As Canada’s population reaches the milestone of 40 million people, economists and housing experts are warning that accelerating immigration numbers could strain the country’s housing market and health-care system.
“My first reaction is that it’s great for the people coming to the country, but maybe it’s not so great for the people in the country,” Frank Clayton, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Toronto Metropolitan University, said in an interview.
“It’s putting so much pressure on our infrastructure, whether it’s housing or hospitals or whatever, it seems that we’re not prepared for it.”
Clayton said while population growth is good for the economy, he raised concerns about the federal government’s inadequate planning when it comes to the infrastructure needed to support new immigrants. He said this often results in municipalities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—which are the top destinations for new immigrants—shouldering the burden of trying to accommodate them.
“It’s just overwhelming for where those people go ... there’s no planning for the infrastructure,” Clayton said, citing numbers from Statistics Canada that showed Toronto’s population grew by over 138,000 people in 2022.
Housing Shortfalls
Bill Tufts, founder of Fair Pensions For All, an advocacy group focusing on public sector pension and compensation issues, said he believes immigration is good for Canada. But he is concerned mass immigration will bring “massive” economic problems for the country, especially when it comes to housing.“That leaves a huge, significant shortfall of housing requirements. It’s bigger than the total housing population of Vancouver, which has about 338,000 housing units,” he told The Epoch Times.
“Obviously something’s got to change, [such as] housing density where you all of a sudden have housing density of four or five people per home.”
Economy
David Amborski, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, said high immigration levels benefit Canada by bringing in the necessary workers to drive the economy, but he acknowledged it also puts stress on the housing market, health-care system, and schools.To offset these strains, Amborski said there will need to be adequate certification processes to allow immigrants to become doctors, nurses, construction workers, and teachers.
“We have to look at bringing people in with those skill sets across the board. You want to make sure that some of the immigrants coming in have the skills to meet the needs that are created by increased population,” he said in an interview.
“The immigration numbers are pretty high, but it depends if you’re bringing in people with the skill sets that will spur the economy. If you can meet the needs of the increased population, then it makes sense, but if you’re ignoring those kinds of skill sets, then [that] doesn’t make sense.”
Kevin Milligan, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia, said it’s better for Canada to have a growing population than a declining one, such as countries like Japan or China.
“There are certainly challenges that arise when we have immigration—of integration, challenges of the housing market, which we’re certainly seeing now,” he told The Epoch Times. “But I'd rather [have high immigration] when we have a booming demand for labour like we have right now, than when we have a big unemployment problem,” he said.
As for the government’s emphasis on student visas, Milligan said there are few downsides to allowing a “whole bunch of young, ambitious, well-trained, smart people” to come to Canada. However, the immigration numbers have put stress on many cities’ housing markets, he said, something all levels of government need to work on together to remedy.
Milligan said he and some other economists have expressed “caution about whether we’ve gone a bit too far too fast, especially on the student visa issue and the stress it has on some areas of Canada.”
“I think it is a fair set of questions to ask: are we going too fast, too quickly?” he said. “My sense is that we’re getting close to [the end of] our ability to absorb right now. I wouldn’t want to go an awful lot faster.”