Glavin: Immigration is a big part of Canada's housing-crisis story

A recognizable “immigration policy” needs to start by radically cutting back on the flood of “non-permanent” arrivals.

Published Jan 03, 2024 • Last updated 11 hours ago • 5 minute read

In just nine months, the federal government, which is exclusively responsible for immigration, added the equivalent of almost the entire population of Nova Scotia. On average, more than 3,500 new residents arrived each day.

Among the tectonic forces enfeebling Canada at the moment in ways we haven’t seen in generations, there are a couple of things we’d all do well to start talking about openly and honestly in 2024, while we still can. Or rather, if we still can. Unfortunately, Canada’s political class seems disinclined to engage in a grownup conversation about either of them: immigration and housing.

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It’s not that immigration in and of itself is any kind of problem. And it’s not at all clear whether the antisemitic and fanatically anti-Israel street demonstrations that have become commonplace in Canada since the Simchat Torah pogrom of Oct. 7 are a function of recent immigration waves or a consequence of the septic currents that for several years have been allowed to flow through the social sciences and humanities faculties of Canadian universities.

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But the subject is coming up with increasing frequency, and this fact remains: The inability of Canadians to simply afford a roof over their heads isn’t just some one-off policy conundrum. It has become a chronic condition of life in this country. It’s worse than any time since the early 1980s, during a briefly perfect storm of housing-bubble prices and sky-high inflation rates. And immigration is a big part of this story.

Immigration isn’t the only reason for this state of affairs, but Canada’s population growth rate of three per cent just last year was higher than at any time since a brief anomaly in the late 1950s. Last year, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reckoned that at this rate of population growth, we’d need to build at least 5.8 million homes in Canada over the next six years, just to restore some semblance of affordability. This isn’t going to happen. The construction industry’s current capability would add only about 2.3 million homes to the country’s housing stock by 2030.

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At the current rate, Canada’s population will double within 25 years. Between the summer of 2022 and last August, nearly 700,000 “non-permanent residents” arrived in Canada, on top of the 400,000-plus permanent residents who showed up in Ottawa’s official immigration counts. Statistics Canada reckons there are now roughly 2.5 million non-permanent residents in the country, which is close to the entire working-age population of Alberta.

More than a million people in this transitory or non-citizen population hold work permits and another million or so are “students” with work privileges of varying duration. It’s as though somebody somewhere decided that Canada should be a country of landlords and well-to-do strip mall college entrepreneurs preying upon an underclass of exhausted renters, homeless people and foreign guest workers. Who voted for this?

These demographics do not reflect “immigration” in any conventional sense of the term and it’s not even clear that the Trudeau Liberals possess an immigration policy anymore in any conventional sense of the term “policy.” To listen to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers talk about the crisis, you’d think it just happened by mistake. To listen to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, you’d think we can just build our way out of it.

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We can’t.

Believe whatever you like about “NIMBYism” and crippling development taxes and the rationale of “labour shortages” in Canada, which is presented as the function of an aging population, which is a euphemism for the predicament of young couples not making a sufficient number of babies to sustain a national population on our own.

Only a quarter of Canadian households can afford to own a single-family home, and nearly half of Canadian households can’t even afford a condominium. You try raising a family in a $900,000 single-bedroom strata unit. Go right ahead. If you’re a renter, how many kids can you afford to raise in Vancouver, where the monthly rent for an average one-bedroom unit is $2,872, or even in Toronto, where a one-bedroom condo will cost you $2,607 a month? And rents are rising faster than at any time since the 1980s.

The difficulty with having a serious national conversation about the role “immigration” plays in this intolerable state of affairs is that it’s dominated by the property industry and its various “experts,” activists possessed by a nostalgia for the social-housing idealism of the 1970s, Century Initiative ideologues fixated on growing Canada’s population to 100 million from 40 million, and cranks obsessed with conspiracy theories about white-race extinction.

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Outside this cacophony are Canadians of all ethnic and racial backgrounds who persist in expressing an understanding of Canada as an idea worth holding onto and a country where immigrants are properly expected to “fit in,” and any newcomers who arrive with hatred in their hearts and sympathy for terrorist groups should be deported.

Diversity can be as much a vice as a virtue, and it hasn’t helped that the Trudeau Liberals insist on “diversity” as though it were a public good exempt from public scrutiny, and tend to favour a notion of Canada as a shameful place of white supremacy and genocide until they came along to make everything better.

Justin Trudeau’s “diversity” is a state-enforced mutation of the multiculturalism embraced by his father, who adopted a politically useful policy that was itself merely the recognition of an already-existing cohesion in Canadian society. People from all walks of life were happily curious about one another’s traditions, getting along and muddling through in subaltern forms of cultural expression and identity outside the suffocating confines of the “English” and the “French.”
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Pierre Trudeau made good use of it in his wars with Quebec’s separatists. Justin Trudeau trussed up a derivative of that multiculturalism during his pitched battles against Conservatives who were champions of stupid “values tests,” arming himself with an insistence on the rights of newcomers to swear citizenship oaths while draped in Taliban bags.

It’s time for a wholly new conversation, and it might begin with an honest conversation about immigration and its impact on housing affordability, cultural identity and what we mean when we use terms like “Canadian values.” Instead of the passive “policy” that always seems to favour Beijing-aligned multimillionaires, dodgy Khomeinist money-men, unscrupulous immigration consultants and bloated university budgets, an active policy would be a better idea.

We should at least have a recognizable “immigration policy,” and it needs to start by radically cutting back on the flood of “non-permanent” arrivals. From there, rather than vetting potential immigrants out, we should be vetting immigrants in. Canada could be a safe haven for refugees from the United Nations’ police state bloc, for starters — there are millions to choose from. If you’re a suitable candidate for the invaluable gift of Canadian citizenship, we’re interested. Show us. If you have a demonstrable record of standing up for liberal-democratic values, you go to the front of the line.

That would be a good start, anyway.

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.