Vancouver, Canada – When Leslie Macfarlane discovered that she and her husband were being evicted from a mobile house park in a vancouver suburb last year, she said she felt “of absolute anger”, then fear.
His house was scheduled to be demolished as part of a large remodeling of low -altitude apartments complexes.
The 67 -year -old retiree knew how difficult it would be to find rental homes in the notoriously exensive region of the bass continent. She predicted correctly: her house hunt was useless.
“We couldn’t pay anything,” Macfarlane told Al Jazeera.
The couple’s housing costs would almost have tripled, firing approximately $ 1,100 to $ 3000 for an apartment with half of the space. The couple decided to move from the city and return to the hometown of Macfarlane or Gibsons, a small coastal community in British Columbia.
“I remember that when I was raising my children, if I had a job, you could afford to run. It may not be a great place to rent, but it could afford something. That is no longer the case,” Macfarlane told Al Jazeera.
The expenses in the small city, accessible only by Ferry, are “higher in everything,” Macfarlane said, particularly for the edibles.
As the cost of groceries increases, she has been buying less.
“It is reaching the point where we are buying baskets or food per week or cars.”
For Macfarlane, the affordability of the house and the increase in the cost of the groceries are the two biggest problems of this year’s federal elections for April 28.
Post-pandemic inflation
The former liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, promised “sunny forms” when he first chosen in 2015, but as the Canadian affordable crisis intensified on his mandate, many Canadians have been trapped in an inflationary storm.
Since Trudeau re -election in 2021, the cost of consumer goods increased dramatically. In June 2022, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the inflation rate was 8.1 percent more than the previous year, the greatest annual change since 1983, according to Statistics Canada. The governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, attributed high inflation to shipping bottlenecks and pandemic -related delays, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Although inflation has slowed its then, and now it is 2.3 percent, real prices remain much higher than in 2020.
Canadians have fought to keep up with the increase in the cost of living.
Consumers feel the most deep effect on regularly bought items, such as food and gasoline, according to David Macdonald, a senior economist of the Canadian Center for Policies Alternatives.
“People feel that inflation more personally,” he said.
The affordability of housing in Canada has been a concern for years before the pandemic, but Macdonald said it worsened “much worse” when the Canada Bank began to increase interest rates.
The rates began to increase in 2022, rising to 5 percent in 2023. The Canada Bank finally reduced the rates in mid -2024; The rate is now 2.75 percent.
“You’re safe anywhere,” Macdonald said. “It didn’t matter if I was renting, it didn’t matter if I owned; both parties were beaten strongly by much higher interest rates.”
In some key Canadian cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver, Macdonald said the rental increases have “amazing.”
Since March 2020, the average income income throughout Canada has increased by almost 18 percent.
Inflation means bad news for politicians in power, according to Macdonald, regardless of the persuasion of the country or politics.
“[Inflation] Not only happened here; It happened everywhere, “Macdonald said.” If you were in power during that period, then they hit you in the electoral picture in the next elections. “
Immigration pressures
Some Canadians should point out the high targets of Trudeau’s immigration as a reason for the out of reach housing.
“They cultivated the population almost three times faster than the housing stock,” said conservative leader Pierre Poilievre last year. He has criticized the “mass growth of the uncontrolled population that exercised tension in our real estate market, our medical care and our labor market” under Trudeau.
Trudeau had chosen his leg on a platform that included changing the discourse on immigration to be more positive and multicultural, according to Irene Bloemraad, professor of Political Science and Sociology at the University of British Columbia and co -director of Migration Studies.
Immigration numbers increased to 2020, when the pandemic caused a “dramatic fall” in the number of people who come to Canada.
As the economy opened in 2021, Canadian companies, universities and provincial governments felt a great need for more workers, students and others, especially after a period of little migration, Bloemraad said.
The federal government quickly increased the number of temporary visas for workers and students.
“It must be argued that the government exceeded, that they are too aggressive in doing this,” he said, since the rapid influx of new people in certain metropolitan areas exerted pressure on those real estate markets.
An environmental survey at the end of 2024 showed that 58 percent of Canadians believed that the country accepts too many immigrants, compared to 27 percent in 2022.
“Immigration tends to be an easy goal for groups of people, because it is identifiable,” said Bloemraad. “People forget that housing prices were also very high before Covid. It is not that this happened during the night.”
The Trudeau Government reduced its immigration projections in October last year, establishing a goal for about 395,000 permanent residents in 2025, below the 485,000 permanent residents planned in 2024. Bloemraad pointed out the now 209 and your reduction in 205 andn more than one restart than a great change in the direction.
Compounds of affordability crisis
Toronto resident Shahad Ishak said Trudeau could also have bit more than he could chew when it came to electoral promises.
“He has sold many promises to people,” he told Al Jazeera.
When he emigrated to Canada from Kuwait in 2013, he could have bought a house potentially.
“But from there, it got worse. At this point, I will never buy a house in my life.”
And it was easy to settle in Canada.
In 2016, he had to use his savings and pay six months in advance because the owner would not rent him without credit history. It was not the only time that barriers faced due to the lack of Canadian experience.
He had to take minimum wage jobs, including one in a call center with “very hard conditions.”
Possible got a work in a bank, but was hired at the bottom of the professional staircase, as a bank cashier, despite having almost nine years of experience working in the corporate banking in Kuwait.
The work paid for little more than the minimum wage, and its lack of seniority meant that I had to work on weekends. Possible to quit smoking, Ishak returned to school and is now a doctoral student in Sociology.
Four of his close friends, all engineers, left Canada due to the affordability crisis after immigration.
“It makes me ask me,” said Ishak, “how do people survive here? Because payment is not enough.”
She expects the next government to prioritize that rental homes are more affordable.
This choice feels different, according to Ishak, partly due to the affordability crisis, but also because foreign policy will be an important factor.
Trudeau calls it.
In January, after political agitation in the Liberal Party and shadow -voting figures, Trudeau announced his resignation as party leader.
The leader of the Conservative Party, Pailievre, who had campaigned aggressively in the elimination of Trudeau, had his leg on the way to the victory and was favored to win a “comfortable” majority, according to a Nanos survey.
Trudeau renouncing took much of the wind from Pailievre’s candles. The “huge” advantage of conservatives begged a free fall.
As anxiety has grown around tariffs and annexation threats from the president of the United States, Donald Trump, Canadians have reduced affording in their list of electoral priorities.
The replacement of Trudeau, the new liberal prime minister Mark Carney, now leads the surveys, capitalization of the public perception of being the best appropriate politician to negotiate with Trump.
Macdonald, the economist, said Trudeau resigned from “washed this choice” or inflationary anger, to some extent.
“Normal people are still really angry because prices are 30 percent higher in the articles of the grocery store five years ago,” MacDonald said. However, Canadians at this point are probably more angry with the United States, he added.
“But the cost of living is a second close in most places.”