Canada’s about face: They cut immigration way back then rentals and housing prices fell. By Christopher Brunet.
For years, Canada’s political elite insisted the housing crisis was caused by everything except immigration. It was a supply problem. A zoning problem. A financing problem. A speculation problem. A foreign-buyer problem. A NIMBY problem.
But never a population problem.
Anyone who suggested that record immigration levels might be overwhelming Canada’s housing and healthcare systems was treated as if he had committed a moral offense. You were not making a basic supply-and-demand argument. You were “blaming immigrants,” “scapegoating newcomers,” or spreading racist conspiracy theories. …
While the stock of “temporary” foreign workers remains high, the flow has effectively been throttled. In 2025, Carney’s first year in office, Canada saw negative population growth for the first time since Confederation in 1867! …
There is still an incredibly long way to go. But while Carney hasn’t completely shut off the tap — a political impossibility given the institutional momentum — he is at least forcing the ship in the right direction. It doesn’t excuse the years of elite gaslighting that got us here, but it is a stark departure from the Trudeau status quo.
Carney essentially stole Pierre Poilievre’s homework, but kept it quiet, technocratic, and respectable. No cringe slogans. No culture-war theatrics. No obvious permission structure for leftists to accuse him of xenophobia. That reflects a deeper understanding of the Canadian psyche. Many Canadians know the country imported people faster than it could house them, but they are too polite and still recoil from anything that feels cruel, crude, or openly anti-immigrant. Carney gave them a way to support restriction without feeling as though they had crossed a moral line. He did things politely and quietly.
The vibe is shifting. …
Housing prices went down!
The desperate bidding wars that characterized the Canadian rental market have completely disintegrated
Average asking rents across Canada have fallen year-over-year (YoY) for 19 consecutive months as of April 2026, and in April 2026, the national average asking rent for a house dropped by 7.9% YoY …
House prices in Brampton, Ontario, which has the highest South Asian population in the country, are in freefall
My shocked face just jumped out the window.
The about-face, but “no one was to blame:”
The numbers don’t lie, even if the politicians do. For a decade, they weaponized the language of tolerance to protect a broken economic model that enriched slumlords, corporate fast-food franchises, and strip-mall colleges at the expense of an entire generation of young Canadians.
These liars and traitors will never apologize. They will never admit that the “racists” and “conspiracy theorists” were simply describing supply and demand.
But the taboo is broken, the numbers are moving, and the old consensus is dead. …
The clearest sign that the taboo has shattered is that Liberals are now beginning to outflank Conservatives from the right. Eric Lombardi, a candidate for the Ontario Liberal leadership, is openly running on what amounts to a mass-remigration platform, calling for Canada to unwind its temporary-resident population from roughly five million people nationally to well under one million over the next five to ten years.
That would have been politically unthinkable two years ago. Not from a fringe populist party. Not from a Conservative backbencher. From a Liberal. Yet here we are: the party that spent the Trudeau years treating immigration restraint as a moral crime is now producing candidates who are willing to say, in plain language, that millions of temporary residents must leave.
This is how completely the politics have shifted. The Conservatives spent years trying to make the immigration-housing argument acceptable. Carney quietly absorbed it into government policy. Now Liberals are beginning to run ahead of the Conservative Party itself, using the language of administrative realism rather than nationalist revolt. What was racist in 2023 is Liberal pragmatism in 2026.