Did Canada not lock down during covid?
It did. But it wasn’t as bad as some countries in Europe.
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The first image in particular. I am really not a ‘comms’ guy, but my speechwriter friend knew right away just how bad it was. I sort of had to be walked there.
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It varied from province to province, most of the country had a lockdown to some degree from March-June 2020, with staged easing into August. There was a second one December-February, progressively eased into April
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Was the jump in numbers in 20 & 21 covid related?
It was significantly down in 2020. That in turn produced a shortage of labour in some sectors, and the government took the very short-sighted view that addressing that and ignoring the problem that had been building since around 2016 in the housing market was critical to restoring the economy post-pandemic. So they opened up the taps, so to speak.
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In part. The two big things were Temporary Foreign Workers and students. The increase in TFWs were a direct response to Covid but there some bad actors amongst the students. There was no cap on students and many fly by night institutions popped up or gunned their student recruitment. These schools paid commissions to recruiters mostly in South Asia to recruit students with either the promise or understanding that they could stay after their schooling. So many of these schools started churning out 8 month diploma mills were housed above bowling allies and abandoned movie theaters. It got so rampant that the Indian police identified hundreds of schools in Canada involved - most inadvertently - in human trafficking.
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To be honest, it is worse than just the fake diploma mills. Even the legitimate mainstream colleges were already pivoting pre-pandemic to make their financial model dependent on international student revenue. That was particularly true in Ontario, where tuition has been frozen at 2016 levels but costs have been growing. The system squared that circle by hauling in huge revenue from the uncapped international student revenue stream, so have actually been prospering. With the much tighter restrictions now, especially on post-graduate work permits, the system is in crisis. The main college in Ottawa just shuttered 38 of ~200 programs, and that is only phase one of the adjustment.
In the interim, rents in the immediate area of campus are about 300% of what they were in 2016. A huge number of single family homes (most of the area is a circa 1955-65 suburb) have been converted into overcrowded student housing.
The same is true though to a lesser extent of the university systems.
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I saw it in Calgary. My brother is handicapped and lived on the street for part of his life. He lived in a low rent but clean apartment in an OK part of town. He moved in with our mother in BC to help her with her health problems a few years ago but he would not have been able to afford the 40% rent increase he would have had, and that was on top of the 30% increase he saw which prompted him to move within the city.
I don’t blame the immigrants. Many of them came with a promise that will go unfulfilled. But I do blame the government for mishandling it.
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It isn’t at all a new problem, it was there over 10 years ago. But we went in precisely the wrong direction.
Now, at a time when building codes are becoming significantly more stringent and building is simply harder/more expensive, we have a massive housing deficit to overcome. Long-term I believe those codes are a very good thing, but right now they just compound the problem.
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How many places in the world aren’t like that though?
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I see it as a simple math problem. Even if there were no permitting or regulations, it would still take years to rebalance the housing market. We’re building 250k-300k homes a year and we’re millions short.
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When canada becomes part of the usa , they can just send them over to the gulags in siberia via trumps master
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If you look at the data though, since 2012 Canadian real estate (urban housing) has appreciated more than any other G20 economy. My brother moved back from Australia ~20 years ago, and part of the reason was that Sydney housing was simply out of reach for him. Since that time, Toronto real estate has overtaken and moved past Sydney.
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and, with a nod to @Bekloppt, along with that there is a massive infrastructure deficit. Municipal governments are broke, yet even with densification to minimize the infrastructure costs, there is an enormous fiscal and financing challenge, not least because new builds don’t actually bear all of their associated costs. The model all along has been that those costs are recouped over time, but that model means there is a limit on the sustainable growth rate.
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Major lockdown in Ontario. At one stage (towards the end) you needed a app showing your vaccination status in order to go to pub, the app was barcode scanned when you went in.
It was like that in BC too. My mild mannered friends were on the verge of revolt
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It was actually just a QR code, not an app. There was an app, but it wasn’t necessary.
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