Canada’s longstanding consensus on immigration crumbled under the weight of a massive influx of migrants from 2022 to 2024. In that time, Canada took in proportionally more immigrants and experienced double the population growth of any other G7 country. The resulting squeeze on hospitals, schools, labor markets, and above all, housing, finally saw the issue register with the broader public.
But the deeper problem is that Canada’s immigration model—like that of the United States—has embodied the extreme open-society ideal of late twentieth-century liberalism. It masks collapsing fertility and family formation, relies on a revolving underclass of temporary workers and international students to prop up boutique business interests and floundering universities, and pushes housing policy toward dense, transient, rent-driven forms and the unattached single lifestyle. All of this pulls us away from the rooted, stable communities and productive jobs that make family life possible in both the U.S. and Canada.
Canada has the worst housing affordability in the OECD, and one of the highest levels of immigration among Western liberal democracies. Recent surge aside, the proportion of immigrants in the Canadian population (a figure which excludes non-permanent residents and foreign-born citizens) rose in the past 30 years from 15% to 25%. Forecasts project this level will climb further, to between 30% and 40% in the next decade, particularly in the context of low domestic fertility rates.
Critics insist that the link between immigration and housing affordability is all correlation without causation. It is true that Canada’s housing woes are also linked to regulatory glut, low price-to-income ratios, and an economy suffering from low productivity. But a recent TD Economics report makes the connection clear. It shows that population growth dropped from 3.2% to 0.9% when Ottawa moved last year to rein in non-permanent resident targets and to modestly lower permanent resident caps.
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