Where's Canada?

"[The total number of newcomers in 2022, including] non-permanent residents [was an estimated 855,000, representing] an unprecedented swing in housing demand in a single year that is currently not fully reflected in official figures."

"What's more, the recently reported proposed plans by the government to reduce eligibility rules for visitors [where foreign nationals would have no need to establish that they will leave Canada once their visa expires], will in all likelihood work to add notably to demand for residential housing."

"While current visitor visa numbers amount to more than 2.2 million, that change of policy would prompt a spike in applications among some visa countries, and create a huge incentive to visa holders still in the country, wavering on returning, to remain in Canada and find accommodation."

"Accordingly, it's not a stretch to suggest that the number of new international arrivals in 2023 might reach one million. This kind of inflow suggests that existing policy tools will easily fall short of addressing the current and future increase in housing demand. At the minimum, short-term housing solutions are needed to accommodate the upcoming unprecedented surge in the number of new arrivals."

CIBC Capital Markets

"Any discussion regarding the housing market in Canada starts and ends with references to the growing number of new immigrants and to the government's aggressive targets that are aimed at lifting the number of new immigrants by no less than 75 percent relative to pre-pandemic levels by 2025."

"This is an environment in which the rental market is getting tighter by the day."

Benjamin Tal, managing director, deputy chief economist, CIBC Capital Markets

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the Liberal national caucus holiday party in Ottawa. Photo by Blair Gable/Reuters

An acute shortage of housing and rental accommodation in Canada has led to some of the steepest rental and home-buying prices in any jurisdiction worldwide. This, at a time of growing homelessness in the country. When incomes are not catching up with an increase in the cost of living, where prices of food and commodities are reaching unsustainable levels for purchasers. Food Banks cannot keep up with the demand on their services.

The housing shortage is one thing, the universal health care system in the country, once the pride of the nation, is now hobbling toward breakdown. Hospitals have had to temporarily close emergency rooms. There are not enough acute-care beds, not enough surgery beds to meet the demands of a growing public need reflecting the aging of the population. The global pandemic exacerbated a health-care system already in perilous shape.

Millions of Canadians have no family doctor. There is an acute shortage of general practitioners and of nurses. Opening up more hospital beds is useless without the personnel to match an increase in beds. And the same holds for surgeries. The waiting list for surgeries considered to be non-emergency is prodigious. At the same time social services and welfare services are being strained. Illegal migrants have been entering the country crossing the border illegally from the U.S. to Canada in staggering numbers.

The Liberal government has lavished billions in treasury on programs ill designed to cope with the fallout of the pandemic. Hundreds of millions of dollars went out to Canadians signing up for COVID relief who were not entitled to the benefits -- including civil servants who were in full employment, working from home. To cap the dysfunction the prime minister's focus on freezing out energy resources development further ignores the need to export the country's abundance of resources to countries desperate to replace their energy sources from Russia's grip.

Canada's living standards have plummeted in the care of a government determined to drag the country away from its dependence on gas and oil. The gas-and-oil-producing provinces have lost foreign investment in the face of uncertainties produced by a government that steadfastly refuses to give an all-clear to pipelines and resource extraction development. The national debt is steadily growing, the deficit expanding.

None of this has deterred the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau from its commitment to increase an already-large third-of-a-million annual immigration, with refugee absorption on top of that, and illegal migration more still. Yet this government is unable to process the applications for immigration already in the works; it takes an average of three years for applications to be processed and finalized. 

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development last year ranked Canada the lowest among its 38 countries for housing affordability, comparing average home prices to average incomes.  Canada provides free health care to many immigrants and visa holders here to work or to study. The universal health care system is simply incapable of accommodating record numbers of people admitted into the country annually. 

 

A debilitated health-care system, higher government debt, lower standard of living, unaffordable housing and growing homelessness and poverty now marks the country reflecting Justin Trudeau's fetish on the environment and progressive wokeism that has served to divide the nation. Any measure of doubt over the direction that Trudeau has taken this country toward elicits a sneer from him, and the labelling of those in disagreement with his policies as 'racist', 'homophobic', or 'right-wing fascists'.

The positive side of the Trudeau government? How about MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying. Helping people in pain or living with an incurable condition end their lives. Soon to include the mentally ill. Canada becoming an abattoir, as well. But then, there is also the availability of recreational cannabis legalized. With British Columbia setting out on a  temporary test of legalizing all hard drugs; the federal government presumably to follow suit if it likes the results. So far the results have been thousands dying of overdoses...