Why does Canada keep inviting immigrants when housing is already too expensive?

 Allan:

Well, first of all, the Canadian birth rate is too low to maintain the population, and Canada needs young and ambitious people to pay the taxes to support old and retired people like me. That is the primary reason for inviting in more immigrants.

Second, the high housing prices are confined to a few very large and congested Canadian cities, notably Toronto and Vancouver. If you look at the prices of housing in all cities over 1 million, they are:

• Vancouver $1,175,000
• Toronto $1,090,000
• Ottawa $660,000
• Montreal $515,000
• Calgary $494,000
• Edmonton $398,000

Once you are out of the overpopulated regions of Southern Ontario and Coastal BC, prices fall to half or less of the two top cities, and prices in Edmonton are not more than 1/3 the price of houses in Vancouver. Once you get out of the million+ cities, prices fall even farther. Winnipeg is only $369,000 and smaller cities like Regina, Saskatoon, and Halifax are even lower.

We just need immigrants to move to less congested parts of the country, of which we have lots. Most of this country is nearly completely empty — we have fewer people than California in an area larger than the entire US, and 80% of the country’s farmland is in the less populated prairies. We could pass laws forcing immigrants to go there and take housing pressure off the most highly congested cities which are attracting them now. They would just have to put up with somewhat colder weather than Vancouver or Toronto.

Maybe we could make “cold tolerance” one of the criteria of the immigration points system. Send them to Winnipeg and give them all down parkas, toques, and mukluks. They can get used to the weather and they’ll blend right in.

Winter in Winnipeg. Calgary and Edmonton are much warmer than this.

New cold tolerance test for immigrants

These are actually researchers acclimatizing to the cold in Antarctica, but you get the general concept.

David Moe