Liberal’s high immigration policy created housing crisis: report

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The federal Liberal government is belatedly trying to fix a  housing affordability crisis it created though immigration policies which caused population growth to far exceed Canada’s capacity to build new homes to accommodate it, according to a new Fraser Institute study.

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“Despite unprecedented levels of immigration-driven population growth following the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada has failed to ramp up homebuilding sufficiently to meet housing demand,” said Steven Globerman, co-author of the study, “The Crisis in Housing Affordability: Population Growth and Housing Starts 1972-2024.”

“Unless there is a substantial acceleration in homebuilding, a slowdown in population growth, or both, Canada’s housing affordability crisis is unlikely to improve.”

The study by the fiscally conservative think tank reported Canada’s population grew by a record 1.23 million new residents in 2023 alone, driven almost entirely by immigration and more than double the pre-pandemic record set in 2019.

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In 2023, Canada added 5.1 new residents for every new housing unit started, the highest ratio for any year of the study’s timeframe, from 1972 to 2024, and far above the average rate of 1.9 residents for every new housing unit started during the study period.

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From 2021 to 2024, the study reported, Canada’s population increased by an average of 859,473 people per year while only 254,670 new housing units were started annually.

By comparison, almost as many new housing units were built from 1972 to 1979, an average of 239,458 per year, while Canada’s population was growing by only 279,975 people annually.

The result of the Liberal government’s high immigration policies has exacerbated a chronic housing shortage across Canada.

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“The evidence is clear — population growth has been outpacing housing construction for decades, with predictable results,” Globerman said, noting the national trend is broadly mirrored across the provinces.

The study cited research by the Bank of Canada showing that housing affordability — typically measured as median shelter costs compared to median disposable income — remains near its least affordable level since the early 1990s.

In addition, the study reported that  “Canada has the lowest number of dwellings per inhabitant in the G7 and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation warns that the current rate of homebuilding is insufficient to improve housing and rental affordability.”

While not addressed in the Fraser Institute study, the Liberal government ignored warnings from its own public servants in 2022 that the big hikes in immigration targets the government was going ahead with would increase the cost of housing and put added pressure on already beleaguered public services like health care.

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Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request explicitly warned the Trudeau government in advance that:

“In Canada, population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units. As the federal authority charged with managing immigration, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply, and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth.”

Despite that, the Liberal government went ahead with dramatically increasing its annual immigration targets until Trudeau himself admitted the policy was a mistake and reduced its target of admitting 500,000 new permanent residents to Canada annually to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027, as well as cutting the number of foreign students and temporary workers admitted to Canada.

New Liberal leader Mark Carney has released a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded election campaign promise to double the current rate of residential housing construction, to reach 500,000 new homes per year over the next decade.

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