Housing foreign students.

– – This is an Open Letter to CBC News, Vancouver.

Re: "Canada's international student spike was blamed on private colleges. Here's what really happened," Feb. 27, 2024.

Good article, well researched.

I would have liked to have seen a statement in it to the effect that foreign students fill a definite need, as you described with reference to Canada's fertility rate and need for skilled labour, but bringing them here without building affordable housing to accommodate them is a grievous policy failure.

Meanwhile, spokespeople for the for-profit housing sector have stated again and again in numerous venues that private-sector developers, in no uncertain terms, cannot build affordable housing.

The root cause of the foreign-student housing debacle is the absence of a rational housing policy. Government at every level, private sector developers, and the entire FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) sector continue to twist themselves into pretzels to preserve the framing of housing as a financial asset.

This model shovels unearned income into asset holders' hands, but it does not, cannot, and will not house the population of this country.

Note also that foreign students, as your article reported, make up in tuition for chronic underfunding of post-secondary education in Canada, another symptom – along with decades of underfunding and consequent understaffing and undertraining in the healthcare sector – of nearly one in five dollars changing hands in Canada being spent on mortgages and rent.

We have been living in an increasingly financialized economy since 1980, self-interested beneficiaries of which seem willing to cast their fellow Canadians adrift to the point of living in tents in the rain for it to continue.

CBC News needs to evaluate its editorial position on housing affordability.

Social housing – which means not "housing for poor people" but publicly financed, built and managed not-for-profit – on a massive scale is the only way out of the hole Canada's FIRE sector has driven this society into.

Strong lobbies ideologically opposed to "government" and capable intellectually only of thinking in terms of "My investment! My property!" actually represent a minority of the Canadian public, but they control most of the money and use it to silence people who oppose them.

You are "the media."

Until you delve one layer deeper into the onion, we are lost.