Chrystia Freeland, who also serves as Canada’s deputy prime minister, said the issue was her main domestic concern. “We had a better chance of buying a home and starting a family than young people today and we can not have a Canada where the rising generation is excluded from the dream of owning a home,” he told reporters on Monday, calling the current situation a “stroke”. . Canada has the largest income and housing price gap in the G7, according to the OECD, and two of its major cities, Vancouver and Toronto, often appear in global real estate bubble rankings. In February, the country recorded the highest average selling price for a home ever, $ 816,720 ($ 647,340 or 49 497,101), with prices up 20% last year. The province of Nova Scotia had the largest increase of any region, with house prices soaring by 35% from last year. The city of Kingston, Ontario recorded the largest increase, with prices jumping 44%. Politicians and economists are increasingly concerned that such increases are unsustainable, but experts say there are no quick fixes to the crisis, which is due in part to low interest rates, market speculation and a lack of new housing. The Liberal government’s budget announced last week imposed a two-year ban on foreign housing in a bid to tame low prices. He also pledged to invest C $ 10.14 billion in housing and said he would accelerate the pace of new housing, with Freeland blaming the low housing stock as a major driver of rising prices. “We can not have the fastest growing population in the G7 without also having the fastest growing stock of housing,” he said. Elected officials have increasingly made affordable housing the focus of their re-election campaigns. Ontario Prime Minister Doug Ford, who is facing voters in June, has blamed cities for slow zoning processes, arguing that delays are increasing costs. “Believe it or not, guys, sometimes [developers] “It may take four to six years to apply for a permit,” he said late last year. “Where in North America does it take four to six years?” Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre has also put affordable housing at the center of his campaign. In a viral video shot over the weekend in Vancouver, the pioneer blamed the “big city janitors”, claiming the system was intended to keep real estate investors rich. On Tuesday, Statistics Canada released new data highlighting “inequalities” in the country’s housing market. The data collected by the national agency found that “multi-property owners own almost a third of all homes” and that “the top 10% of wealthiest homeowners account for about a quarter of the value of homes”.
