While all attention is on the Trump-induced global economic (military, environmental, biological, etc) chaos, Canada was in perilous straights for entirely different reasons. It was a perfect storm that could have been calamitous.

Since the late 2010s and through to 2024, we had a real-estate based economy that was juiced by outrageous levels of migration1. Housing prices spiralled upwards and many of us were “rich” on paper. Everyone was a real-estate agent, and the few who weren’t would “invest” by buying pre-con condos in the expectation that you’d just flip it for a big profit when complete.

Housing sales were super hot as everyone had a FOMO and newspapers would (and still do) breathlessly report on whatever “it only ever goes up” nonsense real estate groups would feed them. Various levels of government netted big on land transfer taxes, service taxes for fees, and so on.

The government would herald every GDP gain fuelled entirely by a massive influx of people, while most Canadians got poorer in real terms. And as housing got completely out of hand and irrational, at every natural limit the government would announce new programs that would juice the markets even more: Expanding credits and lending programs, buying up mortgage risks from the banks, relaxing taxes, and an unending series of mass migration programs. Throwing gasoline on the fire, and doing quite literally the opposite of what would be responsible.

This has collapsed, and always had an expiry date. Housing prices were utterly detached from any semblance of reality and could only be rationalized by stuffing a dozen international “students” in your basement. They remain irrational compared to real Canadian incomes, but everyone knows the delusion is over.

So it’s impressive that the hard landing has been softened from this disastrous setup that Canada was in2. That is what I was most concerned about — not the frantic chaos from the clown show South of the border — and ultimately Canada seems to have slowly started returning to the rational and became a country that makes stuff and innovates and invents, and doesn’t just go on insanely boring conversations about real estate constantly, which was where we were at as a nation.

There is still a lot of correction that needs to happen for the health and wellbeing of the country, and things are going to be pretty flat for a few years.

Footnotes

  1. Various endless immigration advocates would always wave-away the outrageous destruction caused by this ridiculous influx by declaring that it was just illusory, and these people are “temporary”. These are exactly the same people who are now demanding that the government give everyone who came here under one of these temporary visas some sort of permanent status. ↩

  2. This isn’t saying that things are great, and the correction from this economic and social self-destruction will be painful, though it’s uproarious when detractors compare Canada’s real job numbers with the absolutely fictional numbers coming out of the “make numbers up” US Department of Labor. Anyone who really thinks the US is doing well right now betrays they have zero functioning grey matter. And just to be clear, US jobs reports have always been inaccurate, endlessly seeing adjustments downwards as the nature of how they are collected, but under the current communist administration of Chairman “Sharpie-the-Hurricane” Trump they are North Korean level fantasy. ↩

See Also