The Globe is going with a pretty click-bait-y title. But, I’ve seen others call for coordinating federal immigration numbers with infrastructure planning by municipalities and provinces. It looks like National Bank is on the same wavelength.

“The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing supply and demand. According to Statistics Canada, the working-age population surged 238,000 in Q2. That was the largest quarterly increase on record and 6.8 standard deviations from the historical norm of 82,000 per quarter. Unfortunately, Canadian homebuilders can’t keep up with this influx. Housing starts for Q2 2023 stood at 62,000 units (or 247,000 annualized). At just 0.26, the ratio of housing starts to working-age population growth fell to a new and stands at less than half its historical average of 0.61 (the ratio is normally below 1 to account for the fact that there is more than one person per household). To meet demand, builders would need to break ground on 144,000 units per quarter (or 576K annualized), double the best performance ever!

At an absolute bare minimum, post-secondary institutions should show students have decent housing before visas are granted.

  • Boxtifer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Could be many reasons.

    • tourism from friends and family
    • automatic surge of money that they bring
    • good optics to the other countries
    • I’m sure there are some form of country to country politics
    • ensures that when people come, there are common areas to go to automatically to fit in
    • some things like schooling charge more for international students
    • businesses have more customers resulting in more transactions which brings in more income everywhere

    Looking at this based on the sole problem of housing probably doesn’t paint the entire picture to why many countries do similar strategies.