Tony Keller’s column last week makes one thing clear: Canada didn’t just lose control of its immigration system; it lost the ability to talk about it honestly.
While Canada’s population growth quietly tripled after 2015, housing economists and policy experts largely stayed silent about what this would mean for housing. Instead, they blamed skyrocketing rents and home prices on zoning, red tape, and a supposedly sluggish construction industry.
Rather than stating the obvious - that tripling population growth in a country already struggling to build enough homes was unsustainable - they argued that the solution was to triple the pace of homebuilding. It was an elegant theory that sounded both pragmatic and optimistic. But it was also completely detached from reality.
Did anyone seriously believe that Canada could triple housing completions in a matter of years? Or was it easier to avoid the politically sensitive question Keller raises, that our immigration surge was a deliberate policy choice with predictable consequences for housing affordability?
For nearly a decade, immigration and housing policy became matters of virtue, not trade-offs. As Keller put it, “Nobody said boo.” The conversation shifted from evidence to ideology. Economists who should have known better treated demand as untouchable, and instead turned “supply” into a moral crusade.
The irony is that by refusing to engage honestly with demand - and by insisting that any discussion of immigration’s impact on housing was off-limits - Canada’s experts made it harder to solve the very crisis they claim to care about.
Until we can talk about both sides of the equation - population and housing - we’ll keep pretending that a country that can’t build enough homes for one million new people a year can somehow triple that output, and everything will work out fine.
John Pasalis is President of Realosophy Realty. A specialist in real estate data analysis, John’s research focuses on unlocking micro trends in the Greater Toronto Area real estate market. His research has been utilized by the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
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