Housing crisis vs. immigration: Is it time to slow things down?

We’ve opened comments on this video to hear your ideas and experiences related to this story. Comments remain closed on other videos to try to reduce harm to the subjects of our content, our staff and the audience.

We’re importing Uber drivers and Tim Horton cashiers. The country needs construction workers, welders , plumbers etc

It’s not just housing though. We need to fix housing, healthcare and existing social services that are degrading before we have aggressive immigration targets.

Immigration should be and always should have been indexed to Canada's ability to build new houses.

One thing to consider, if some people have not realized, is that the largest Canadian colleges (not universities) are essentially diploma mills that bring in hundreds of thousands of international students into the country each year. A lot of these 1-to-2-year college diplomas are just a piece of paper, with many classes consisting of 70%+ international students. As a second-generation immigrant, I favor halting "student visas" which some politicians have suggested. The cost of giving oligarchs their much loved cheap labor to work under horrible conditions is a price everyone is paying dearly for. It lowers salaries across the board, makes standard work conditions worse, and promotes fraud, all because desperate, entitled people, sometimes lying on their application and pretending to be students, will accept anything to stay or become PRs. International students may pay taxes and subsidize domestic tuition but the broader long term economic implications they have is contributing to the crises we're experiencing in this country. If we're going to allow more immigrants, we need more skilled labour or people who will pursue something actually useful, and who will actually integrate with the rest of Canadian society. "Leaders" and politicians are just as much to blame if not more.

Mass (legal) immigration is causing labour shortage. To fill 1 carpenter job you bring a family of 5, who will eventually sponsored parents and siblings. Now you need more doctors, teachers, roads, shelters, food etc. The solution is to make it affordable for families here to have children.

Let’s have an immigration stop for 5 years and see what happens.

Hilarious. The left side of the table is a developer who has a vested interest in increasing house prices and scarcity, and an IT manager who has a vested interest in hiring cheap immigrant labour (and funnily argues that immigrants are building houses). Our entire economy is tied up in a real estate bubble, and it will be solved when no one wants to live here anymore.

‘We need more houses for people who build houses so they can build houses!’ This is about as Canadian as it gets.

Who voted for this volume of immigration? Who voted for the majority of the immigration coming from India, and a specific region of India?

Why is immigration the ONLY way to sustain our economy? And why is this idea always repeated and never challenged?

The woman in pink made an excellent point. For some it’s not about not wanting a child or being a fit parent but can you give that child a good quality of life especially compared to the quality of life we once had. I’d add, what kind of future is there for those kids and how will they afford to live!

Finally someone in the mainstream media is talking about this....excellent format to discuss the issue. One thing that struck me was how the tech person thought that the number of 1.3% of the population being immigrants wasn't a big deal....it's a huge number of people who have to completely start a new life and need access to all of our services and infrastructure.

It shouldn't take 5 years to train someone to build a house. If there isn't enough skilled labour to build homes in Canada, then maybe the wages are too low. If the housing crisis is getting worse because of too high immigration, then it only makes sense to take the foot off the accelerator and give time for the housing supply to catch up.

Lol that guy isn't concerned about the good of society at all. He's all about himself and his cheap labour

Time to slow down was about 5-7 years ago. Today is time to put a full stop until our infrastructure can catch up.

Vancouver guy is the typical "I got mine" in Canada.

Unless you, as an immigrant, are bringing something to the table, that this country is in short supply of, then YES STOP THE INFLUX of more people. This influx puts a strain of all levels of healthcare, education, housing, etc. and Canadian born and veterans must come first.

This conversation was fantastic and needs to continue. My daughter who just started College and I have these conversations often. Unfortunately the above program only touched on the demmographic crisis. When I was in highschool in the 1980's there were roughly 10 different highschools in my community. Now there are only 4. Back in the 80's, all of the minimum wage service type jobs across the city were either highschool or post secondary students. Now those same jobs are nearly all filled by foreign students. It's scary to say, but if it weren't for all of the foreign students at the local College and University, much of the local service sector would collapse. Now that we're in this mess, governments are in crisis mode, because they don't have a clue about planning ahead of the next election.

As an Indian saying this Canada should stop PR for few years. Close down private colleges for profit and bring a balance in housing and healthcare. Lots of Indian students just waste a lot of money for these colleges in Canada which is a huge drain on our resources.