[pcthrowaway]

Canada is bringing in 1.3% worth of its population in immigrants every year. IIRC the births and deaths are nearly even, so without immigration the population increase would be something like 0.02% per year. The federal government is likely incentivized to create high immigration targets by big industries (because more workers creates a race to the bottom for wages, and most people are not making a living wage in Canada), as well as the federal pension program which will be paying out record amounts to new retirees as the last of the boomers are retiring now.

If you can't increase the housing stock by 1.3% every year (I suspect it's more like 0.2%-0.5% growth per year, but can't find numbers), but you choose to increase the population by 1.3% every year, you can see how this would contribute to a soaring cost of housing and consequently the record numbers of homelessness in Canada (which includes tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people now living in their vehicles).

BC is moving in the right direction with recent policies which make it much more difficult to run an Airbnb, which will return some of the housing stock to the long-term housing supply when the changes come into effect, but the municipal governments of most of its largest cities (including Vancouver, whose metro area has 50% of BC's population) have made it difficult to build housing in general, as well as restrictive of high-density housing.

If you're not from Canada, you honestly can't fathom how bad things have gotten for people living here.

[snapplebobapple]

I agree with you its' gotten bad here but I think immigration is a bit of a red herring. It's not the immigration numbers that are the problem per se, it's that the people immigrating are net consumers rather than providers of skills that are in shortage and I think that in itself is a relatively small problem compared to the nuts and bolts of how housing is actually built in Canada and the primary cause of this problem is the government's regulation of that process. We aren't setting new highs from the building boom of the 1970's when our population was 60% of what it is now when we should probably be producing housing at double the rate of the 1970's boom, given our much larger population and immigration and a large part of why is the large cost of dealing with the government on each new build. The time it takes to go from buying land to getting it rezoned for higher density and the building process is often very long, permitting is expensive and time consuming beyond the rezoning aspect, every spot where a trade touches anything outside the lot has a government cartel on it charging double or triple what the trades working on the residence charge, inspections are arbitrary and archaic, making it very hard to bring in modern building practices at scale, etc. We need to go in and bulldoze all those barriers and get housing in production if we expect this problem to solve itself. BC is moving in the right direction on one thing though, they jsut proposed automatic upzoning of all land within 800 meters of a major transit stop. That would relieve a decent chunk of the first part of the problem.

[lm411]

> If you're not from Canada, you honestly can't fathom how bad things have gotten for people living here.

100%. People outside of Canada really don't realize how bad it has gotten here.

Yes, housing costs are up all over the world - but Canada's housing crisis is off the charts. Hell, even many Canadians that are comfortably housed don't even realize how bad it has gotten.