Canada is Cracking Down on Immigration. It's Stabilizing Housing Prices.
Too little, too late, but still, a glimmer of hope. Now start the mass deportations.
For years, Canada’s political elite insisted the housing crisis was caused by everything except immigration. It was a supply problem. A zoning problem. A financing problem. A speculation problem. A foreign-buyer problem. A NIMBY problem.
But never a population problem.
Anyone who suggested that record immigration levels might be overwhelming Canada’s housing and healthcare systems was treated as if he had committed a moral offense. You were not making a basic supply-and-demand argument. You were “blaming immigrants,” “scapegoating newcomers,” or spreading racist conspiracy theories.
Liberal ministers said this explicitly.
In 2022, 2023, and 2024, Immigration Minister Marc Miller repeatedly rejected any blame on immigrants/international students for the housing crisis, arguing they were “no more responsible for the housing crunch than they are for rising interest rates,” and warned that public debate would cause “stigmatization of particularly people of diversity that come to this country to make it better, and that includes international students.”
For years, Miller repeated these talking points on a weekly basis.
In 2025, Miller performed an utterly shameless 180. After years of treating immigration-housing skepticism as bigotry or paranoia, he now openly boasts that immigration does, in fact, affect housing.
Miller’s reversal captures the Liberal Party’s broader heel turn: an attempt to distance itself from the stench of Justin Trudeau.
Prime Minister Mark Carney was sworn in in March 2025, and almost overnight, the taboo vanished. Suddenly, it was no longer racist to say in polite company that Canada had imported people faster than it could house them.
Carney immediately began reversing the population shock the Liberals had spent years pretending did not exist:
Cut permanent-resident admissions from the Trudeau-era plan of 500,000 per year to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026, and 365,000 in 2027.
Capped temporary residents.
Restricted international-student growth through the study-permit cap, tighter rules on designated learning institutions, and stricter post-graduation work-permit eligibility.
Restricted the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, including the reinstatement of pre-pandemic restrictions, lower hiring caps, shorter permit durations, and limits on the use of low-wage foreign labour in regions with higher unemployment.
Riley Donovan@valdombre"We have reduced the number of temporary Canadians" What are temporary Canadians?9:08 PM · May 26, 2026 · 259 Views5 Reposts · 21 LikesRestricted family open-work permits and chain migration.
Ended the visitor-to-worker conversion loophole, the temporary policy that allowed visitors already inside Canada to apply for work permits without leaving the country.
Tightened asylum eligibility by expanding grounds for refugee-claim ineligibility and restrictions on people who had already been in Canada for more than a year before filing a claim.
Targeted immigration fraud and abuse by consultants via new/harsher penalties for paid immigration representatives who break the law.
Tripled deportation numbers from the Covid era, and doubled deportation numbers from the pre-Covid baseline.
While the stock of “temporary” foreign workers remains high, the flow has effectively been throttled. In 2025, Carney’s first year in office, Canada saw negative population growth for the first time since Confederation in 1867!
This week, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced:
88% drop in new international students
78% drop in new international workers
80% drop in new asylum claims
The raw numbers are stunning:
To be clear, massive structural loopholes remain. Take Bill C-3, passed into law last year: it amends Canada’s Citizenship Act to extend citizenship by descent beyond the first generation, allowing foreign-born citizens to pass it to unlimited generations abroad with minimal residency requirements.
There is still an incredibly long way to go. But while Carney hasn’t completely shut off the tap—a political impossibility given the institutional momentum—he is at least forcing the ship in the right direction. It doesn’t excuse the years of elite gaslighting that got us here, but it is a stark departure from the Trudeau status quo.
Carney essentially stole Pierre Poilievre’s homework, but kept it quiet, technocratic, and respectable. No cringe slogans. No culture-war theatrics. No obvious permission structure for leftists to accuse him of xenophobia. That reflects a deeper understanding of the Canadian psyche. Many Canadians know the country imported people faster than it could house them, but they are too polite and still recoil from anything that feels cruel, crude, or openly anti-immigrant. Carney gave them a way to support restriction without feeling as though they had crossed a moral line. He did things politely and quietly.
The vibe is shifting.
Even Tim Hortons, Canada’s most prominent importer of mass slave labor, this week announced that they would reduce their reliance on temporary foreign workers and hire 10,000 Canadians…
… although that may be an empty promise, writes Alexander Brown:
Housing Prices
With the most important immigration inflows choked off by up to 88%, the desperate bidding wars that characterized the Canadian rental market have completely disintegrated
Average asking rents across Canada have fallen year-over-year (YoY) for 19 consecutive months as of April 2026, and in April 2026, the national average asking rent for a house dropped by 7.9% YoY:
In many cities, rent is down by double digits YoY:
Hamilton & Toronto are down ~27% from their peak:
My personal favorite is Brampton, Ontario, which has the highest South Asian population in the country, and is in absolute freefall:
The numbers don't lie, even if the politicians do. For a decade, they weaponized the language of tolerance to protect a broken economic model that enriched slumlords, corporate fast-food franchises, and strip-mall colleges at the expense of an entire generation of young Canadians.
These liars and traitors will never apologize. They will never admit that the “racists” and “conspiracy theorists” were simply describing supply and demand.
But the taboo is broken, the numbers are moving, and the old consensus is dead.
The clearest sign that the taboo has shattered is that Liberals are now beginning to outflank Conservatives from the right. Eric Lombardi, a candidate for the Ontario Liberal leadership, is openly running on what amounts to a mass-remigration platform, calling for Canada to unwind its temporary-resident population from roughly five million people nationally to well under one million over the next five to ten years.
That would have been politically unthinkable two years ago. Not from a fringe populist party. Not from a Conservative backbencher. From a Liberal. Yet here we are: the party that spent the Trudeau years treating immigration restraint as a moral crime is now producing candidates who are willing to say, in plain language, that millions of temporary residents must leave.
This is how completely the politics have shifted. The Conservatives spent years trying to make the immigration-housing argument acceptable. Carney quietly absorbed it into government policy. Now Liberals are beginning to run ahead of the Conservative Party itself, using the language of administrative realism rather than nationalist revolt. What was racist in 2023 is Liberal pragmatism in 2026.
We're doomed, Chris. Its an apocalypse walking down the street every day. But people are very cheery about it, they ride their little eco bikes around the no go zones