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Comment by ravendug | Hacker News Reader

It’s nowhere near 1 million per year. The record from 2021 was 405,000 and the plan for the next 3 years is < 1.5 million in total.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

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That's 405,000 permanent residents only. Add to that hundreds of thousands international students + hundreds of thousands temporary workers + tens of thousands asylum seekers + etc + etc

Based on a Google search, Canada builds 200k homes, condos and other dwellings in a year. Looks like the pace needs to be doubled.

I’m not disagreeing that a lot more should be done on the supply side but the suggestion of it needing to double comes across as the additional demand equaling 1 home per immigrant which is simply not the case. I would like to see the hard numbers but I would expect a significant proportion to be 2+ families.

Yep, there's a huge amount of international students in Canada and many of them are here for the purpose of eventually getting permanent residency. We are also extremely generous when it comes to granting asylum. My dad actually gamed the asylum process to immigrate to Canada.

Those are mostly temporary by definition so I don’t see that as a source of the longer term shortages at the macro level unless it is shown that the size of the student and temporary worker pool is growing significantly every year? Sure, many of those eventually go onto permanent residency but that’s still included in the 400k annual figure is it not?

The number of asylum claimants is overstated in my opinion. Even if 100% are granted, which is unlikely, it is a very small number in terms of population growth.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

Why does temporary vs permanent status matter? Whoever is coming to Canada needs a place to live in.

My assumption is that temporary residents no longer consume housing at the end of their stay in the country so, provided the rate of growth in the number of temporary residents is low, their net consumption of the available housing stock over time would also be low. I haven’t seen the growth figures to judge.

Where we stand today, the absolute number of temporary residents are consuming some percentage of housing but I suggest that is the current baseline and is less useful discussing how to solve the problem going forward, unless anyone is advocating for a net reduction in the absolute number going forward. However, I haven’t seen that as part of the discourse and would consider that an extremely short term measure with its own set of ramifications.

Right, what we need is a net number of temporary residents leaving subtracted from temporary residents coming in. Given that Canada's model is to encourage immigration though, it would be good to have that number.

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