Immigration and housing.

An Oct. 24, 2024, CBC News article, "New immigration plan aims to stabilize population growth, housing market: minister," reported that a "new immigration levels plan [to substantially reduce immigrant numbers] will cause a 0.2 per cent population decline over the next two years" and "reduce the housing supply gap by approximately 670,000 units" over the next few years.

This policy panders to the widespread belief among Canadians – grounded in the simple-minded dogma that house, condo, and apartment prices depend on how many people need a roof over their heads relative to how many roofs there are – that "immigrants!" increasing the "demand" for housing is the reason housing is unaffordable in Canada.

That a deep-pocketed cohort of financial institutions, corporations, and high-net-worth individuals having repurposed housing from dwellings in which people reside to financial assets that magically create money out of thin air have artificially inflated house, condo, and apartment prices is deliberately obscured, concealed, and ignored by neoliberal ideologues who like watching the number of zeroes in their personal portfolios increase without having to perform any useful work

What no one wants to admit, because the 65% of the Canadian population who are paying off a house or condo or own one outright feel richer every day watching that house or condo increase in price without having to lift a finger, is that so-called "investors" have distorted house, condo, and apartment-building markets and driven the price of entry to hold one of these commodities through the roof.

"Supply" in the sense of a sufficient number of structures to satisfy human beings' need for shelter has little to do with the "demand" for these assets, not least because 30% of the houses or condos put on the market in Canada are snatched up by so-called investors competing with each other to hold and rent them out, driving up house and condo prices – and rents – and elbowing seekers wishing to buy a house or condo to dwell in out of the market.

Housing in Canada has been repurposed as financial assets for the last 30 years and is therefore priced not as infrastructure within which people dwell but as financial instruments that yield "returns" for holders flush enough to participate in the market and wait for a bigger fool to meet their target or demand ever increasing rents from tenants they let their holdings out to.

Eliminate "investors" from Canada's housing market, build publicly financed, purpose-built workforce rental housing, and there will be plenty of housing to go around.

In 1994, after having built an average of 20,000 units every year throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ottawa stopped building not-for-profit housing.

Spending on affordable housing has risen since the federal government announced a new National Housing Strategy in 2017, but housing experts say the funding and units promised need to be increased to make up for decades of under-investment. Chart by Brian Clifford, data from CMHC's Canadian Housing Statistics, multiple years.

From an April 22, 2022, The Tyee article "Why Can't We Build Like It's the 1970s?" by Jen St. Denis.

What have been built instead, until "the housing crisis" forced some tepid efforts to house Canadians affordably to begin around 2017, are upscale houses and condos catering to households sufficiently flush to buy them. Thirty percent of this housing is snatched up by so-called "investors" to rent out at top dollar, making excuses all the time about how magnanimously they are "taking risk" to serve niche markets like families on holiday or itinerant healthcare workers.

"Immigrants!" are blamed for this, and "politicians!" (who are indeed at fault for letting housing be used as chips in the derivatives casino instead of as homes for human beings) are blamed for letting healthcare, education, infrastructure, homelessness, and untreated mental illness and addiction face huge shortfalls in funding, staffing, and adequacy of service when more than $7.8 trillion that would be better used investing in Canada's real economy and funding public services are sequestered in financial instruments that do not create wealth but concentrate it.

"Supply and demand" in the world of financialized housing is not measured by bodies competing for shelter but by dollars competing for seats at the magic money machine, where "investors'" net worth goes up just by "taking risk," thinking you are smarter than everybody else, and – worse than contributing nothing positive to society – draining wealth created by people who perform useful work for a living into one's own pockets.

House, condo, and apartment owners are a cartel. The prices they pay to buy what from their point of view are financial assets determine the rents these holders demand. People, who by definition need a roof over our heads, have no choice but to pay what these predators demand.

The supply of house-buyers who want to keep their first house to rent out when they buy a second one, and real estate aggregators like REITs, hedge funds, and private equity funds, determines the prices that holders of these assets demand for them.

Please stop repeating that the "demand" of so many people for a house, condo, or apartment determines the price. The financial markets, the price of credit for the rentier class, and how much rentiers pay to hold houses, condos, and apartment buildings determine what these predators demand.

"Immigrants!" did not eliminate entirely financing the construction of purpose-built affordable workforce housing from Ottawa's budget in 1993 after Ottawa had built 20,000 units of affordable housing a year from 1968 to 1993.

"Immigrants!" did not build upscale condos instead of affordable workforce housing from 1994 to the present.

"Immigrants!" did not reduce the BOC overnight rate to 2% in 2001 after a long decline since 1980, flooding commercial banks with cheap money which they used to capitalize cheap mortgages for 22 years, driving up the prices of houses, condos, and apartment buildings.

"Immigrants!" did not buy second houses and condos with pockets deepened by the racket of being paid by a tenant to hold these assets rather than having to pay to own one out of one's own paycheck.

"Immigrants!" did not take houses and condos – approved and constructed with the understanding that households would dwell in them full-time – off the market and use them to make a killing renting them out by the night or week or even by the month as short-term rentals.

"Immigrants!" did not drive house and condo prices out of the reach of house- and condo-seekers looking to buy a home.

"Population" competing for "supply" is such a simple-minded narrative, and it is drummed into the heads of otherwise intelligent people by predators who have not only destroyed Canada's housing sector, but, by extracting into their own pockets a huge portion of the surplus created by Canada's productive economy that could otherwise have been spent training healthcare professionals and a wide range of other skilled workers for the future; properly staffing and equipping hospitals, clinics, schools, and daycare centers; and building and staffing mental health facilities, supportive housing, and drug treatment centers adequate to the magnitude of our country's problems with untreated mental illness and drug addiction, have decimated important public services for which Canada was once widely envied and respected around the world.

Wake up, Canada, and definancialize housing now before this country is further bifurcated into an obscenely rich oligarchy and millions of peasants living in tents, if we are not packed onto mothballed cruise ships and set adrift on the ocean.