Once again – the rising cost of housing has a lot more to do with private sector interference than it has to do with immigration. On the one hand, the housing available to Canadians is being reduced by speculators and would-be AirBnB hosts. “The Bank of Canada found that investors were responsible for 30 per cent of home purchases in the first three months of 2023. That’s up from 28 per cent in the same period in 2022 and 22 per cent in the same period in 2020.” https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/housing-prices-affordability-real-estate-1.7170775 Renters, meanwhile, are facing a double crisis because landlords, in addition to the traditional ‘renovation’ to force rents up, are now using AI to push rents even higher, using a product called YieldStar. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rents-canada-price-fixing-yieldstar-1.7361871

They want you to blame immigrants, even though limiting immigration and even deportations won’t bring housing costs down. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-housing-crisis-costs-1.7088878 But “immigration, on average, has no significant effect on housing prices.” https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/esi/index.php/esi/article/download/1/1/92 In the U.S., similarly, the surge in immigration does not line up with increases in housing costs. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/role-recent-immigrant-surge-housing-costs As the Bank of Canada notes, housing starts slowed down during the pandemic, also impacting supply, but immigration is more of a solution than a problem, as new housing needs people to build it, and Canada’s population is aging out of the industry. https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/12/economic-progress-report-immigration-housing-outlook-inflation/

I would add that the Conservatives will make the problem worse, not better, as they will allow the private sector to continue squeezing Canadians while doing nothing in the way of public action to alleviate the shortage. They might even limit immigration, would would slow down construction even more.