Housing costs in Canada – and in particular apartment rental rates – are being driven up by international students and temporary foreign workers who are coming to the country in record numbers and putting pressure on the market, says an urban policy researcher.
Steve Pomeroy, a Carleton University Centre for Urban Research and Education (CURE) policy research consultant and senior research fellow, says international students and temporary foreign workers put a particular pressure on Canada’s rental market.
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“Temporary foreign workers and students are going to be renters, as opposed to owners,” Pomeroy reportedly told the National Post.
Opposition politicians blaming immigration for Canada’s housing woes
In Canada, right-of-centre politicians, including Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre and People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier blame – at least in part – the country’s record-high immigration levels for creating too much demand on the housing market and driving up prices.
The Conservative leader has said immigration targets should be driven by the number of vacancies that private sector employers need to fill, the number of charities that want to sponsor refugees, and the families that want to reunite quickly with loved ones.
Poilievre has so far not divulged an immigration target that would accomplish that goal but has repeatedly bashed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration policy as being out of control.
Further to the right on the political spectrum, Bernier, whose party failed to win a single seat in the last election, has said he wants immigration to be cut to less than a third of the current level.
“A People’s Party government will… substantially lower the total number of immigrants and refugees Canada accepts every year, from 500,000 planned by the Liberal government in 2025, to between 100,000 and 150,000, depending on economic and other circumstances,” the party’s website states.
The Conservative leader has said immigration targets should be driven by the number of vacancies that private sector employers need to fill, the number of charities that want to sponsor refugees, and the families that want to reunite quickly with loved ones.
Further to the right on the political spectrum People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, whose party failed to win a single seat in the last election, has said he wants immigration to be cut to less than a third of the current level.
“A People’s Party government will… substantially lower the total number of immigrants and refugees Canada accepts every year, from 500,000 planned by the Liberal government in 2025, to between 100,000 and 150,000, depending on economic and other circumstances,” the party’s website states.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller has defended the country’s immigration targets and suggested they are not the primary cause of Canada’s housing affordability crisis.
But all of those criticisms of Canada’s immigration policy have so far been almost exclusively about the number of new permanent residents the country accepts every year.
At CURE, Pomeroy is quick to point out many newcomers to Canada are not permanent residents but rather temporary foreign workers and international students and they too put pressure on the housing market.
International students coming to study in Canada in growing numbers
And their numbers are rising – fast.
Last year, the number of international students, those foreign nationals who hold study permits, shot up by 30.8 per cent, to 807,750 from 617,315 only a year earlier, data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) reveals.
Since then, the IRCC has issued 238,960 study permits in the first half of this year.
During that time, rents have shot up in almost every market in Canada, jumping roughly 10 per cent across the country.
Canada is a destination of choice for international students with universities here recruiting as many foreign nationals to come study here as possible because universities can charge international students much higher tuitions and so boost their revenues, said Pomeroy.
“In Ontario, university tuition fees are frozen, grants are frozen, but the only variable that universities have to generate new revenues is international students, so they naturally go and chase those,” he reportedly said.
The urban policy expert says Ottawa should work with the universities and colleges and developers to improve housing conditions for international students and help ease the pressure on the housing market.
“If the government was smart, it would say ‘OK, we’re causing the problem by giving out these visas to international students, how can we solve this problem,’” he reportedly said.
“Let’s work with the universities, let’s work with the private developers for some incentives and stimulus.”
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) rental construction financing initiative, a program that provides low-cost loans to encourage rental apartment projects, could be used to stimulate the construction of student housing, he suggested.
“You can wait until folks get displaced and they’re in the homeless shelter and we intervene and provide supportive housing and wraparound services to help them get out of shelters at significantly high cost, or we could build 1,000 units of student housing with no cost to government,” Pomeroy reportedly said.
Last year, IRCC data reveals there were 465,350 foreign nationals in the country who had gotten work permits through the International Mobility Program (IMP) and another 135,760 working in the country through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). That’s a total of 601,110 foreign workers who got work permits in 2022 alone.