^^^ Correct. But here's the worst part. To make sure, Toronto Life Guy isn't totally fucked, the government has to bring in record numbers of people, hope they stay in illegal substandard housing (so that rents skyrocket) and then hope some professional Millennial couple signs away their financial future in a competition with these poor immigrants. The stats will say TLG is richer than any of his ancestors. They'll also say the millennial couple who bought his home are well off. In reality, that millennial couple will never have the lifestyle TLG and his wife did. They'll slave for 30+ years to pay a mortgage that is 3-4x what TLG had. But stats won't show this picture today. Because TLG is helping boost the average.

Everytime I think of Toronto Life Guy, I seethe. Nothing shows how failing up works, more than that dude. He's a writer. Wife's a newscaster. This let's them afford a house across from Trinity Bellwoods park and they live a two decades long party lifestyle to the point that they wrack up $900k in debt on a $300k house.

When innsertnamehere says that people are richer and better off today, my mind goes to TLG and his wife. I think a lot of the wealth we see is exactly this. Absolutely none of this would be possible today for anybody who doesn't own real estate already. Just imagine the jobs and income it would take to live what TLG and his wife did.

10x, actually. (~$2M vs ~$200k.)

And quite possibly even more than 10x, if the Millennial couple had to resort to an CHMC-insured mortgage (95% of the $2.5M they paid to the TLG) while the TLG didn't (need the CHMC's help).

Old poll, but haven't seen it discussed. This is downright scary, and explains why the nation at large isn't making a bigger fuss about the fiscal decisions made by the government. They are essentially saying "We want more services, but we don't want to pay for it, nor do we want to work harder for it." (I have a suspicion that there are certain forumers who share these beliefs as well)

Four in 10 Canadians prefer socialism but not higher taxes to pay for it

I suspect some of that is really not knowing what socialism IS, which is kind of a contagious situation brought out by proximity to the US. It's like we wanna be Norway but also the US, and don't realize those are mutually exclusive mindsets. Ignorance, largely.

They gave survey participants 3 definitions of socialism, and polled each definition separately.

1. Government takes over production = over 30% support

2. Government provides more services = over 60% support

3. Government provides UBI to everyone = over 50% support

There is more info here:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/stud...-and-socialism

And the full report is here:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/site...sm-polling.pdf

Ultimately the debt is going to become so high that the nation implodes. Reality will kick in eventually.

Socialism has so many definitions that it is not a useful word in describing anything anywhere.

See post above. I already said they gave definitions of socialism to the survey respondents before asking them to answer.

Having actually worked on programs that have resulted in significant tax increases with extensive public consultations the most common amalgamation of real-world responses can be summed up along the lines of:

"we don't want to pay more taxes, but we're willing to pay our fair share and would pay more if it can actually be tied to an increase in services received"

Keep in mind this wasn't with downtown residents, but smaller communities and some cities across Northern Ontario. Some of which are more traditional labour-based NDP, but others which are very Conservative with a libertarian bent.

A lot of people don't make the connection that more services for you means more taxes for you. There's a narrative popular in the anglosphere that we can have all the services in the world without more taxes by just "taxing the rich". This approach is never financially sustainable. It leads the situation that Margaret Thatcher famously summed up with: "The problem with socialism, is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

I think the political left would be a lot more successful if they were honest about this and tried to sell people on paying more taxes in exchange for getting more value from their state.

The Nordic model works because all of those generous services are paid for by the same people receiving them; Swedes don't expect to get a free ride from a tiny minority of the population. In the Nordic model, taxes on businesses are actually low and regulations are low as well. Countries like Sweden, Norway, etc. actually rank really high on indexes for things like "ease of doing business" and "economic freedom". Sweden has a thriving corporate sector - think of all the famous big brands that tiny country has produced - largely for this reason. So they have a "capitalist" approach to business while having a "socialist" approach to individuals. These go hand in hand, because the business-friendly economy creates the high paying jobs that allows the countries to have the personal income tax revenue to pay for all the programs.

You wanna be like Sweden? Add a bunch of high quality state services, pay for it with big tax increases on the entire population (not just on the rich), and slash taxes on businesses and investors while reducing their regulatory burden. That's the Swedish model.

In smaller towns people tend to have a more acute awareness of the fixed nature of the tax-to-services ratio, I find. Same with inner city folks.

It's not that uncommon in some of the more right-wing pockets of Eastern Ontario to find municipalities with really minimal service levels. Sharbot Lake, for example, has no curbside garbage pickup (you have to drive all your waste to the dump yourself), very little in the way of any municipal recreation programs, maintains very few parks, and most of their roads outside of the village itself are gravel. But people pay very low property taxes out there. And generally, they accept that tradeoff.

As opposed to the mentality of so many suburbanites where they seem to think there's a possibility of really generous services with low taxes just by having more "efficiencies" or by making someone else pay for it.

People like ‘free’ shit and don’t want to pay for it. Um, shocking.

The unspoken implication: People are too stupid for democracy, thus we should go with an authoritarian model. Hard pass on that idea here, even if I have to live with mediocre governance as a consequence.

Benefits are also taxed, so everyone is a taxpayer even if they don't work.

Due to progressive taxation, lots of people earn an income of some sort and pay very little.

They do pay consumption taxes, but again some of those are rebated, and/or not charged on essentials.

I can't speak for all of Scandinavia, but in Sweden everyone pays a municipal income tax of 32% from the first dollar of income (or benefit).

On top of that, people who earn over 613k (about 77k cad) pay a 20% national income tax.

Count me in as someone who has given up on home ownership.

I'm an older Millennial who remains single. The down payment required to buy a property anywhere in Canada is so far out of reach for me, home ownership is not even on the table, and help from my parents in the form of financial assistance or co-signing is not an option. If my marital/relationship status ever changes then the math changes.

I'd rather hold on to the rental apartment I currently have, which only costs me around 21% of my income, put some money into savings and use some spare money to travel. Even if I put all my disposable income into savings and didn't travel at all, there is no mathematical pathway to home ownership for me on my own in this country within the next 10 years, at least in any of the parts of Canada where I can get a job in my field at a similar income to what I make now.

Some interesting data about the failure of our immigration program to meet our labour needs:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/tops...c9bdb49d&ei=12

Labour shortage entirely made up of low skilled professions: StatCan

Skill workers outnumber the amount of jobs available: StatCan
I suspect there's also a mismatch between the skills that these workers have and the skills actually required by the work force (i.e. a business degree from Yorkville University doesn't qualify you to work as a nurse).

Seems like our current plan of just opening up the tap is leaving us with a bunch of people sitting around doing gig work (or nothing at all).

This^ doesn't surprise me at all considering how much the gig economy has grown, and not organically so much as of late from my understanding.

The biggest take away is it casts doubt on the narrative that we have a labour shortage in this country - the jobs that are available are the low wage/low skilled positions. When it comes to jobs that require some degree of education or training, there's actually a shortage of jobs.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be ramping up the import of points-based economic migrants and international students (most of whom are using it to access PR status) when the jobs that we actually need to fill don't utilize any of their skills or experience.

What do you do for work? You can get a detached house in Regina or Saskatoon for $10-15,000 down payment.

You can get into a condo for like $6k down payment.

It's so bizarre looking at the BC/Ontario housing stats. Buying a house in your 20s while having a lot of disposable income is very much the norm in Saskatchewan.

Yes, no offense, but words that you never hear are; "I want to move to Saskatchewan". I have never heard it spoken, and I've had friends from there.

It comes down to what you want.

Cheap housing, early retirement, and extensive travelling are simply more important to me than the urban fun and weather of Vancouver.

It's one thing if you're wealthy. But seeing peers work at coffee shops so they can rent a bedroom in Surrey and not actually get to enjoy the concerts/sights just doesn't seem worth it.

Experience Regina

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74B5kMLNd5Q

Totally agree. If I were on a fixed (defined) income, and had to pick between living in Vancouver or living in Regina, the latter would win very easily.

I'm not very familiar with Regina (passed through it once...) but I'm 100% sure the quality of life there absolutely destroys what you can get in Vancouver for a given amount of dollars per year.

This was true in Quebec as well, not that long ago. It was certainly true for my cohort (older Millennials), and it seems to be still true (though not as true) for my younger cousins who are 5-10 years younger.

I recall seeing it discussed a few times on this forum that there's a real Landed Gentry Cutoff within the Millennial cohort; the older ones could easily get property that then decupled in value since*, while the Gen-Z-adjacent younger ones had a much harder time -- and for those who managed to, enjoyed a lot less appreciation.



* The (in)famous Toronto Life Guy as a fairly typical case: ~$250k to ~$2.5M in two decades. One order of magnitude. And fully tax-free gains, of course.

It seems that way but start counting the number of people who will actually do it and you won't run out of fingers. I've even entertained notions of living by the seaside in NL, but I think the reality would not be as romantic as the dream. Since we are a country of compartmentalized enclaves, I think many Canadians are pretty stuck wherever they happen to be, and it's considered "un-Canadian" to suggest that people actually move.

There's a huge gap between living rural seaside in Newfoundland and living in a walkable neighbourhood in a rapidly growing city of 350,000.

If people want to be miserable while renting a small bachelor in the suburbs, it's a free country. The gap between wage and housing price is simply too high in Vancouver to not at least explore Winnipeg/Saskatoon/Regina/Calgary/Edmonton.

Thank you. I just got that damn song out of my head 2 months ago. Now it's back. :P :cheers:

"Move to region x" is not a solution to our atrocious housing policy. Out of control prices are spreading and will eventually reach Saskatchewan too.

I'm in a similar boat as you. I didn't get any help from my parents for university or a down payment, so it took years to pay off my student loans and then start saving. Now my investments are what a decade ago would have been a generous down payment. But the target is moving away faster than I can reach it.

I could buy a place today, but then my monthly housing costs would more than double over my current rent. That means no travel, no other investments, and essentially no disposable income. Not worth it.

This real estate speculation gravy train can't keep going forever. The percentage of people who can afford to buy a home is shrinking, especially with younger generations. Our economy is hollowing out as more and more of our GDP goes into further inflating this bubble. We're sowing the seeds for a serious reckoning at some point in the future and the more we fuel this fire the worse that reckoning is going to be.

The housing bubble will pop at some point, and when it does we are going to have a massive retirement crisis.

However we have no way of knowing when that will happen. It could happen next year (unlikely), or it could happen in 20 years.

Here are the knowns:

1. Unions and pensions are a fraction of what they used to be, so baby boomers couldn't rely on these for their retirement as previous generations did.

2. Boomers still had to retire, and their savings had to be invested somewhere. That "somewhere" ended up being real estate, in lieu of union-provided pension plans.

3. Real estate became the largest portion of most households' personal wealth, and therefore there was a strong incentive for home prices to, at the very least, not go down.

4. As a result, every land use policy from the last 3 or 4 decades had one thing in common - they were designed to NOT let home prices go down.

5. When every policy is designed to not let home values go down, while your population is also increasing, that means there is only one direction prices can go, which is up.

6. Smart investors realized that it's literally the safest investment they could make, since there was no way for prices to go down, since every policy was designed to prevent that from happening. The sheer mass of investors this environment attracted, created even more demand, which only further increased the prices.

7. Baby boomers have grown accustomed to their home values being worth over $1M for having done basically nothing, so there was a disincentive for most baby boomers to even bother with other investment classes. Why risk losing money in stocks, bonds and gold when they can just buy more real estate and live off a HELOC?

8. Most millennials and Gen Z are priced out of Canada's housing market.

9. Millennials and Gen Z are still going to have to retire one day.

10. If Millennials and Gen Z can't rely on real estate for their retirement portfolio's this means that their savings are going to have to go elsewhere.

11. This means that we are going to see other asset bubbles created driven by millennials and Gen Z in lieu of real estate. Personally I think this will end being Bitcoin but we will see.

12. Millennials and Gen Z still need to live somewhere, and most would prefer to own rather than rent, if they could actually afford it.

13. The average Millennials and Gen Z, if given the option, would vote for policies that would make housing more affordable for them, in other words bring home values down.

14. Millennials and Gen Z are almost half of the voting age population, and have a massive interest in home prices going down.

15. Assuming our nation continues to be a democracy, we are entering a period where every new land use policy will be reviewed to NOT further inflate home prices, since pretty soon this is what the majority of the voting age population will want.

16. For real estate values to go up, you need population to go up.

17. Canada has a below replacement birth rate, and very soon will have a natural decrease.

18. The majority of Canada's population increase is through immigration.

19. At the moment Canada is still a better alternative to most other countries in the world compared to other countries with open immigration policies.

20. This affordability crisis is likely to change that. Quality of life in Asian countries are improving rapidly, and pretty soon will be good enough to (a) incentivize their people to stay, and (b) attract immigrants from other Asian and African countries.

So this leaves us with the following scenario which I believe is going to unfold over the next 30 years:

- Population stagnation/decline - since we aren't making enough babies, and soon won't be able to rely on immigration (if Canada can no longer compete with Asian countries).
- The emergence of an alternative investment class that Millennials and Gen Z are going to use for their retirements.
- A longterm trend of policies that are designed to NOT pump home prices further, which means that eventually all policies will be designed to not pump up home prices, and that this means there will only be one direction that property prices can go, which is down.

It's not a question of IF this will happen.

The question is WHEN will it happen, and how fast?

The biggest risk we face at the moment is a mass real estate sell off (from investors) as soon as it becomes apparent that real estate is no longer guaranteed to go up in Canada. It's not going to happen any time soon - there are hundreds if not thousands policies that are going to have to be rewritten for this to happen, and before that happens you need politicians elected who will actually make these changes.

Like I said at the very beginning, we have an entire generation of boomers who are relying almost exclusively on their personal residence to fund their retirement. If there is a housing crash, then we are looking at a scenario where we have an old generation that can no longer afford their retirement, while at the same time their kids can't afford to take care of them.

Essentially, the path out of this would be as such:

1. Bring government spending and taxation into balance with a focus to retiring debt at all levels of government. Bonus if one can simplify the tax code at the same time.

2. Re-evaluate the assumptions of life expectancy and cost of government services/benefits over a lifespan and account properly for expected future payouts.

3. A increasingly firm line on ability to accumulate mortgage debt (and other debt) at a personal level. I dislike paternalistic government, but people don't seem to be capable of restraint in this country. This would be done via banking regulation.

4. A stronger mandate to the Bank of Canada to provide price stability.

5. A pro-development housing regime to relieve the existing pressures of housing prices without causing a catastrophic housing price deflation in the short-to medium term. By making the asset class deflate relative to other options (stocks/bonds), we'd shift mentality over the longer-term. We're so backlogged with demand that this may take decades to accomplish.

6. A reactive gearing of immigration levels to what the economy requires and will likely require in the future. Which will probably require some soul-searching about things like 'industrial policy'. If we aim to be a do-nothing resource colony so be it, but we should be cognizant of the risks of a large portion of the labour force may experience if the bottom falls out of resource prices. Conversely, if we're going to revitalize manufacturing/high-value here, we'd better have a pro-development policy in all its facets. Our immigration targets should reflect our goals.

It's all very unlikely and seems to require bigger thinking than is currently apparent in Ottawa.

Don't companies post these jobs and then not hire anyone and claim we need TFWs?

There should never be a shortage of "low skilled workers" since those are job everyone can do, right? People just choose to remain unemployed vs. take a crap job and wage.

There can be a shortage of skilled labour, or overall labour.

This is unlikely in my opinion. I don't see any way out of this without triggering a short term crash. Most likely is a short term crash, followed by a bull run that peaks lower than the previous high, and then a longterm steady decline.

You have to remember that the market value is simply the balance of buyers vs sellers at that particular time. Even though we don't have nearly enough homes for all our people, the only thing that matters for today's sale prices is: how many homes are listed for sale, vs. how many people are currently in the market.

In a situation where a mass sell-off is triggered, you're going to see thousands of investors try to pull their profits at once. When this happens the number of listings will far surpass the number of people looking to buy at that time, and we will see a short term crash in prices.

It will reach a bottom at some point once most of the investors have pulled out and the inventory sold off, and then will return to a high driven by fundamentals.

Then you will see a longterm downward trend in real terms as construction goes up while population growth stagnates.

For reference here is Tokyo's home price index since 1984.

https://i0.wp.com/japanpropertycentr...40%2C728&ssl=1

https://japanpropertycentral.com/202...d-land-prices/

What your proposing is we need a bunch of people to write off investments they have made, with some perhaps going bankrupt. The end result is forcing them to evict their tenants so others can potentially get a good deal. In the process scare away property developers that are building new units.

Any solution that does not build more homes is not solving the problem. It is just moving money around.

It makes little difference if a home is owned by a investor or the person living there as long as its not sitting vacant. In both cases it is providing housing.

I'm not proposing anything. I'm saying what I think the likely outcome is going to be.

We 100% need more homes. As we trend towards a more pro-construction society, property prices will eventually go down in real terms. That is a given.

As soon as investors get a whiff that we're at the peak of they are all going to list their homes for sale in a very short period of time. If they aren't living in it, there is nothing preventing them from listing it at a moment's notice. It doesn't matter whether there's a tenant living in it, or if it's vacant. A listing is a listing. And if there 4x or more listings than sales, you have a buyers market. If you have 10x as many listings as sales you will have a housing crash (which will likely be short-lived, and followed by a bullrun).

Also, you mentioned that developers won't be incentivized to build if property prices keep going down - this I highly disagree with. All a developer cares about is recouping their costs by the time they sell. Most homes are sold before they're even built. If developers who have been sitting on land for a decade see that their land is starting to lose value, then they are going to be incentivized to either sell that land immediately (for which they are unlikely to find a buyer since the buyer pool are developers themselves), or develop it ASAP so they can sell it ASAP before the land loses even more value (much more likely).

By the way, here is a chart of Japan's population over the last few decades. As you can see, when their property bubble burst, their population was still growing. Japan's population didn't peak until 2009 ... 22 years after their property bubble had burst, and at which point Tokyo's property values had already plummeted by over 70%. Don't be naïve in thinking the same thing won't happen here. We don't know when it will happen, just that it will happen in the near future. Everything the Liberal government is doing right now to attract immigrants is a desperate attempt to prevent this bubble from popping, in my opinion. Ultimately it will fail, and it's the baby boomers who are going to end up losing their shirts. Here's another fun fact about Japan: 50% of those aged 65-69, and 33% of those aged 70-74 are still working (source).

https://i.ibb.co/7tLG2xR/japan.jpg
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...an-historical/

The Japanese Asset Bubble had a lot to do with the Plaza Accord
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japane...price%20bubble.

which is not necessarily a good analogy for what is happening in Canada.

I am curious about the rate of household formation in Japan for the 1990s and 2000s. That is a bigger underlying drive for housing demand, all other things being equal. Immigration is nearly a non-factor in Japan; the demographics of the country and supply of homes provided are key. The bubble popping was a run up in speculative demand that spectacularly cratered, similar to the US in the late 2000s. Demand was easily met by supply and once a recession hit, the speculative bubble popped.

The thing about Canada is that both rents and housing prices are high and vacancy very low. This seems more indicative of high demand to low supply mismatch. If housing prices fall here, in theory that pent up demand should flow out of rentals and into houses. As long as household formation rate remains higher than the ability to supply accommodation, the bottom shouldn't fall out. Obviously a severe recession changes this calculus.

We are never going to get out of this mess while our politicians refuse to dramatically reduce our immigration rates and for the 100k that we allow in every year, they must be in very high demand areas. Currently Canada is relying on house building/flipping to grow our economy and when prices start to decline {like last year}, what does Canada do? We increase our immigration levels to keep the Ponzi Scheme going while our productivity levels continue to decline. If we eventual reach a housing crash, Ottawa will turn around and just keep increasing immigration to stop it from happening.

Canada is getting progressively poorer and this will continue. Our standard of living has plunged in the last 40 years. When I was a kid a bank was a place to get money, not food and the only time you saw tents in your city was when the carnival came to town. Mass immigration, except for the very highly skilled in high demand areas, has led to the situation where instead of businesses investing in new technology or the skills of their workers, just import cheap labour. If cheap labour resulted in a wealthy population then Nigeria would be the new Switzerland. Immigration MUST plunge so Canada can again become a country with a high productivity level to say nothing of actually being able to house our people.

The thing that I find really scary about this whole situation is that younger Canadians seem to think this is normal. Dodging tents on the sidewalks or not being able to go to a city park , being asked for spare change every 100 meters, paying 60% of your income on a glorified walk-in-closet, and having your friends or family going to the Food Bank to put dinner on the table is just part of normal life. Poverty and homelessness has become just another part of our urban landscape and younger people seem to think that it has always been like this and will always will be and that is truly horrifying.

Yes it would be interesting to see that data.

Regarding vacancy stats:

7% of homes in Toronto were vacant in 2021, vs 5% in 2011. I can only assume that most of these are mostly short term rentals. This is roughly 90,000 units city-wide. (source 1, source 2)

Furthermore, 42% of all condos in Ontario are used as an investment (meaning the owner doesn't live in it). This is roughly 378,000 condo units across the province. (source 1, source 2)

It is incredibly easy for any investor to sell their property at any time, since it doesn't involve them moving or having to find a new place to buy. You can literally call your agent on Monday and have it on MLS by Wednesday without having to lift a finger. If a bunch of them get spooked at the same time we would see a flood of inventory hit the market all at once which would most certainly lead to a crash.

Afaik, neither party has suggested a lowering of immigration to that sort of level, although they could do so. I think I saw something in the news this week about the Government speeding up the family reunification process.

The 300k in the 2010s under both Harper and Trudeau seemed reasonable.

If you were actually concerned with productivity you'd wouldn't be decreasing immigration....you'd be placing a significant retiree tax on a 100km radius around every CMA where all the jobs are concentrated.

How productive is a retiree sitting on $1M worth of prime urban land relative to an immigrant working?

Of course they won't, the all want to whore around for the immigrant vote.

Is this the new “normal” for office buildings ?
(I sure hope not as a skyscraper enthusiast):

http://https://www.reminetwork.com/articles/office-building-values-still-trending-downward/

Apparently a debt ceiling compromise has been met in Washington and it MAY provide some help to Canada's finances.

The Republicans are looking for big cost reductions on current program spending in exchange for an agreement. The details have not yet been released but there is a good chance that one of the reductions could be directed at the IRA ACT which is responsible for the unGodly amount of government subsidies being thrown at auto giants and which Canada has had to match.

The ongoing subsidies for VW and others don't kick in until production starts and in the agreement it is stated that if the US subsidies fall, Ottawa's contribution falls by an equal amount. The IRA is a massive amount of money and would be easy picking for Republicans to demand a claw back with no negative political ramifications. It is also reported that the debt ceiling amount will only continue to 2025 and again, the scenario starts and again the IRA would be an easy target for cost reductions and is also before VW starts production in 2027.

This juvenille charade in Washington may actually end up helping Canada. Here's hoping.

GDP is up...another rate hike?

I'm a bit surprised. I thought growth would be flat this quarter, at best.

I'm not that surprised because we've had significant population growth.

I think BoC raises another .25

Early reports I've heard suggest that the Republicans aren't touching this. Usually in these debt ceiling negotiations, the GOP slashes social programs and things that help working class people, not corporate subsidies.

That said, I think that in the case of Stellantis, the Ontario government should have promised a token amount - like $500 million (still not chump change) and then called Stellantis' bluff. It's a much smaller plant than VW, and Stellantis has probably sunk enough planning effort into the project that they have to write off a certain amount if they decide to move the whole project to some southern state. Also, the VW subsidy as I understand it is more about foregone future tax revenues than cutting a cheque today.