Majority of new Canadians feel they are being unfairly blamed for housing crisis: OMNI poll

CITYnews halifax / By Giacomo Burrati, OMNI News

As the housing affordability crisis continues to impact Canadians across the country, a majority of immigrants feels they are being unfairly blamed, as they themselves see the dream of home ownership slip further out of reach.

A poll commissioned exclusively for OMNI by Leger found that nearly seven in 10 new Canadians think politicians are using immigration as a “red herring” to distract from other factors contributing to the lack of affordable housing, such as government policies and economic conditions.

The federal government is planning on bringing the share of temporary residents to 5 per cent of Canada’s total population, down from 6.5 percent.

According to a housing expert, however, “relatively high immigration numbers” don’t necessarily mean newcomers are responsible for high shelter costs.

“One big issue, as we know, is that some areas just have a higher percentage of population of new immigrants than they used to, and as a result they get used as a scapegoat for the housing crisis,” says Prentiss Dantzler, the Director of the Housing Justice Lab at the University of Toronto. “People forget that this housing crisis is not new. We’ve been dealing with this for a long time.”

“There’s a lot of blame to go around, but a lot of time people are focusing on other individuals and not focusing on the housing system itself,” he told OMNI News.

Dantzler points out that a lot of the housing stock is not even being bought up by individuals, but by private equity firms or other companies, and that the number of condos on the market means the system “is not serving a diverse portfolio of families.”

A lot of blame to go around

“What we really need to do to overcome the housing crisis is to build more houses,” says Sabine El-Chidiac, at the Consumer Choice Center. “The fact is that there isn’t enough for the people that need them.”

A former policy advisor to federal Immigration ministers, El-Chidiac believes politicians are scapegoating immigrants, despite being the ones responsible for the lack of affordable homes.

“They are the ones who instituted the policies that got us here,” she told OMNI News. “Every level of government has made policies that have made it more difficult for homes to be built in Canada.”

El-Chidiac says if politicians “actually cared” about solving the crisis, “they would come up with ways that allow people to build more.”

Responding to the poll finding on Tuesday, however, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told OMNI News that “there’s no question” the volume of temporary residents Canada welcomed the past few years has contributed to the affordability crisis.

“That is not something you can go around denying entirely,” he added. “To what extent it contributes to it, I think, has been subject of debate.”

Miller said provincial premiers have been blaming immigrants “for 100 per cent of all ills of society,” and that is not the right approach to take.

But using scapegoats when trying to tackle complex issues is something political actors have always done, says Dantzler, who adds that if home ownership is part of the Canadian dream and identity, so is the fact that Canada is a country of immigrants.

“We need to put that first,” he says, “and not use it as a political tactic to divide people when it’s politically feasible or advantageous for us to do so.”

Housing: ‘A Mirage for an Immigrant’

Janice, who moved from China to Toronto, is waiting to become a permanent resident to try and make an offer on a condo.

“I know that now the Canadian government wants to cut down a lot of temporary residents,” she told OMNI News. “So housing prices will be dropping, eventually .”

The OMNI-Leger Poll found that owning a home is part of the Canadian Dream for 85 per cent of newcomers, with more than double compared to last year defining that Canadian dream as the ability to purchase one’s own home.

But the possibility of achieving this dream appears to be bleak, according to many respondents. Forty-nine per cent disagreed that home ownership is a possibility for all immigrants who come to Canada. Of those who are currently renting, three in 10 polled say they will never be able to buy a home.

Pietropaolo Frisoni, a recent immigrant from Italy, says buying a home in Canada has become increasingly difficult.

“Home prices are appalling,” he told OMNI News in Italian. “Canada offers some small incentives, but overall, buying a home now is almost like a mirage for an immigrant.”

Overall, 54 per cent of immigrants feel that they are being blamed for a problem they did not create. In fact, renters, younger immigrants, those who have been in Canada for less than 6 years, and BIPoC individuals feel it even more.

“Many immigrants who moved here in the early 00s or in the 90s – it was much easier then to become a citizen and buy a house,” says Frisoni. “It’s different for us now. We must be patient.”

The OMNI-Leger online poll was conducted between August 28th to September 9th, among a random selection of surveyed 1500 respondents who were not born in Canada. A probability sample of this size would have a margin of error of 2.5%, 19 times out of 20.