Geoff Russ: Immigration made affordability worse. Liberals gaslighted us all

Did the Liberal government lie about the effects of mass immigration, or simply get it wrong? It is almost certainly a heady mix of both. Canadians were told not to notice what was happening right in front of them, and they have every reason to be angry about the impact it had on their lives, most notably on affordability or the sudden emergence of shady “career” colleges in strip malls.

The latest batch of evidence is found in an economics paper from University of Windsor graduate student Ali Ghazizadeh Monfared. He focuses specifically on immigration from India, the largest source of immigration to this day, and the impact on housing prices in Canada.

In his analysis, Monfared does not assume that newcomers to Canada pick cities at random. Instead, he assumes that they choose to move to places that are already doing well economically, which complicates the analysis of cause and effect as part of the spread.

To translate this work into plainer language, Monfared predicts where Indian immigrants will arrive based on where fellow Indians already lived, choosing 2011 as the baseline year, and based on how Canada-wide Indian immigration fluctuated over time.

Monfared’s predicted flow is then used to estimate the causal effect on housing prices, rather than simply tracking correlations. When applying the model to 21 different metropolitan areas between 2012 and 2022, the results are exactly what Canadians have been saying for years: mass immigration made new houses more expensive and rents higher. The cities cited range in population size from Toronto to Saint John, New Brunswick.

“(B)oth economic and demographic factors interact with immigration-driven demand to shape housing outcomes,” writes Monfared. “(I)mmigration-induced demand shocks can drive up housing prices, especially in supply-constrained markets. Canadian cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, which face well-documented supply challenges, are likely experiencing intensified price responses to immigration shocks.”

The formula held true for different housing types, including bachelor apartments and two-bedroom units. Monfared’s excellent work is a welcome confirmation that even the most lofty pro-immigration rhetoric of the Liberal government could not defeat the law of supply and demand.

Furthermore, Monfared’s paper focuses only on India, which while the largest source of immigration into Canada, is just one of dozens of countries that have seen large population transfers to Canada in the past decade, with the average price of a house rising by $16,000 per year. By isolating immigration-driven demand shocks, Monfared concludes that higher immigration was associated with rising monthly rentals, with bachelor apartments carrying the highest increases, as well as two-bedroom rentals.

Middle- and working-class Canadians should take Monfared’s paper as further permission to say aloud that mass immigration has made their lives materially worse, without being called rude, wrong, or “racist” by government officials, NGOs, or other activists.

In 2023, Justin Trudeau lectured Canadians on why it was wrong to single out international students as a reason for the spike in housing costs, and then equivocated by insisting there were “different” contributing factors, pretending as if demand pressures were inconsequential.

That same year, Trudeau’s then-minister of immigration, Marc Miller, stated, “We have to get away from this notion that immigrants are the major cause of housing pressures and the increase in home prices.”

Less than two years later, that same political class began to applaud the slashing of annual immigration numbers for the positive effect on housing prices. In November 2024, Miller touted, on social media, a potential 45 per cent reduction in the “housing gap” due to the late-stage Trudeau government’s cuts to immigration.

So what happened to Miller and Trudeau’s demands that Canadians ignore the changes wrought by millions of newcomers who arrived under their government?

There are two unflattering possibilities.

First, they may have been dishonest. Swelling the number of people living in Canada superficially boosts GDP and allows the Liberals to brag about growth while ignoring worsening GDP per capita. Many skeptics correctly termed this trick “human quantitative easing.”

The second possibility is simple incompetence. Perhaps they believed that demand for housing and supply would magically align if enough potential construction workers entered the country, and municipalities would build at a scale unseen since the Second World War.

In either case, the people who noticed that both were nonsense received scolding and spin in return.

In 2023, Maclean’s published a piece defiantly declaring that “limiting immigration isn’t the solution,” and suggested that blaming the surge of newcomers was to shoot at an “easy target,” while also noting that the population had grown by over a million people in 2022 due to temporary and permanent immigration.

On the hard left, arguments that there was too much immigration were slandered as a moral panic, with critics instead blaming the evils of capitalism, and castigating those asking questions for apparently scapegoating foreigners.

Trying to ignore the relationship between the numbers of immigrants, government policy, and negative economic pressure is akin to ignoring the connection between peanuts, people with allergies, and anaphylactic shock.

Do you notice the sleight of hand? It is perfectly acceptable to believe that bad housing policies are to blame, and that zoning, fees, and the lack of purpose-built rentals all matter.

But if you so much as imply that historically outsized immigration levels worsened the lot of everyday Canadians, you are suspect, and those suspicions were endorsed by the Liberals.

This is why the pivot matters. The Liberals were eventually forced to half-admit their mistakes, or malpractice, with Trudeau confessing his government “didn’t get the balance right” on immigration after the pandemic, as if it were a mediocre martini with too much vermouth. They spent years denying that population growth was a central pressure on rising housing prices, and now want to congratulate themselves for changing course when most young Canadians are deeply pessimistic about their future.

Advocates for mass immigration have lost the economic argument, and most Canadians want a reduction in the annual numbers. After years of Ottawa and its ideological allies minimizing the material effects of immigration, Canadians should insist on an honest second conversation about the social and cultural consequences of rapid change.

Surveys show Canadians want sterner expectations regarding assimilation and mainstream national norms, and they deserve that debate without being smeared for noticing the changes around them.

The supposed Canadian exceptionalism when it comes to the pitfalls of immigration and multiculturalism is winding down. For those who want a truly responsible approach to both subjects, now is the time to keep pushing the boundaries of debate and discourse.

National Post