueled by high-interest rates from bad fiscal policy by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, has reached over 4 million views.

“Something new and strange has happened in Canada. Canada is sitting on probably one of the largest housing bubbles of all times, something we haven’t seen before,” Poilievre said in his 15-minute video titled Housing hell: How we got here and how we get out.

“An entire generation of youth now say they will never be able to afford a home. This is not normal for Canada.”

Housing hell: How we got here and how we get out. pic.twitter.com/vVLsXMVM35

— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) December 2, 2023

The video goes deep into Canada’s housing market and includes statistics on why it is in such a dire state. It currently has 4.2 million views on X (formerly Twitter) after it was released on December 2.

Poilievre documents in his video, using facts to back him up, that in the coming months and years “tens of thousands of Canadians could default on their mortgages” due to skyrocketing interest rates.

He noted how the “nightmare scenario” after “generations of affordable and stable Canadian home prices” means that 66% of a person’s average monthly income is to simply “make payments on the average single detached Canadian house.”

“Given that most of the remaining 34 percent of the family paycheck is taken out by taxes, there’s literally nothing left for food and recreation,” Poilievre noted.

Taxpayer watchdog says high house prices due to Trudeau’s out of ‘control’ government

Franco Terrazzano, federal director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), told LifeSiteNews that the reason house prices, along with everything else, are more expensive is due to Trudeau’s “out of control” governmental spending.

“Life is more expensive because the cost of government is out of control.”

Terrazzano noted that governmental fiscal policy is making home prices more expensive and thus out of reach for most. He said what needs to happen is a reduction in red tape.

“Taxes and onerous government regulations are making homes more expensive,” Terrazzano told LifeSiteNews.

“If governments want to make homes more affordable, they would cut taxes and the red tape that makes it harder and more expensive to build homes.”

Terrazzano highlighted a report from the C.D. Howe Institute that shows the cost of excessive government regulations on home building.

As for Poilievre, he observed how it now would take a staggering 25 years just to save enough money to make a downpayment for a simple home in Toronto.

He continued, noting how newlyweds now on average pay $1,000 per month to rent a “single room in a townhouse that they share with two other couples.”

He also raised the issue of how 35-year-olds “live in their parent’s basements” and “rents are so high in Toronto that students live in homeless shelters.”

When it comes to middle-class workers, Poilievre emphasized how “people like nurses and carpenters now live in their vehicles.”

While housing falls primarily under provincial and municipal jurisdiction, some areas, such as interest rates, are directly influenced by the federal government.

House prices have shot up in Canada due to short supply in the market, and speculative buying and interest rates have risen to highs not seen for decades. As it stands, Canada’s interest rate sits at 5%. At this same time in 2021, interest rates were 0.25%.

This past Wednesday, the Bank of Canada decided to keep rates at 5% but did not rule out future rate increases, as it “is still concerned about risks to the outlook for inflation and remains prepared to raise the policy rate further if needed.”

Interestingly, Trudeau put out a video the same day as Poilievre that he said was to address housing challenges. This video only has 264,000 views, however.

Curiously, Poilievre made no mention of Canada’s high immigration levels, which critics say has put a strain on an already tight supply.

Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, has been one of the only party leaders to call out high immigration levels and their effects on housing.

Trudeau’s ‘money printing’ pouring fuel on ‘inflationary fire’

According to Poilievre in his video, in the past one could save enough to buy a house by their mid-20s but said this “changed” about “eight years ago” when Trudeau came to power.

“When the government borrows and spends, it builds up the goods we buy and the interest we pay. The Trudeau government has doubled Canada’s debt, adding more debt than all prime ministers combined. Our finance minister has conceded that this deficit spending pours fuel on the inflationary fire,” Poilievre said.

He observed how excessive money printing through a banking scheme called “quantitative easing” has only benefited well-connected banking insiders and financial institutions that are awash with money.

“In recent years, the Trudeau government spending has exploded, and they’ve been borrowing more than lenders will lend. So, the Bank of Canada has started creating the cash. The money supply has therefore grown eight times faster than the economy over the last three years,” Poilievre said.

“More money bidding on fewer goods, including fewer houses, equals higher prices.”

Poilievre ended his video by stating that the “good news is housing costs were not like this before Justin Trudeau.”

“And they won’t be like this after he’s gone,” he added.

He said that the solution, besides a change in leadership, is for all levels of government to work together to cut red tape and taxes to encourage the construction of new homes.

Under Trudeau, mainly due to excessive COVID money printing, inflation has skyrocketed.

A recent report from September 5 by Statistics Canada shows food prices are rising faster than headline inflation at a rate of between 10% and 18% per year.

Earlier this year, the Bank of Canada acknowledged that Trudeau’s federal “climate change” programs, which have been deemed “extreme” by some provincial leaders, are indeed helping to fuel inflation.

Related Topics:#AnthonyMurdoch #CanadaHousingCrisis #HousingHell #JustinTrudeau #LifeSiteNews #PierrePoilievre

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What Drives Canada’s Immigration Policies?

Published on September 21, 2024

Todayville

News release from The Audit

By @davidclinton

Author of courses and books on data analytics, generative AI, cloud computing, and server virtualization

Government decisions have consequences. But they also have reasons.

Dearest readers: I would love to hear what you think about this topic. So please take the very brief survey at the end of the post.

Popular opposition to indiscriminate immigration has been significant and growing in many Western countries. Few in Canada deny our need for more skilled workers, and I think most of us are happy we’re providing a sanctuary for refugees escaping verifiable violence and oppression. We’re also likely united in our support for decent, hard working economic immigrants looking for better lives. But a half million new Canadians a year is widely seen as irresponsible.

So why did Canada, along with so many other Western governments, choose to ignore their own electorates and instead double down on ever-increasing immigration rates? Whatever nasty insults we might be tempted to hurl at elected officials and the civil servants who (sometimes) do their bidding, I try to remember that many of them are smart people honestly struggling to be effective. Governing isn’t easy. So it’s worth cutting through the rhetoric and trying to understand their policies on their own terms.

The Audit is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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As recently as 2022, the government – as part of its Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration – claimed that:

“Immigration is critical to Canada’s economic growth, and is key to supporting economic recovery”

There you have it. It’s at least officially about the economy. To be fair, the report also argued that immigration was necessary to address labor shortages, support an aging domestic population, and keep up with our “international commitments”. But economic considerations carried a lot of weight.

Now what I’d love to know is whether the “immigration-equals-better-economy” assumption is actually true. It’d be a real shame if the receipts told us a different story, wouldn’t it?

One possible way to measure economic health is by watching per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates. Insofar as they represent anything real, the inflation-adjusted GDP rates themselves are interesting enough. But it’s the rates by which GDP grows or contracts that should really capture our attention.

The green line in the graph below represents Canada’s (first quarter) GDP growth rates from the past forty years. To be clear, when measured against, say, its 1984 value, the GDP itself has trended upwards fairly consistently. But looking at changes from one year to the next makes it easier to visualize more detailed historical fluctuations.

The blue bars in the chart represent each year’s immigration numbers as a percentage of the total Canadian population. That rate leapt above one percent of the population in 2021 – for the first time since the 1960’s – and hasn’t shown any signs of backing down. Put differently, Canada absorbed nearly 12 immigrants in 2023 for every 1,000 existing residents.

Seeing both trends together in a single chart allows us to spot possible relationships. In particular, it seems that higher immigration rates (like the ones in 2018-2019 and 2022-2023) haven’t consistently sparked increases in the GDP.

With the exception of those COVID-crazed 2020 numbers – which are nutty outliers and are generally impossible to reliably incorporate into any narrative – there doesn’t ever seem to have been a correlation between higher immigration rates and significant GDP growth.

So, at best, there’s no indication that the fragile economy has benefited from that past decade’s immigration surge. As well-intentioned as it might have been, the experiment hasn’t been a success by any measure.

But it has come with some heavy social costs. The next chart shows the painful disconnect between an artificially rising population and a weak housing construction market. The blue bars, as before, represent immigration rates as a percentage of total population. This time, however, they go back all the way to 1961. The red line tells us about the number of single-detached housing starts per 1,000 people.

With the exceptions of the mid-1960’s and the past few years, each of the historical immigration surges visible in the graph was either preceded or accompanied by appropriate home construction rates.

As an anomaly, the 1960’s surge was for obvious reasons far less damaging. Back then you could still purchase a nice three-bedroom house in what’s now considered midtown Toronto for no more than two years’ worth of an average salary. I know that, because that’s exactly when, where, and for how much my parents bought the house in which I spent most of my errant youth. Those elevated immigration levels didn’t lead us into economic crisis.

But what we’re witnessing right now is different. The housing supply necessary to affordably keep us all sheltered simply doesn’t exist. And, as I’ve already written, there’s no reason to imagine that that’ll change anytime over the next decade. (Can you spell “capital gains tax inclusion rate change”? I knew you could.)

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Just to be complete, the disconnect doesn’t apply only to detached “built-to-own” houses. This next chart demonstrates that housing starts of all flavours – including rental units – grew appropriately in the context of historical immigration surges, but have clearly been dropping over the last couple of years.

Since housing starts data isn’t the only tool for measuring the health of a housing market, here’s a visualization of rental apartment vacancy rates in Canada:

The combination of a sluggish construction market and an immigration-fueled population explosion has been driving up prices and making life miserable for countless families. And things appear to be headed in the wrong direction.

So sure, immigration should play an important role in Canadian life. But by this point in the game, it’s pretty clear that recent government policy choices failed to reverse economic weakness and contributed to disastrous outcomes. Perhaps it’s time to change course.

Now it’s your turn. I hope you’ll take this very brief (and anonymous) survey.

Share your thoughts. Click to take the Immigration Policy survey.

Assuming we get enough responses, I’ll share the results later.

For the full experience, please subscribe to The Audit.

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Economy

Immigration crisis is absolutely “On Purpose” Center for Immigration Studies testifies

Published on September 20, 2024

Duane Rolheiser

Citizens of western nations all over the world have been dumbfounded by the absolute collapse of immigration services in country after country. Until very recently, agencies in charge of the flow of people into their nations did a reasonable job of securing borders. Then something changed.

What used to be a trickle of illegal immigrants has turned into a torrent of millions. Since 2020, over ten million illegals have entered the southern US. This week San Diego’s former Border Patrol Chief Agent Aaron Heitke testified at a hearing by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security that far more than ten million illegals have entered. Heitke says border patrol agents were so entirely overwhelmed “80% to 90%, sometimes 100% of the agents on duty [were taken] away from” the southwest border. There were miles of the border unmanned in Texas, Arizona and California, he said, where there was “no agent presence for weeks and months at a time.” This means of course that the unofficial number of migrant “gotaways” is far larger than the already shocking official numbers.

In Canada, illegal immigrants take a different path but the results are similar in terms of the percentage of immigrants compared to the general population. Most undocumented migrants in the US pour in through the southern border. Canada’s undocumented migrants tend to enter the county legally as refugee claimants, or with valid student, work, or visitor visas. Then they simply stay. While the official immigration numbers are in the 500,000 range, the undocumented migrants are easily twice that number. As a result Canada’s population is absolutely skyrocketing, putting pressure on anyone trying to buy a home, making a lot more competition for entry level jobs, and contributing to inflation as the economy plays catch up with the number of consumers.

The influx of people into western nations has caught citizens off guard. The question is, are the governments of western nations also surprised? It’s obvious that something is broken. The way our governments protect borders has changed in each of these nations (and it’s different in nations where people can simply walk over the border compared to nations like Canada and the UK where that’s not possible).

Another question is, who’s even looking into this? In times past we’d expect governments to hold inquiries into such nation challenging events. Failing that, the media would be up in arms, demanding government officials do their jobs and investigating how things fell apart. In nation after nation, the traditional media doesn’t seem all that interested. Surprising, because with an election bearing down on America, alternative news sites are reporting growing concerns millions of illegal immigrants will have access to voter registration forms and may help to choose the next President.

A research organization called Centre for Immigration Studies has found itself swamped in the 2020’s trying to keep track of what’s happening and who’s coming to the US. The Executive Director of The Center for Immigration Studies testified this week at an Oversite Committee Hearing into Biden Immigration Policies. The CIS is the nation’s only think tank devoted exclusively to the research of U.S. immigration policy to inform policymakers and the public about immigration’s far-reaching impact. Executive Director Mark Krikorian is one of the few people watching government specifically to answer questions such as “Is the largest border crisis in history some kind of accident?” His answer is stunning and disturbing.

“The largest border crisis in the history of our country, probably the largest such event in human history, began on January 20th, 2021, ON PURPOSE, not due to incompetence.”

FINALLY some truth-telling in Congress!pic.twitter.com/l97R9uuPCq

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) September 19, 2024

While this testimony applies to the United States, it very likely points to similar situations in other western nations. The question for Canadians is, who’d looking into this in Canada?