For several decades Canada’s population growth rate hovered at about 1.0 percent annually. This rate has more than tripled in a few short years, up to 3.3 percent in 2023.
For several decades Canada’s population growth rate hovered at about 1.0 percent annually. This rate has more than tripled in a few short years, up to 3.3 percent in 2023.
Both are required to drop the price and return to affordability as building new housing takes time and has hard limitations.
The reality is that the level of immigration should be dictated by the level of new housing and overall service and infrastructure investment. If you add people without alignment to these you’re just degrading the housing security, quality of service, and overall quality of life for the vast majority of existing residents.
This also means that millions of immigrants could be accommodated per year if the level of new housing and investment were sufficiently high enough.
But government can do much to speed it up. Why are we just taking the rate of new housing as a given, and not taking the rate of new immigration as a given?
They can mandate and make laws but they can’t make more framers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. We can train more but there will still be a 2-4 year gap which leaves us another 1M houses behind. There has to be a combination of increased construction, increased services, and reduction of population growth. Once prices of and access to housing and other services normalized then open the doors again but try to tie the population growth to the growth of infrastructure.