Immigration and Housing
Immigration and Housing
The Devil really is in the details.
I’ve recently had some heated discussions with people who are complaining that the government has created the present housing mess because of loony immigration policies. There is a kernel of truth in this, but it’s really important that people understand the nuance because this argument can degenerate really quickly misleading rhetoric on this subject has got right-wing populists elected all over the world. As a result, I thought I’d renege on my pledge to not write anymore about housing and do something about the relationship between it and immigration.
Temporary Student Visas and Housing
First off, why some international students are a problem.
The federal liberals brought in a program a that aimed to encourage the best and brightest foreign students to stay in Canada so they could eventually become permanent residents, invent new stuff, found new companies, and, build up the economy. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, some ‘slick Willies’ saw an opportunity to make a fast buck off desperate people and created phony baloney college programs that could offer student visas that would allow families in poor countries to spend their life’s savings on the forlorn hope of coming here, getting a student visa, and, then parlaying that into permanent residency.
The problem is the number of people taking advantage of this program—with zero hope of ever becoming Canadians—has ballooned. The result is some of the more affordable housing in cities with these dubious college programs has been eaten up as landlords stuff ‘students’ into their rental properties.
If you are interested in the details of this issue, I’d suggest this podcast from CanadaLand.
Just to show you the scale of the problem, I found the following graph referenced by Russil Wvong’s excellent substack Vancouver Needs More Housing. It comes from professor Mike P. Moffatt who teaches at the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario in London.
As you can see, the permits given by universities to students isn’t the problem—it’s the colleges.
If you bother to listen to the podcast I’ve linked to in the above, you’ll see that the provincial Liberal government under Kathleen Wynn could see this happening, so they took steps to stop it. Unfortunately, our present provincial “peerless leader” chose to remove this fix shortly after ascending to his throne. (See that dip in 2019 and the rebound in 2020? Yet another bone-head decision by Doug Ford!)
Of course this increase in temporary residents is a localized phenomenon—not every community in Ontario has a ‘strip-mall college’. But where they do, I can certainly see how it would make a difference in the available rental stock.
Immigration and Housing
This leaves the second part of the problem, increased legitimate immigration. Here’s a Statistics Canada graph that shows recent and projected immigration numbers.
Why do the Liberals want so many more people to immigrate when we don’t have enough housing for the people already living here?
The important issue to remember—but far too many people are missing—is the impact of the the baby boomers on the demographic curve. Here’s another graph that should make readers stand up and take notice.
See all those dotted lines? Those are the people in Canada that will be consuming all sorts of services without being able to work anymore because they are just too damn old to do so. What is the government going to do with so many more people consuming government services without paying into the tax base?
I’m not the sort of media weasel who likes to ‘sex up’ stories in order to get clicks (hence my appeals to buy subscriptions), so I’m not going to leave the above graph as your only vision of this issue. Here’s a graph of the change in the mean age of Canada’s population projected over the next few decades.
Notice the difference a little context makes? This isn’t to say that the dramatic increase in elderly people in society isn’t something for the government to be concerned about, but I don’t want readers to believe the sky is falling. This is just an issue that a well-run society takes into account when designing public policy.
That is why the Liberals under Trudeau want to bring in immigrants. We need them to fill the jobs that the boomers like myself have left behind. They aren’t only helping the economy, they are also supporting the tax base that pays for Canada’s social programs. If we want to solve the housing crisis, we need to do it some other way than by closing the boarders and refusing entry to any new immigrants.
A Short Personal Caveat
People who know a little about me might find it odd that I’m defending the Liberals in their support of increasing the population in order to sustain continued economic growth. That’s because over the years I’ve been one of the rare people arguing for the development of a ‘steady-state economy’, mainly because I find it absurd to believe that exponential economic and population growth can continue on a finite planet. Indeed, seen from this point of view, traditional economic thinking seems to me to be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.
Having said that, however, I have to accept that my concerns about the viability of unlimited economic growth are extremely unpopular. I learned this in the Green Party where I found that not only most voters, but also most members of the Greens were not interested in this idea. Indeed, I came to the conclusion that it was so far outside of the Overton window that the majority of people can’t even understand it—no matter how carefully people like me try to explain the concept.
Luckily, it appears that there is some sort of natural ‘braking system’ in both economies and human populations that has kicked in and is slowing humanity down. I still believe that we are well past environmental overshoot, and that is both already causing and will cause a lot more horror and suffering for both humanity and Mother nature. But I’ve become a lot more sanguine about the future. (Perhaps it’s just the fact that I’m now a senior, I feel like I’ve ‘done my bit’, and, now it’s up to others to do the heavy lifting on this file.)
Moreover, no matter what I may believe about economic growth and the earth’s carrying capacity, the fact of the matter is that we live in a free-market economy right now, the baby boom ‘goat in a python’ exists, and, any government we elect has to deal with it. That’s because if they don’t there will be disasterous consequences for our social safety net. And while I still believe in a steady-state economics, I don’t support catastrophic mismanagement of the economy we have now!