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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Federal government’s turbo-charged immigration helping drive housing demand

Published on July 7, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jock Finlayson

Unusually brisk population growth is putting considerable strain on public services and infrastructure, in part because the federal government did essentially nothing to plan or prepare for the dramatic surge in immigration that its own policies sanctioned.

According to a recent Statistics Canada report, Canada’s population has just hit the level it was previously expected to reach in 2028. That startling finding underscores the extraordinary growth of the country’s population since the pandemic, driven by record inflows of both permanent and “temporary” immigrants.

A rapidly expanding population can bring some benefits, notably by stimulating overall economic activity and providing additional workers. But it’s not an alloyed good. The number of Canadian residents is increasing faster than economic output (gross domestic product), which has translated into an unprecedented series of declines in per-person GDP over the last several quarters. Productivity is stagnant, as newcomers struggle to find their way in the economy and job market. In addition, a significant share of new immigrants don’t seek or obtain employment, dampening immigration’s contribution to the growth of economic output.

Meanwhile, unusually brisk population growth is putting considerable strain on public services and infrastructure, in part because the federal government did essentially nothing to plan or prepare for the dramatic surge in immigration that its own policies sanctioned. The “downstream” challenge of managing the pressures flowing from turbo-charged immigration falls mainly to provinces and municipalities, not faraway Ottawa.

All of this has implications for the hottest issue in Canadian politics today—housing affordability and supply. Like the rest of us, newcomers need a place to live. Immigration is the predominant source of incremental housing demand in much of the country, particularly big cities. Demand for housing also comes from the existing Canadian population, as young adults establish separate households, marriages dissolve, and people move to other communities or neighbourhoods for work, education or to retire.

Unfortunately, homebuilding has been running far behind what’s necessary to accommodate immigration, let alone meet the demand from household formation among current residents. In 1972, when the population stood at 22 million, roughly 220,000 new homes were added to the Canadian housing stock. In 2023, with a population of 40 million, housing starts were only a little higher than half a century ago.

This brings us to the Trudeau government’s multi-faceted housing plan, rolled out over the past year and finalized with great fanfare in the 2024 federal budget. The government has pledged to somehow build 3.9 million new homes by 2031—just seven years from now. This is equivalent to 550,00 housing starts per year. It’s an aspirational target, but also a patently unrealistic one.

The federal government has little control over what happens in the towns, cities and provinces where most of the policy and regulatory decisions affecting homebuilding and community development are made. Moreover, the Canadian construction sector doesn’t have the spare human resources or organizational capacity to quickly double housing starts. Even today, the construction sector’s “job vacancy rate” is higher than the all-industry average.

The year 2021 marked an all-time record for Canadian housing starts at 270,000. Starts fell over 2022-23, amid higher interest rates. This year, RBC Economics projects housing starts of 251,000, rising to 273,000 in 2025. To put it mildly, these figures are inconsistent with Ottawa’s ambitious plan to deliver 550,00 new homes per year.

We’ll likely see more and faster homebuilding over the next few years, as governments at all levels direct more money and political attention to housing. But a doubling of housing starts simply won’t occur within the Trudeau government’s politically manufactured timeline. One thing seems certain—Canada’s housing “crisis” will continue to fester.

Author:

Jock Finlayson

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

Economy

Toronto, Vancouver named “Impossibly Unaffordable”

Published on June 29, 2024

Todayville

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Courtney Greenberg

Two Canadian cities — Toronto and Vancouver — have earned the title of “impossibly unaffordable” in a new report.

“There has been a considerable loss of housing affordability in Canada since the mid-2000s, especially in the Vancouver and Toronto markets,” according to the Demographia International Housing Affordability report, which is released annually.

“During the pandemic, the increase in remote work (working at home) fuelled a demand increase as many households were induced to move from more central areas to suburban, exurban and even more remote areas. The result was a demand shock that drove house prices up substantially, as households moved to obtain more space, within houses and in yards or gardens.”

Vancouver was the least affordable market in Canada, and the third least affordable out of all of the 94 markets observed in the report. The West Coast city’s affordability issue has “troublingly” spread to smaller areas like Chilliwack, the Fraser Valley, Kelowna, and markets on Vancouver Island, per the report.

Toronto was named as the second least affordable market in Canada. However, it fared slightly better than Vancouver when it came to the other markets, ranking 84 out of 94 in international affordability.

“As in Vancouver, severely unaffordable housing has spread to smaller, less unaffordable markets in Ontario, such as Kitchener-cambridge-waterloo, Brantford, London, and Guelph, as residents of metro Toronto seek lower costs of living outside the Toronto market,” the report says.

The findings of the report have “grave implications on the prospects for upward mobility,” said Joel Kotkin, the director at the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University, a co-publisher of the report along with Canada’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

“As with any problem, the first step towards a resolution should be to understand the basic facts,” he said. “This is what the Demographia study offers.”

The report looked at housing affordability in 94 metropolitan areas in Australia, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. The data analyzed was taken from September 2023. The ratings are based on five categories (affordable, moderately unaffordable, seriously unaffordable, severely unaffordable, and impossibly unaffordable) with a points system to classify each area.

The report determined affordability by calculating the median price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) in each market.

“There is a genuine need to substantially restore housing affordability in many markets throughout the covered nations,” said Frontier Centre for Public Policy president Peter Holle, in a statement. “In Canada, policymakers are scrambling to ‘magic wand’ more housing but continue to mostly ignore the main reason for our dysfunctional costly housing markets — suburban land use restrictions.”

Toronto and Vancouver both received the worst possible rating for affordability, making them stand out as the most expensive Canadian cities in which to buy a home. However, other Canadian markets — like Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa-gatineau — stood out as well. They were considered “severely unaffordable.”

“This is a long time coming,” senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives David Macdonald told CTV News.

“We haven’t been building enough housing, we certainly haven’t had enough government investment in affordable housing for decades, and the chickens are coming home to roost.”

The most affordable Canadian city in the report was Edmonton, which was given a rating of “moderately unaffordable.” The city in Alberta was “at least twothirds more affordable” than Vancouver.

Overall, Canada ranked third in home ownership compared to the other regions observed in the report. The highest home ownership rate was in Singapore, at 89 per cent, followed by Ireland, at 70 per cent. In Canada, the rate was 67 per cent.

First published in the National Post here, June 17, 2024.

Courtney Greenberg is a Toronto-based freelance journalist writing for the National Post.