Governments like to take credit for every good thing that happens. So, it’s only far that they take the blame for the housing affordability crisis, especially since their policies have caused it.
“How is it possible that the average Canadian cannot afford the average home here in the nation with the second biggest supply of land anywhere on Earth.”
After 7 years of Trudeau, it is now impossible for most to afford their first home.
We must remove the gatekeepers and reverse Trudeau’s inflationary spending & taxes so people can afford homes again. pic.twitter.com/bjNOUvmLct
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) January 11, 2023
That’s the question CPC Leader Pierre Poilievre asked in Parliament, and it’s a question many Canadians are asking themselves.
For years, housing prices have been skyrocketing to absolutely absurd levels, pushing housing affordability out of reach for millions of people.
Even the recent small declines in housing prices have coincided with interest rate hikes and surging inflation, meaning that many people are unable to afford a home anyway and thus can’t benefit from the slightly lower prices.
Since the Liberals took power in 2015, our economy has slowly but surely become less and less productive – especially relative to many peer nations.
‘Growth’ has become illusory, based on rising housing prices, more and more debt (personal, government, and corporate debt are all up), and large population increases.
An expansion of the money supply in this situation meant all that money had to go somewhere, and since the productive side of the economy was stagnant much of it poured into the housing market.
This, combined with local and provincial restrictions on building (that treat Canada as if we were some tiny island nation with zero space to grow horizontally), have led to Canada having one of the most overpriced housing markets in the world.
As noted by BetterDwelling, “Canadian real estate prices are pushing the limits of affordability. Not just for Canada, but any advanced economy. Canada came in second on the OECD house price to income ratio index. The index, measuring an affordability fundamental, shows the country’s housing is severely overvalued. It also reveals Canada has the second fastest growing gap between home prices and incomes in the developed world.”
“Canadian real estate prices have surged for years now, but it isn’t due to an income boom. The index reached 141.9 in Q4 2021, which means from 2015 home prices increased 41.9% faster than incomes. Since 2000, home prices have more than doubled the pace of income growth. Home prices recently surged in most advanced economies. However, you can probably guess that Canada is a totally different animal.”
Along with the fact that our military is in a state of near collapse, this should be the biggest issue in the country.
And, it should be seen as a complete indictment of Liberal Party governance.
You would have to try incredibly hard, you would have to go out of your way to somehow engineer a massively overpriced housing market in a country like Canada, yet the Liberals have managed it.
That alone should be an unmistakable sign that we need new leadership, and given that Pierre Poilievre has been warning about the impending (now current) consequences of Liberal overspending/Bank of Canada money printing he has far more credibility on the economy than Trudeau does.
This country needs to get back to basics and get back to common-sense, and having a housing market that is at least somewhat affordable for most Canadians should be the bare minimum of what we expect.
Spencer Fernando
Photo – Twitter
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