Jason Kenney 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱

Andrew makes a pretty great point in this thread that housing prices consistently rose faster than incomes for 20 years, while the big spike in immigration was 2020-2024. But I disagree with him on his conclusion (I’ll get to that). Our housing cost challenges have 4 basic root causes in Ontario (if not all of Canada): 1. Immigration > Supply. 2. 1990s infrastructure downloading -> High taxes on new housing. 3. 2000s Land use/ growth reforms -> Less space for housing & smaller units. 4. Fragmented municipal permitting. I’ve personally been advocating solutions for 2-4 for years, in fact, it’s what I’m most known for. But Andrew’s proposed solution here, that we should return to high immigration rates because our politicians have stopped pursuing reforms, is a really bad one. If Canada’s elites and business leaders want a fast population growth country, lobby provinces and the federal government to make reforms that actually enable the capacity and supply we need BEFORE. They barely acted as a generation got priced out before, there is no telling that they will after. It’s a dumb game of chicken that weaponizes the economic interests of young people in practice to secure a fantasy policy goal at some point in decades (a higher population country). You are more likely to make an entire generation jaded while immigrants themselves get blamed for failures of political leaders. We are already seeing reversals of modest reforms in places like Edmonton. Demanding we price out young people even more so theoretically we get political action is an insane gambit.