Canada

No — the current housing troubles go back a long way. Back to at least the early 90s. A housing crisis like we’re seeing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been going on for a long, long time. But just like climate change people ignored it when it was a more superficial problem until we got to a point where it is close to intractable.

The early 90s was about when the NIMBYs took over in full force. Construction companies had by this time stopped building starter homes, and virtually nobody was building apartment buildings. Condos were suddenly where all of the vertical construction was going in Canada’s biggest cities.

The big problem here is that big projects like these take time — and the lack of focus in the 90s on these types of housing really started to manifest itself around 10 years later. If you lived in one of Canada’s big cities at the time complaints about how hard it was getting to buy a home weren’t a lot different than today (smaller centres didn’t quite have the same problem, although it slowly started to spill over into them as people moved to the peripheries to avoid the soaring costs in the major centres). Projects that can take 10 years from start to finish in the “missing middle” had been ignored, and you can’t go back in time to correct that.

It isn’t as if we didn’t have immigration before. In fact, the previous record number of immigrants into Canada was in 1921, at 22.3%. And the record highest per capita immigration rate Canada ever saw was in 1913, when Canada (with a population of only 7.6 million people) let in 400 900 newcomers — or nearly 5.3% of our population. It didn’t cause Canada to collapse.

It may feel like the Feds just decided to bring in all these people and dump the problem on the Provinces to deal with, but that’s not how the system works. Here is what Chris Alexander, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration under Prime Minister Steven Harper says about the process:

Under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), as adopted in 2001 and amended and updated regularly by successive governments ever since, the federal government must consult with its provincial counterparts on three issues: the number of permanent residents to be admitted in a given year; their “distribution in Canada taking into account regional economic and demographic requirements”; and what we call settlement issues, namely “the measures to be undertaken to facilitate their integration into Canadian society.”

In concrete terms, this means federal and provincial officials are in touch constantly, with the minister meeting his or her provincial and territorial counterparts regularly, as well as many other groups with an abiding interest in immigration.

So it isn’t as if the Provinces didn’t know and weren’t part of the conversation, and didn’t help come up with the numbers. The Feds numbers are typically the summation of what the Provinces want/need (all except Quebec have their own Provincial Nomination Programmes). But by and large, the Provinces still did fuck all about housing, even after asking for all these new immigrants (including international students).