demographics
01. demographics
Canada’s latest immigration targets will benefit the workforce; we need to rise to the challenge of providing enough housing.
CANADA’S LATEST IMMIGRATION TARGETS
Canada is a country that has been built by immigration. To this day, immigration plays a significant role in not only growing the national population, but also shaping its workforce, its cultural landscape, and its cornerstones of universal health care and the Canada Pension Plan. And immigration flows continue to increase, with an average of almost 300,000 immigrants being welcomed to Canada in each of the past two years. Recently, the federal government laid out its plan for even more immigrants to come to Canada in the coming years, a move meant to counterbalance the economic headwind created by an aging—and consequently, slowly-growing—labour force. Canada aims to open its doors to up to 350,000
immigrants in 2021, up from its first-year target of 310,000 in 2018. If we assume that in the absence of these targets Canada would have continued to welcome roughly 300,000 immigrants each year, the implication of the policy is Canada growing by at least an additional 185,000 people between 2018-2021. For Metro Vancouver, this means an additional 22,500 people will need to be accommodated during this period above and beyond what trends would indicate. The region will need to find a way to add almost 9,000 net new homes to accommodate this additional increment of growth over four years. Are policymakers, developers, and all other market participants ready to take on this challenge?
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