• Canada’s traditional homeownership rate overstates ownership among younger Canadians. Because it counts only heads of households, it misses the growing number of adults living with their parents and paints an overly optimistic picture of homeownership.

• A new measure from the Minnesota Fed provides a more accurate picture. By measuring the share of the entire population that owns the home they live in, it better captures today’s living arrangements and reveals much lower ownership rates for Canadians under 40.

• The revised numbers challenge common assumptions about housing. Fewer than one in four Canadians aged 25–29 owned their home in 2021, while many seniors remain homeowners well into old age, suggesting policymakers have overstated how quickly older Canadians transition out of homeownership.

A More Accurate Portrait of Homeownership

The traditional homeownership rate metric is misleading. Fortunately, the Minnesota Fed just came up with a better measure.

Here at the Missing Middle, we frequently write about and talk about homeownership rates and post a lot of graphs like the one below, from our piece The Homeownership Journey Is Broken. Policymakers Need to Repair It:

Figure 1: Homeownership Rate by Age Cohort and Year, Canada

Source: The Homeownership Journey Is Broken. Policymakers Need to Repair It

The problem with the metric becomes apparent when we chart the homeownership rate for every age group, including 15-19 years, as shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: Homeownership Rate by Age, Canada, 2021, Traditional Definition

Data Source: Census 2021 Table 98-10-0231-01, Chart Source: MMI

A homeownership rate of 16% for individuals between the ages of 15-19 would strike most people as absurd, but the data is accurate. The problem is with how statistical agencies define homeownership. It is simply the proportion of families that own the house they live in. But very few 15-19-year-olds are the head of a family in the first place, so they are neither owners nor renters. They are absent from the calculation entirely.

This absence from the calculation matters, as the traditional homeownership rate measure does not capture phenomena such as people in their 20s and 30s living with their parents longer. This problem has been recognized for some time, so the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota decided to address it. In their piece New homeownership measure puts people first they created a new metric, the “homeowners-to-population ratio”, which measures the percentage of the population that owns a home, either as an individual or as a couple.

In an instructive infographic, the piece shows how factors such as older family members or adult children living with homeowners, or roommates living with the owner of a home, are captured under their new metric, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Traditional vs. Minnesota Fed Measures of Homeownership Rates

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Fortunately, Census 2021 contains enough data to calculate homeownership rates using the new Minnesota Fed definition. Figure 4 shows that, under the Minnesota Fed definition, homeownership rates fall dramatically for persons under the age of 40, and those over the age of 85. This better captures the phenomenon of younger people living with their parents longer, and the elderly living with relatives or in long-term care homes. Under the Minnesota Fed definition, the homeownership rates for 15- 19-year-olds in Canada are effectively zero, a much more sensible result.

Figure 4: Homeownership Rate by Age, Canada, 2021, Two Definitions

Data Source: Census 2021 Table 98-10-0231-01, Chart Source: MMI

The new definition causes homeownership rates to fall by 15 percentage points for those under the age of 30, 10 points for those between 30 and 34, and a whopping 20 points for those over the age of 85.

Figure 5: Homeownership Rate by Age, Canada, 2021, Two Definitions

Data Source: Census 2021 Table 98-10-0231-01, Chart Source: MMI

A few other points stand out to us:

• Even under the new definition, those aged 85 and up are still more likely to be homeowners in Canada than those between the ages of 30 to 34. The rate at which older Canadians sell their homes and move into other forms of housing is vastly overestimated by Canadian policy-makers, particularly at the municipal level.

• Further to the previous point, those aged between 75 and 84 have higher homeownership rates under the new definition than any age category under age 50.

• In 2021, less than one-quarter of all Canadians between the ages of 25 and 29 owned the home they lived in, either as an individual or a couple.

This new definition of homeownership from the Minnesota Fed is far more sensible than the traditional definition, and we are grateful that they created it. Where possible, we will utilize their definition in future work.

Canada’s fertility rate has fallen to a record low, but the conversation often focuses on whether people want children rather than why so many stop at two. As housing, childcare, transportation, and the opportunity costs of parenting have all become more expensive, having a third child has increasingly become something associated with wealth rather than ordinary middle-class life.

In this episode of DemograFix, Mike Moffatt and Cara Stern examine the economics behind family size. They discuss how the shortage of family-sized housing, rising costs, and changing labour market realities have reshaped the decision to have children, and what governments would need to do if they genuinely want to make larger families attainable again.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: I’ve started noticing something at my kid’s school when I’m at pickup, or a birthday party, or just talking to other parents in the neighbourhood, I almost never meet a family with three kids. Occasionally it happens and I remember them because it’s notable enough. And the rare time when I do meet a family with three kids, my first thought is, “Oh, this is a wealthy family.” Either they got into the housing market early and built their wealth there, or they’ve got some serious family wealth, or maybe massive incomes.

Canada’s fertility rate hit a record low last year, entering ultra-low territory. Some of that is people not having any kids, but of the ones who do, two seems to be the maximum most middle-class families will have. I suspect many of these families are people who did the math and got to the same place most middle-class urban families are getting to right now, which is that a third kid would require things that we just can’t easily afford: space, time, and money.

Mike Moffatt: When things are unaffordable, they become a status symbol. Think of someone who drives a very high-end luxury car. They’re signaling to the world, or at least attempting to, that they have the resources to afford such a lifestyle. We’re seeing the same thing play out with families with three or more children. There’s a cohort of high-income, high-wealth families—think of one-percenters—that are having three, four, or five kids as a status symbol, let alone millionaires, billionaires, and trillionaires with 37 kids, some of whom have names that look like a cat stepped on the keyboard.

This is a real phenomenon, and we’ve seen in the data that billionaires have far more kids than the rest of us. If we look at the media about this trend of three kids as a luxury status symbol, there are a lot of articles out of the U.S. and the U.K.

Cara Stern: Yeah, even if it’s not in the media yet, I think there are a lot of people who genuinely think that is actually happening in Canada just because of the cost of living. You need a lot of money to be able to raise three or more kids.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I often hear this when we’re talking about younger friends of ours—gossips that we are—who are lawyers and doctors, where we will say, “Oh, well they must be doing well because they just had their fourth kid, and I can only imagine what that costs.”

If large families have become this status symbol because they’re so unaffordable, that raises the obvious question of what has made having three or more children so unaffordable.

I’m a housing guy, so housing is the obvious answer. If you have three or more kids, you’re going to want a home that has at least three bedrooms, and more likely four or five. Those are incredibly expensive, particularly in our cities—what I like to call places with NHL teams.

Cara Stern: Based on National Occupancy Standards, a maximum of two people should share a bedroom, even if they’re the same sex. So even if you end up with three girls, for example, they couldn’t all share a room, otherwise you’d be considered under-housed. You need to have at least a three-bedroom home when accounting for the parents’ room. That is a guideline that determines what is considered appropriate housing in Canada, and I suspect many people agree with those standards. Most people, if you ask them what they would like to have for three kids, would say a minimum of two bedrooms, if not three.

Mike Moffatt: Knowing some families with three boys, I can’t imagine all three boys in the same room. Just the chaos and, quite frankly, the smell would not be fantastic. This three-bedroom thing is really important.

But of course, in Canada, we don’t really have three-bedroom apartments, particularly in high-rises. If you need something that’s family-sized, you’re probably looking at single-detached, semi-detached townhomes, or maybe some older low-rise apartments. You’re probably going to need that kind of ground-oriented housing.

Cara Stern: And three-bedroom family units are exactly what developers in Canada have stopped building. They’re just more expensive to build with current building codes, and politicians have been treating a studio and a three-bedroom as interchangeable units for the purpose of housing supply so they can say, “Yay! We are hitting our target. We’re getting this many units on the market.” But there’s a big difference between a studio apartment and a three-bedroom home; they’re not at all the same.

Mike Moffatt: We have these politicians representing our cities, both urban and suburban areas, who have this “unit is a unit” mindset. What they fail to recognize is that a high-rise apartment unit, while incredibly useful, houses on average half as many people as a full-sized home and is not as flexible. You can fit six single people in a single-detached home, but you can’t fit a six-person family in a high-rise unit. The types of units we build are important, and our politicians tend not to make that distinction.

You’ve got the housing side of it, but you’ve also got the childcare side of it. When I talk about childcare, I want to use the term as broadly as possible: stay-at-home parents, daycares, full-time nannies, and so on. The full-time nannies piece is important. I think that is how a lot of these very high-income families are able to have three or four kids, as it allows both parents to continue working. It almost adds a third parent to the household and ensures the kids are looked after.

Cara Stern: For full-time care, the other option is to have one parent stay home, but that’s a practical impossibility for the middle class or even the upper-middle class if they want to have a decent-sized home in an urban area on a single income. It’s pretty much impossible to do that nowadays. There may have been a time when it was possible, but those days are over. That is, of course, because of housing prices; both people need to work full-time to afford these prices. This is a big change from the past, where houses could be purchased with one income or one-and-a-half incomes, meaning someone could work part-time, giving them time to take care of the household and the kids—especially since school finishes a lot earlier than most jobs do.

Mike Moffatt: Let’s review: if you’re a middle-class family in an urban or suburban area and you want to have three or four kids, a full-time nanny is out because you just can’t afford it. Being a stay-at-home parent is out because it’s no longer feasible due to the price of housing. That leaves daycare as the only plausible option.

Cara Stern: And while that’s helpful, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

The theory the researchers had was that affordable childcare made returning to work easier, and once you’re earning again, stepping away for another baby just costs so much money.

Mike Moffatt: Cara, I love it when you go full Econ 101. Even though you didn’t use the term, you were talking about opportunity costs there. There is a massive opportunity cost for women, including the impact on career progression, connections, missed promotions, and so on. Having more daycare and more attainable daycare is fantastic, but it’s not a panacea.

Cara Stern: No matter how you look at it, if you’re taking time off work, there is going to be an impact, even if your maternity leave policies are pretty good. A woman in her early 30s has been working for ten years and has built up seniority and a salary, so the actual financial cost of leaving that career for a third parental leave is much higher than it was the first time. Later on in your career, you’re leaving more money on the table and missing out on promotions. It’s very difficult to catch up when you’ve been taking so much time off. Cheaper daycare helps people get back to work faster, but once that woman’s back at work, another baby means starting that clock all over again with time off, losing out on earnings, and everything else that comes with it. It’s a big sacrifice that a lot of women realize the weight of, especially after doing it once or twice.

Mike Moffatt: There’s a bit of a caveat when we look at the Quebec experience of the 1990s because cheap childcare wasn’t the only policy they introduced. It doesn’t make for a perfect natural experiment because they simultaneously cancelled a cash baby bonus that had existed since the late ‘80s, and that bonus was specifically weighted toward larger families.

Before that cancellation, having a third or fourth child was worth about $8,000 paid out over five years. That program was cancelled when childcare was introduced, so it’s hard to know how much of the Quebec experience was due to the introduction of childcare versus the removal of that program. Researchers have noted that it’s hard to disentangle those two effects when looking at the overall effect of the Quebec reforms in the 1990s.

Cara Stern: But what I think is actually the more important point for today’s viewer in Toronto, Vancouver, or Ottawa is that those studies measured the effects of a policy introduced when housing cost a fraction of what it does now. My hunch—and I want to be clear that this is just me guessing, not a formal finding—is that a Quebec-style program does more for fertility today than it did in 1997 because the overall cost of living context is just so much more brutal. I always say I would not have had a second kid if childcare was still $2,000 a month or more because the math just wouldn’t work. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work in my budget.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely, and that’s really important to note. This comes up a lot in policy work where I’ll get questions like, “If we raise or lower development charges, how much of that is passed along to the end consumer?” A lot of times, it depends on the underlying market conditions. The same thing applies here: the Quebec experience was in a very different real estate market. It’s fair to expect some differences when porting a policy from the 1990s under one economic circumstance over to the GTA in 2026, where the impact is likely to be different because of a different housing context.

Cara Stern: Childcare policy might help, particularly for getting to a first or second child at an earlier part of your life, which gives you more time biologically to have a third kid if you want. A lot of people don’t start having kids until their mid-30s, and then you have to move quickly if you want a third. There’s also just so much working against you between housing costs, opportunity costs, and career timing all stacking up at the same time.

Mike Moffatt: Yes, and I also think the expectations we place on parents play a big role here. This isn’t the 1970s or 1980s where latchkey kids were the norm. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for a kid in grade three to wear a house key on a shoelace around their neck, let themselves in after school, pour a bowl of cereal, and watch cartoons. Not only is that not normal anymore, but in many cases, it’s not even legal. You can’t expect kids to do that. The context of raising children has changed, plus there’s a growing expectation that kids be enrolled in hundreds of increasingly expensive activities. Having one child play hockey is outrageously expensive; having three or four seems downright impossible.

Cara Stern: It’s not just expensive, it’s also time-consuming. There is a big logistical challenge in trying to get multiple kids to all of their practices on time. If you want to have any sense of self as a parent, you probably want to have your own activities and hobbies, too. Trying to work all of that together is incredibly difficult when you have more people to coordinate with.

Interestingly, there’s data showing women spend more time engaging actively with their kids than they did in the past, which is pretty surprising because women’s participation in the workforce is obviously much higher today than it was when Mike was eating his Froot Loops and playing Atari.

Mike Moffatt: To be fair, that was just last week. But in all seriousness, I imagine parents are having much higher-quality time with their kids than they did in the past.

Cara Stern: I can see how when you’re working all day, you want to be very focused on actively playing with your kids compared to when you have all day to spend with them. This is something I often tell moms who are dreading the end of their maternity leave. There is this angst about going back to work because you feel bad that you’re going to get so much less time with your baby.

What I always tell them is that the quantity of time you spend with your baby decreases when you send them to daycare and go back to work, but the quality goes up. It’s easier to really enjoy that time together when you know it’s limited, rather than feeling like you just have to get through the day until the next nap.

Mike Moffatt: And those kids are now old enough to learn how to play Atari.

Cara Stern: I don’t know if a one-year-old can, though I suspect you did at that age. It’s not just the time cost; you also have to cart all those kids around to sports, school, and daycare. You’ve got to coordinate with your partner about who’s taking which kid and figure out how to manage three different schedules. When I think about three kids, I think about transportation, which is most people’s second-biggest expense after housing. It isn’t cheap to get kids around. SUVs and vans are expensive, which you probably need because fitting three kids in car seats into a sedan is incredibly tight. You need a specialized cargo bike if you’re biking, and transit is tough to wrangle with multiple kids—though at least most cities in Canada have free transit for kids, which helps. Of course, that doesn’t help if you had to drive until you qualified for a place that doesn’t have transit.

Mike Moffatt: That coordination is huge. When you’ve got two kids and two parents, you can play man-to-man defense—”I’ve got him, you’ve got her.” But when the kids outnumber the parents, it’s like killing a penalty in hockey or being a man down in soccer: you have to transition to zone coverage, and that can be tricky.

Cara Stern: When you add it all together, the numbers are brutal for families in urban areas. If a family is doing the math in a two-bedroom in Toronto, Ottawa, or Vancouver and wants a third kid, they look at it and say, “We don’t have the bedroom, we can’t afford to buy the bedroom here, and even if we cleared that housing hurdle, one of us is probably stepping back significantly at work for the next five years.” What happens? They’re going to move out of the city.

Cara Stern: That happens not just in Canada. A researcher looked at this in Oslo a couple of years ago, surveying nearly 3,000 families in inner Oslo, both those who left and those who stayed. He found about 70% of children born in inner Oslo leave before school age, and the single strongest predictor of which families left was wanting a separate bedroom for each child.

Mike Moffatt: It’s always been the case that you get more space in the suburbs than in cities, but if you want to retain at least some of those families, cities need to legalize building family-sized housing, whether that is at the edge of town, infill, or what have you. You’ve got to be able to build those three, four, or five-bedroom units.

Cara Stern: What does this actually require to solve policy-wise?

Mike Moffatt: The housing piece is the most concrete. Three, four, and five-bedroom family-sized units need to exist in cities at prices that a dual-income professional family can access, not just those in the top 1% or 0.1%.

Cara Stern: Let’s acknowledge that right now, for the most part, having a third kid in Canada, especially in a city, is a luxury—and it shouldn’t be. People can lower their standards to make it work, but as always when it comes to birth rates, women don’t have to have kids. If the situation doesn’t exist to make it desirable, it will not happen.

Mike Moffatt: It really comes down to affordability.

We might get feedback saying, “Well, low-income people have lots of kids, why can’t the middle class?” But that is simply not true. In Canada, low-income families tend to have very few kids, so it really comes down to this affordability piece across the board that affects both the middle class and lower-income Canadians.

Cara Stern: Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and our editor is Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the relative merits of Froot Loops versus Cinnamon Toast Crunch, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

More Crowding, Fewer Babies: The Effects of Housing Density on Fertility

The ultimate status symbol? A big family

Opinion | Three Kids? You Showoffs. - The Washington Post

Why are some families with children leaving the inner city and other staying?

Home Alone | Cardus

Fertility Incentives in Canada: A Cohort Analysis

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

Mike Moffatt and Sabrina Maddeaux break down why Canada’s housing goals should reflect today’s slower population growth, why what we build matters more than raw housing starts, and how smarter policies on affordability, immigration, and family-sized homes could solve the housing crisis faster than many think.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: During the 2025 election, the federal Liberal Party made a campaign promise that they would double Canada’s current rate of residential construction over the next decade to reach 500,000 homes per year. So far, it’s not going well. Housing starts have been stuck at the 250,000 level, and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation forecasts that starts will actually fall each of the next three years.

Analysts have questioned whether or not that rate of homebuilding is even possible. But now, with Canada’s population growth slowing and the aging of the baby boomers, analysts are also questioning whether or not building a half million homes each year is even necessary. Mike, you are one of those analysts, and you’ve done a lot of research on housing targets. Does Canada really need to build 500,000 homes a year?

Mike Moffatt: Short answer: No.

Back when Canada’s population was growing by a million people per year, we would have to build that many homes —or actually even more than that — just to keep pace. But since the federal government has reduced immigration targets, it’s scaling back on the number of non-permanent residents in Canada; half a million a year is, frankly, overkill.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s interesting. So I’m curious where the Liberal Party got their 500,000 target to begin with. Did it just sound like a good number, or were they basing this on prior immigration targets?

And these are really solid reports. I would say their methodology on how they arrive at that figure is a bit opaque. I’d like to see a little bit more transparency in their model, but it’s a good report. And the thing I really like about it is that it recognizes the link between housing supply and affordability. So their estimate on the size of housing shortages or how many houses you need each year is a function of the overall level of affordability you’re trying to target. If you want to get deep affordability, you have to build more homes. If you’re less ambitious, you build fewer homes.

Though all of this housing starts discussion makes me believe that governments, and not just the federal government, are overfocused on the wrong targets because the general public doesn’t care about how many housing starts there are. They care about whether or not they can afford a home. So I think governments might be better off focusing on metrics that the general public can relate to.

In your mind, what would the housing market look like if the middle-class housing crisis were over? And what data would you be looking at?

Sabrina Maddeaux: The public cares about whether they can afford rent or a home that they want to raise a family in. So the government ultimately should be focused more on metrics that show whether that is possible.

Now, I think housing starts— they feel that’s something they can control. It’s an easy metric, and it’s less complicated than talking about other areas of supply and demand, like immigration. But really, the government should be focused on things like price-to-income ratios, the proportion of young people still living at home with their parents, homeownership rates, and also whether the housing supply is properly allocated in terms of the number of people living in a home versus the number of bedrooms. Can seniors downsize if they want to in their own communities?

All of the stats related to those things probably aren’t looking too good and are much less favourable to governments and are going to be harder to fix long-term. So I can see why they would just like to go with starts. And starts is also a number that they seem to constantly manipulate. What does that mean? Are those single detached homes? Is it just any unit? Is it dorms as well as those long-term care homes? So I think that’s why a lot of governments turn to starts as an easy indicator to point to.

Mike Moffatt: I think you’re right. And I think the fact that it does obscure what’s going on may actually be a benefit to governments. Because if you focus on price, then you raise questions like, “Do you want my existing home price to go down?” or a metric like a price-to-income ratio still invites those questions.

So I get what governments are doing with housing starts. It’s a bit easier to measure. They’ve got an existing methodology. It’s not as controversial. But at the same time, I do think we would be a little bit better off if governments had a little bit more transparency on exactly what they were trying to accomplish.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Starts are obviously focusing on the supply side of the issue, where there’s also the demand side, which has really gone off the rails due to unsustainable immigration targets in recent years. So these targets we’re talking about for starts do assume that the population is going to grow at a certain rate. But we have seen a lot of the pressure taken off the housing market through reductions in immigration.

My view is that there needs to be further reductions. Do you think [the changes they’ve made] is enough to fix it over time?

Mike Moffatt: It certainly has taken the pressure off. And the federal government admits that itself. They said so outright in the last budget. But once the reductions in non-permanent residents are fully phased in a couple of years from now, Canada’s population is set to grow between about 300,000 and 400,000 people a year.

Just do the math on that. You don’t need to be building 500,000 homes a year in a country whose population is growing by 300,000 to 400,000. You don’t need two homes for one person.

You do need to build some. The amount isn’t zero if you’re growing that much. And we still have a large pre-existing housing shortage to account for. So you need to build quite a few homes, but it’s certainly taking a lot of the pressure off.

Sabrina Maddeaux: It’s that pre-existing shortage I’m very much concerned about because even if the immigration targets are brought down over the next couple of years, we had such unsustainable explosions in numbers over the last five years, in particular, even ten years, that we have a lot of catching up to do. And then when we talk about starts, what types of starts?

I’m also concerned that long-term, the government hasn’t really bought into the idea that immigration policy needs to be sustainable and matched to housing targets and health care capacity and infrastructure, and that this is a quick patch over the next couple of years, and then we’ll just go back to where we were before.

Mike Moffatt: That is a real risk. And housing needs are highly dependent on immigration policy assumptions. If the population growth rate changes, so too do future housing needs

The developers who are continuing to build are making the same bet that you’ve discussed, where they’re saying, “We don’t think it’s politically sustainable to have immigration rates this low. We think governments are going to turn the taps back on for economic reasons, because the business community is going to want more labour and so on. So we’re making a bet that immigration is going to go up, and we want to have the units there to account for that increased demand.”

So it is really funny how the industry fully recognizes that really what they’re betting on is the future path of immigration policy more than anything else.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s really interesting. And that’s why I think immigration will continue to be a top-three issue when they’re polling the public over the next few years, because there’s going to be a lot of pressure on both sides. And I think that politicians, in general, have trouble making hard choices. And immigration reductions are, by nature, very difficult choices. And especially in the federal Liberal Party, which obviously now has a majority over the next two years -they’ve traditionally been very pro-large-scale immigration, and there’s going to be a lot of ideological pressure from within to return to that.

Mike Moffatt: I do think it is probably the number one issue worth watching, because as you recognize, it affects the demand and supply of everything. And there is a lot of uncertainty there.

Now, when we go to housing, we can talk about the number of people and the number of homes, but you’ve also mentioned a couple of times that what we build also matters. For example, high-rise apartment units house roughly half as many people as ground-oriented homes, like townhouses. High-rise apartments, you tend to be talking about one, maybe two bedrooms. Townhomes tend to be three or four bedrooms. So our housing targets and housing starts data are a bit misleading, because it treats all units the same; it treats those one-, two-, and studio high-rise apartment units, they all count as a start, the same as a three- or four-bedroom townhome. That’s also a start.

And because over the last 20 years, Canada has shifted from building mostly ground-oriented housing, like those townhomes and single detached and so on, to mostly high-rise apartments, the types of units have changed and the amount that each unit can house has changed. None of that is to suggest that building high-rises is bad. We need lots of it. But it does mean that building five high-rise units doesn’t have the same impact on the housing crisis as five townhomes. If we’re going to be relying on high-rises to fill some of this housing shortage, we need to be building closer to ten of them to have the same relative impact as building five townhomes. And our data doesn’t really capture that.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And if we are building high-rises, then they need to have livable units with good layouts, with more bedrooms as well, because the real shortage is the shortage of family-sized homes. That can be in high-rises, and it can be townhomes, but single detached is really what a lot of people envision when they want to raise a family. And there is still such a shortage of those. And certainly anything that resembles affordability near a major economic centre. So with that in mind, how many homes do we actually need to be building each year?

But regardless of the type of homes, they’re not just going to happen. Those homes won’t get built if people can’t afford to buy or rent them. It’s just simple economics. So Canadian governments need to do a lot more to get the cost of delivery and construction down. And that includes everything from land costs to approval costs, taxes, and fees like development charges and HST.

But I would say that all of this is solvable within the next decade. We don’t need to hit 500,000 housing starts a year unless we have some big changes to immigration policies. So I think if governments are willing to make some tough decisions on issues such as taxes and land use policy and how infrastructure is funded, I think we can get to middle-class affordability within the next decade or so.

Mike Moffatt: And that’s a good thing because Canada’s never even hit 300,000 housing starts a year.

Now, I do think half a million a year would be possible with some rather radical government reforms on land use, zoning and so on. Reforms that they haven’t really shown much of a willingness to do. And half a million a year could be needed if we decide to aggressively increase population growth and immigration. But at the end of the day, your country’s only growing by 300,000 people a year; you don’t need to be building 500,000 homes a year, even if you’re dealing with a pre-existing shortage. Eventually, those homes catch up with population growth and do so pretty quickly.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And our demographics also are working in our favour here, as baby boomers will inevitably be turning over a lot of those larger suburban homes over the next 20 years.

Mike Moffatt: That’s absolutely true, though we have to note that those suburban homes have actually traditionally been very popular with newcomers to Canada, along with first-generation Canadians. So, yes, a lot of them will be turning over, but many of them will be inherited by family members, and others, I think there will be a fair bit of demand for those homes, particularly from relatively new Canadians.

Mike Moffatt: Exactly. If we had much more nuanced targets, if we focused more on the cost of delivery rather than the number of housing starts, we could end this crisis much faster. And we certainly wouldn’t have to wait until the year 2060, as the Federal Housing Advocate suggests.

Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. And to our producer Meredith Martin and our editor, Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about being trapped in a small room, doomscrolling on your phone, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

As youth unemployment reaches levels not seen in decades, this episode examines how the Temporary Foreign Worker Program may be reshaping Canada’s labour market, and why the people paying the biggest price could be young Canadians looking for their first job.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: In a free market, when demand goes up, prices rise. And when supply goes up relative to demand, prices drop. The same applies to the labour market. During times of high unemployment, employers have the power to dictate wages and working conditions. But when unemployment is low, it’s harder to find workers, so wages should go up. Canada, though, has completely messed with that, ensuring that it’s never really an employee’s market in this country.

Mike, what was your first job?

Mike Moffatt: Like any good Gen Xer, I started working at an absurdly young age. In my case, it was the age of eight, and I delivered newspapers. I did that all through elementary school, high school, and even through a couple of years of university. But my first actual paycheck job was going door-to-door for Greenpeace, trying to sign up people for donations. I really didn’t enjoy that job. What sticks out to me about that time was how hard it was to find that job. Back in the early to mid-1990s, the youth unemployment rate was in the 15% to 20% range. Folks my age were just taking whatever we could get.

Cara Stern: Today’s youth unemployment rate is bad, but it’s actually not as bad as you had it. You Gen Xers win again, though by “win” I mean lose. Given all the other challenges young people are facing these days, the 13.4% unemployment rate feels like a kick in the gut.

Mike Moffatt: It really is. As much as there were those issues in the early to mid-1990s, governments did something about it. Back then, they stepped in and created programs to help with youth unemployment, some of which still exist today.

Cara Stern: Even though you may have had an even worse job market than today’s Gen Z, at least you didn’t have to compete so heavily with a huge number of people who have been hired through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

We’ve covered the Temporary Foreign Worker Program a lot on this podcast, but one thing we haven’t talked about is how the stream of low-wage labour impacts the job prospects for young people in Canada.

Mike Moffatt: It’s not just the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Students are facing, and have faced over the last few years, way more competition for those jobs, mainly because the student population has exploded, especially with so many international students. The youth population grew by over 14% between 2021 and 2025. That’s a combination of temporary foreign workers, international students, and a little bit of immigration as well. There’s been a massive supply of young workers competing for a fairly limited number of jobs.

Cara Stern: Right before I started university, international students could only work on campus. But then that changed so that they could work anywhere for a maximum of—well, it’s up to 24 hours per week now, as well as an unlimited amount between semesters.

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say governments are messing with supply and demand in the labour force. More young people are looking for work, which means more supply of workers in the labour market for lower-skilled jobs. That means a higher unemployment rate for youth.

Mike Moffatt: It really does. Again, there are so many young workers competing for a limited number of jobs. If we focus just on the temporary foreign worker issue for a moment, the TFW program has been around a while—it’s older than I am, having been around since 1973.

Nowadays, it’s not just one bucket of very specialized labour. You’ve got a high-wage stream and a low-wage stream. You have the primary agriculture stream, which goes back to the ‘70s, and you have this fourth stream which is specifically dedicated to supporting permanent residency. The program started out in a limited sense but has really ballooned over the last 50 plus years.

Cara Stern: What we want to talk about today is that low-wage stream. That’s the stream that seems to be having a significant impact on the youth unemployment rate.

Mike Moffatt: And it wasn’t always like that. When the program started in the early ‘70s, it was very limited to a certain set of occupations: very high-skilled roles, some academics, and specific agricultural roles like picking tobacco.

But that changed in the early 2000s when the low-wage stream was created. Suddenly, employers could bring in people for pretty much any job, especially jobs that only needed a high school diploma or a bit of on-the-job training. These were the jobs that traditionally students worked. Students weren’t just competing for tobacco-picking jobs in Tillsonburg anymore; now they’re competing for fast-food jobs and positions all over the economy. As long as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program has existed, there have always been concerns around what it means for young workers, but now even more so because that competition is so much more fierce.

Cara Stern: We’ve seen a big backlash to immigration over the last few years—so much so that Canada has reduced the number of people it lets in on the permanent residency side of things.

Because of that backlash and the spiking youth unemployment, they changed the rules again this past April. Now, employers have to advertise a job for eight weeks before they can even apply to get a temporary foreign worker, although some designated sectors, such as healthcare, food manufacturing, and accommodation, are eligible for a higher cap than that.

Mike Moffatt: We see it in some of those industries like the accommodation industry, the hospitality sector, hotels, motels, and so on. Think of jobs like the front-desk clerk, housekeeping staff, janitors, and accommodation service managers—jobs where you can go above that 10% cap. A lot of those jobs were traditionally filled by students or by younger workers.

Even with these reductions, the fact that these exemptions exist to allow for higher levels of temporary foreign workers to be hired tends to disproportionately push out, or at least cause increased competition with young workers.

Cara Stern: What got us talking about this most recently was an article being passed around in our group chat with the headline, Tourist Towns Desperate for Workers in Alberta. It basically said that Alberta’s tourism industry is facing a severe labour shortage, with mountain towns like Banff and Canmore being particularly affected.

Employers highlighted two primary barriers: a critical housing shortage that makes it unaffordable for staff to live in the region, and tighter federal regulations on the TFW program, which have slowed their ability to fill vacant roles with international staff.

Mike Moffatt: When you guys were passing this around the group chat, it drove me absolutely up the wall. I found it incredibly maddening because, first of all, the article presents no actual evidence that there’s an unusually high number of job vacancies relative to previous years. That might be true, or it might not—we don’t know, we’re never told.

But suppose it is true. Let’s say everything they’re saying is factually accurate and could be backed up by data. Employers could just raise their wages and attract more people to work there. If they can’t find enough people to work at a certain price, raise the price. Yes, that would have knockdown effects; if you raise the price of labour, you may have to charge more for rooms or meals. But it also means that young workers would make more money, and it would create incentives for companies to innovate and invest in technology so they’re less labour-intensive.

We talk a lot in this country about our productivity issues, but every time a company is forced to be a little bit productive because they can’t find enough workers, the government comes in and says, “No, no, no, don’t invest in technology. We’ll just make it easier for you to hire a bunch more low-wage workers.” It drives me absolutely up the wall.

Cara Stern: I find this part of the program very offensive to workers. I’ve heard employers say they can’t find workers, that young people just don’t want these jobs. But there is a price where people would want those jobs. If an employer is not getting the number of people they need, if they just raise wages, they will find someone. There is a number where people will do these jobs. What I want people to get from this is that if you hear them talking about labour shortages, what that really means is an employee’s market, and that should be the time when wages go up.

I also think it’s interesting that you get this constant push from employers saying they need more workers, then the government expands the program, then you get spiking youth unemployment, then there’s a backlash and they implement new restrictions, and then employers say they can’t find people. It’s a cycle that keeps going on and on.

Mike Moffatt: It does. I think it’s symptomatic of a larger problem in Canada that goes way beyond the TFW program. In any other sector in the economy, prices are allowed to adjust. If the demand for gasoline goes up because we all want to take a bunch of road trips, we don’t suddenly have gas shortages everywhere; we let the price adjust upward. In economist-speak, we get the quantity supplied and the quantity demanded to stay in balance, and when you get to a gas station, there’s actual gas available to buy.

But for some reason in Canada, we don’t treat labour the same way, at least not in the same professions. When the demand for workers goes up, we don’t have firms competing with each other for workers and putting upward pressure on wages. Instead, we declare there to be a shortage and have governments put policies in place to eliminate that competition.

It’s like saying, “Well, there’s a shortage of 50-cent cups of coffee in my neighbourhood.” Okay, that’s true, but if I’m willing to pay three bucks, I could find a half-dozen coffee shops to sell to me. It’s not a real shortage; we have to be able to allow prices to adjust.

Ultimately, what Canada does is insulate businesses from capitalism, which undermines a lot of its benefits. But us non-business owners have to deal with the downsides. It’s a very unequal system.

Cara Stern: I totally get why employers are stressed about seasonal workers because that’s a hard business to be in when you need people for such short periods of time. You’re asking them to move or to give up part of their life to work for a short period, and it’s tough to deal with those seasonal swings. But that’s just the nature of tourism. Historically, places like the Jasper Park Lodge and the Banff Springs Hotel solved this by building staff housing right into their business models.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. Any good Gen Xer knows this from the 1987 classic movie with Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, Dirty Dancing. If you haven’t seen it, make time for it—make a weekend of it. Watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and some other great ‘80s movies, but make sure you watch Dirty Dancing.

Cara Stern: For decades, resorts relied on students looking for spring and summer work, and that’s what we saw in the movies. Since these hotels were built by the railways, they would sometimes pay a student’s train ticket to get there, which was a strategic move. By covering that, they made sure that if you were tempted to quit, you maybe wouldn’t because it would cost you to get home, versus if you made it through to the end of your contract, it wouldn’t.

In fact, according to our producer’s mom, Sally Martin, who worked at Jasper Park Lodge as a chambermaid in the '50s, the hotel actually preferred employees traveling from the Maritimes because it was a far journey, so it would cost them more to get home. There was a better chance they would actually stay.

Mike Moffatt: Big shout-out to Meredith’s mom here.

To be clear, when Cara mentioned those two historic hotels, they weren’t the employers who were complaining about the articles, so we’re not throwing shade at those two fine institutions. Rather, we’re trying to establish the idea that resort towns across Canada have always experienced swings in the demand for labour because that’s how the business model works, and they found ways to adjust without the government stepping in to create temporary foreign worker programs.

One of the main ways these hotels were able to do that was to hire students who happen to have a four-month break in the summer when these places need more staff. They could entice them by saying, “Hey, come out to Banff or Jasper, and we will give you free or subsidized housing, and we’ll pay for your travel to get there and back home.”

Cara Stern: The thing I don’t understand is that those temporary foreign workers have to live somewhere, too. You say it blunted the need for housing, but how does that work?

Mike Moffatt: You find that people are less likely to complain about their housing conditions if complaining gets them deported. It’s an issue with how the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is run. Everybody needs housing, but things change a little bit depending on who’s getting hired and what ability they have to enforce their labour rights. Unfortunately, we know that temporary foreign workers have a much harder time getting their rights enforced than other workers.

Cara Stern: That makes them ideal workers for a lot of bad employers.

I will say, though, many companies do still hire locally, and they attract people from across the country by offering highly subsidized housing and food. I have a brother-in-law right now who’s in the Columbia Icefields, and while they didn’t pay for his ticket to get there, he does get a bonus for finishing the contract, cheap housing, and food covered. It’s a really good experience. If I were in university, I would absolutely take one of these jobs because it’s such a unique thing to do—something you wouldn’t do at any other point in your life. It fits so neatly into the school year when you get that four months off. It’s hard to find a regular job in a city for four months because people typically want someone long-term. They do still exist, they are still out there, and I highly recommend people look into it.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I’m sure it beats going door-to-door soliciting donations.

Cara Stern: It probably does, and you don’t get to be that person everyone hates when they open the door and want to get out of the conversation. I would hate to do that job because people are just dreading it when they open the door and see you, right?

Mike Moffatt: I’d just be like, “Cara, you care about the environment, right? Of course you’re going to write me a cheque.”

Mike Moffatt: “Now, of all times, we don’t need as many workers.” I’m sure that had to do with it and not the other conditions going on in our economy and not the fact that they are seeing sales decline and their brand value absolutely evaporate. “No, no, no, it’s the economic conditions—that’s what’s changed here.”

Cara Stern: Or the threat of Dunkin’ Donuts coming to Canada, helping them realize they need to change the narrative on their hiring practices because they’ve kind of become the poster child for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. I think they thought people would see this and think it’s great, but I saw mostly people saying, “Oh, so you could have been doing this all along. This was a choice you made.”

They could have hired locally because, while they say it’s no longer necessary, the rate of youth unemployment has been high for years. It’s not that much higher now than it was when they were lobbying to get 30% of their businesses filled with temporary foreign workers. I don’t believe their argument, and I don’t think most people do. It’s nice that they’re doing it now, and I’m glad finally this is happening, but it doesn’t really buy them the goodwill they thought it might.

Mike Moffatt: It’s like saying, “We no longer kick puppies.” Great, but I’m not going to give you credit for that. It feels like this backfired a little bit, and they may have been better off to downplay this and just make those changes instead of trying to position themselves as being corporately responsible. It created a backlash where people are just like, “Come on, guys, you’re not good corporate citizens, and don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

Cara Stern: To sum up, Canada’s youth are facing a significantly higher unemployment rate this summer that is more than double that of the regular workforce, and that’s historically much worse than normal. It isn’t as bad as the 1990s, but it’s close.

Mike, how do we get out of this doom loop?

Mike Moffatt: We have to scale back the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and put it back into its intended use. That’s not to eliminate it entirely; there are reasons why you might need a temporary foreign worker. Let’s say you are refurbishing a nuclear power plant and there’s an expert in Germany who can help because they have skills and experiences you can’t find here—absolutely, that’s the type of thing this should be used for. But the idea that we can’t find somebody to be an assistant manager of a Dairy Queen or pour coffee just doesn’t make any sense. We really need to eliminate this for lower-skilled jobs.

If we find that there are chronic labour issues there, you could settle that through permanent residency. If they’re good enough to work here year after year, they’re good enough to live here, raise a family, and contribute to Canada’s economy on both the supply and demand sides, rather than this endless cycle. It really comes down to that. Don’t be afraid to let the economy adjust, and if certain business models don’t work anymore, they should be allowed to die. It shouldn’t be the role of government to prop up companies with unworkable business models that rely on massive amounts of exploitable temporary foreign workers.

Cara Stern: Something you said there is really important. It’s not that there’s something inherently wrong with people coming here and working low-wage jobs; it’s the fact that they’re temporary and don’t have the same rights as other workers. As someone who cares a lot about workers’ rights, I think you need some sort of path for people to come here and stay, because it’s so easy to take advantage of someone who has to leave the country if they complain.

It’s not a progressive thing to support this program, even though I understand there are a lot of progressives who support immigration for all different kinds of reasons. This is about working conditions, and that’s something people need to realize. It’s so important that they have the same rights as everyone else in Canada rather than having this second class of citizens.

Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and our editor is Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about why Tim Hortons shouldn’t get a participation trophy for hiring locally, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Tourist towns ‘desperate’ for workers in Alberta

Tim Hortons says it will hire locals, scale back temporary foreign workers

Youth unemployment in Canada jumped 57% in 3 years, hitting levels previously unseen outside a recession

Youth unemployment in Canada near record highs since 2022; unprecedented levels outside of a recession

The Extraordinary Increase of Youth Unemployment in Canada

Temporary ForeignWorkers in Canada:Are They Really Filling Labour Shortages?

StatsCan: Drayton Valley statistical area sees lowest unemployment in Alberta at 4.9 per cent

Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programs

Businesses face new limits on temporary foreign worker program

3 problems with the temporary foreign worker program and 3 possible fixes, according to experts

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

Mike Moffatt and Sabrina Maddeaux unpack the surprising reasons families continue to leave the GTA, Metro Vancouver, and Montreal at near-record rates, exploring how housing costs, crime, mental health, community, and urban planning are reshaping where Canadians choose to build their lives, and what policymakers still aren’t getting right.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Canadians are continuing to move out of the GTA, Metro Vancouver, and Montreal at near-record numbers. Now, a lot of people thought that return-to-office mandates would reverse this trend, but it’s barely made a dent. And it’s not older people cashing out of their expensive urban homes and moving to cottage country, either. Over two-thirds of the domestic population losses are under the age of 45. Today we look at why - from housing prices to mental health.

Mike, you’ve been known to make a lot of predictions. Some you’ve been right about and some, not so much. Now, one that you didn’t exactly nail is how much the end of the pandemic and the push to have workers return to the office would impact the exodus of families out of Canada’s largest cities. Can you walk us through what’s happening and why you were so wrong?

Mike Moffatt: I am happy to walk you through why I was wrong.

At some point, we’ve always had a net migration out of our big metros. So in the first decade of the 2000s, the metro areas of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver collectively tended to lose about 37,000 people to the rest of the country each year. So what that means is 37,000 more people would leave the GTA, Vancouver, or Montreal and move to Edmonton, Tillsonburg, or somewhere else in Canada, then move in the opposite direction - actually move to one of the big metros.

I want to be clear when we say Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver; I’m talking about their metro areas. So Toronto includes Oakville and Markham, Vancouver includes Surrey and Burnaby, and Montreal includes Laval, and so on. So it’s not just the core city.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And to be clear, this outmigration doesn’t mean that the GTA’s population was actually falling?

Mike Moffatt: Correct. There are still births, immigrations and so on. So this is just looking at domestic migration - the number of people moving out of one community in Canada to another community in Canada.

So if we fast-forward to the first half of the 2010s, this trend picked up. An increase from about 37,000 to 45,000. But it really took off around 2015. It doubled to about 70,000 people before the pandemic. And then during the pandemic, it doubled again because of work-from-home and some of those other things that we describe. It peaked at about 158,000. It’s cooled off since then, but it’s still near 130,000 a year.

So this is where I got it wrong, because I thought that once the pandemic was over and companies would try to get people back in the office - which they have with some success - we’d go back to being in that 60 to 70,000 range, or perhaps even lower, as people moved back into the GTA. I totally got that one wrong. We’re still way above where we were before the pandemic, and it doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And it’s not just retirees selling their multimillion-dollar homes in, let’s say, Cabbage Town and moving to Muskoka.

Mike Moffatt: It’s not just retirees, though we do see some of that in the data. That is a real phenomenon that occurs, and you talk to realtors out in cottage country, and they’ll tell you that this is happening.

So this is early career professionals, which is kind of strange when you think about it. These are people who are starting their careers, and they’re choosing to move away from Canada’s most economically dynamic cities. And housing costs are obviously a big part of that story. But I’m a housing guy, so I tend to see everything as a housing problem. As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So I thought it might be helpful to discuss reasons besides housing costs why young families are moving to other communities. One is something that you’ve written about quite a bit, and it’s the perception of crime and disorder. We had an episode on this a while back. We’ll link to that in the show notes. But I’d love to get your view. How much do you think perceptions of crime and disorder are playing out, and people leaving the GTA and moving to other communities?

Sabrina Maddeaux: It’s a big one. I think affordability is still the key factor, but there are also social factors. And one of those is not just the perception but the reality of crime and disorder and chaos in our cities that has really increased over the last five to ten years.

I see it every day, and it’s not just in one neighbourhood or another neighbourhood. It’s really across the board at this point. You have the major things that you see on the news, like car thefts and break-ins, which are happening more and more frequently. Everyone knows multiple people this has happened to. But even when you take a streetcar to work or from work, as I do every day, more often than not there’s some sort of altercation.

The other week, there was open hard drug use on the streetcar I was coming home on. And a woman who then decided to pee on the streetcar floor multiple times. People yelling at other passengers or kicking things. Often I take the streetcar home and this is a regular occurrence, not a one-off. Often, someone is either having a severe mental health episode or clearly using hard drugs and owns the back third of the streetcar, and everyone else on that streetcar is so scared and uncomfortable that they’re crammed up like sardines, even though there should be more than enough space on the front two-thirds. And there’s really no enforcement, no solution to any of this.

And I hear a lot about women getting off the streetcar early because they’re scared. I mean, imagine being in that environment alone late at night, coming back from a shift, and then you throw kids into the equation. I don’t think really anyone ideally wants to raise a kid in an environment like that, and parents and prospective parents are rightfully scared. So all of this does contribute to people saying, “Hey, I’ve had enough. I’m going to move somewhere where I feel I can have more control and more safety as well.”

Mike Moffatt: I can see that. I’m someone who quite likes transit. But I know there have been times when I’ve been hesitant to take my daughter with me on transit because of some of the stuff I’ve seen, and in some cases, when she was younger, she’s seen. I think it’s one of the reasons why we moved to a walkable neighbourhood, so we actually didn’t have to use transit as much.

And there is a fair bit of research out of the U.S. on some of these topics that shows there is a linkage between migration decisions and crime. So there is evidence to show that the people do act in the way that you describe, but there’s some complexity here.

So a few notes: first, that if you’re a homeowner who’s the direct victim of a violent crime, you are far more likely to sell your home and move somewhere else than the general population, though it’s not necessarily that you’re moving out of the metro. You might just be changing neighbourhoods or moving out of, say, the City of Toronto to a smaller community still within the GTA. But that does happen. So there is a direct linkage between experience and migration patterns.

Now, secondly, if we look for non-victims, or at least ones that haven’t been directly affected by violent crime, they still may have witnessed it, but they weren’t directly victimized- we do find that it is the perception of crime that matters more for moving decisions than the actual crime numbers. But sometimes those are aligned, and sometimes they’re not. And you mentioned kids, and I mentioned experiences with my daughter.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Of course. And that makes sense to me as well, because ultimately people are tied to wanting to be near their social networks. They have jobs. And with the return-to-office, there’s only so far they can move without having to switch jobs. So they’re going to try to find the safest, most affordable area they can within that metro. But it’s becoming more and more difficult to do so. So I could see people starting to consider even bigger moves.

Mike Moffatt: I think you’re right. If we bring this to Canada, we don’t have as much direct research. So we’re looking at correlations and things like that. But I suspect there is a crime migration linkage. But it is hard to support with data.

Now, there is a related topic that is a little bit cleaner when it comes to migration, and that’s mental health. We actually see families who are disproportionately moving to smaller communities. When researchers conduct surveys of these smaller communities and so on, they’re finding that in those communities, anxiety and depression levels are lower and reported mental health is higher. So this is mostly correlation, not causation, about this causing the move. But I do find it interesting that the data suggests that people are moving from communities that have higher levels of anxiety and depression to communities that have lower levels of anxiety and depression.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That totally makes sense. I don’t think people are actively saying, “I’m looking for a community where people are less anxious or less depressed,” or even would know how to find out that information. But what I could see that correlates with a smaller community where there are tighter social networks, more support, more social trust, less unpredictability and precarity in terms of having to get up and move, and will you be in the same home next year? Affordability may not be as much of a concern. So all those things add up to lessen the mental health strain. So that’s where I would see that being correlated more than people choosing to actually move somewhere because of the better mental health of the community. But I think that all the things that contribute to that better mental health are factors that draw them there.

Mike Moffatt: I would agree with all that. I think I might be the only person in the universe who might download an Excel sheet and go, “I want to move to a community with low levels of depression.” But I do think there is something to, at a subconscious level, where you visit one of these communities and go, “Oh, this is very nice. And everybody kind of seems happy. Maybe I’ll move here.”

And there’s this fascinating study from Statistics Canada from a couple of years ago, which we’ll also link to in the show notes. This study notes that the people who live in smaller communities report higher levels of life satisfaction and a sense of belonging to a community. So exactly what you said: it is that feeling of belonging.

Here’s where it gets really interesting, though. It’s not just the size of the community, but it’s actually the size of the metro. So if you are in the GTA and you move to a commuter suburb in the GTA, your reported levels of mental health and life satisfaction are the same as if you live in the city of Toronto.

So it kind of bleeds together. That, really, if you want those higher levels of life satisfaction, you have to move to a smaller community that’s kind of outside of a metro that is more self-contained.

Which makes sense from that connection thing because if you live in a smaller community where people actually work in the community, they’re probably a little bit more connected with each other rather than driving to Toronto to work. Love to get your take on that.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That makes sense to me. I mean, all the issues that used to be more concentrated in urban cores or downtown have spread out. So affordability is a big one, but also crime, people having to move outside of their communities, everything from congestion and commute times. So you do have to go further and further to escape those factors if you want to live in a place where those stressors aren’t impacting you or your neighbours as much, and you have stability.

I think stability and control are really big for people, especially when we’re in a world that is so uncertain. And the headlines change every 30 minutes, and it’s very stressful, which makes those factors even more important psychologically, I would think.

Mike Moffatt: I would completely agree with that. I think people are looking for that sense of control, that sense of community. I think you see, though, stories around carjackings in the GTA and many of those have been in smaller communities in the GTA. So I do think it’s important to look at that at the metro level and say, “If I really want the small town life, I’m going to have to move out to Goderich, or somewhere that’s not within a commuting distance of a place with an NHL team.”

Sabrina Maddeaux: There’s a lot at play. But at the end of the day, so much of it does come down to housing and affordability, doesn’t it?

Mike Moffatt: It really does.

So I really do think being a housing guy is important here, that it’s not just my imagination. And, particularly not just house prices and rents at a high level, but specifically prices and, to a lesser extent, rents of family-sized homes.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this really started to pick up at a time when we had the introduction of Green Belts and we started having tight urban growth boundaries. Correlation is not causation, but I think the timing here is suggestive of part of what’s going on. We’ve made it so difficult to create family-friendly homes in our metros that people are moving to these smaller communities.

I often hear urbanists cite Kitchener-Waterloo as a success case for preventing sprawl because they do a lot on infill and they do a lot of good things. They have tight urban growth boundaries and so on. But interestingly, the metro area actually saw net outmigration to the rest of Canada. And that’s actually really unusual for a non-Toronto metro like Ottawa, Oshawa, Saint Catharines, Niagara, Hamilton, Barrie, London, Woodstock. They’re all gaining families, but KW is losing them.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Unfortunately, I think it might take longer than we’d like and longer than logic would dictate. We are seeing that conversation happening more with, for example, the Greenbelt. But there’s still so much backlash, especially from older voters who turn out in bigger numbers, who show up at meetings and contact politicians who are comfortably housed and don’t understand the dynamics here.

Mike Moffatt: And what I’m afraid of, because I also would put environmentalists in this pocket of which I’m one. I’m the guy who gave the Carney government an “F” on environmental policy. But overall, I think that these things have become more about symbols than policies, right? That we don’t actually see whether or not these policies have been effective at all.

But what it means to be a good environmentalist is that you support tight urban growth boundaries, and not say, “Does the data actually show that this is helpful? Or is it doing more harm than good?” And I’m afraid we’ve gotten to that point in policy where it’s all about virtue signalling and going, “These are the things you must support to stay in the environmental club. And if you don’t, then obviously you hate Mother Nature or you hate the planet.” And I just wish we could get to a point where we had more evidence-based policy.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I could not agree more.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. And to our producer Meredith Martin and editor Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about Goderich or other communities on Lake Huron that Letterkenny might be based on, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Housing is a large part of the story. The OECD has examined this:

OECD Economic Surveys: Canada 2025

As has Statistics Canada:

Housing challenges related to affordability, adequacy, condition and discrimination, August 2 to September 15, 2024

Remote Work and Employment Dynamics under COVID-19: Evidence from Canada

Remote workers, who tend to be college-educated, also want to move to areas with a robust mix of local amenities.

Settling into a New Normal? Working from Home across Canada

Social ties and quality of life, including lower rates of depression:

Beyond urban and rural: Rethinking the social geography of Canada

Rates of depression and anxiety in urban and rural Canada

Why some people are choosing country life over the city

Though evidence is nuanced:

Rural life hardly healthier

Crime and disorder:

Urban Violent Crime Report, Volume 2: Comparing crime across Canadian cities

Characteristics of police-reported crime in rural areas in the Canadian provinces, 2023

McDonald-Laurier Report

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

Cara Stern sits down with Jasmine Steffler of Walkable Parenthood and Oh The Urbanity! to explore why Canada’s parental leave system is among the most generous in the world, yet still leaves many new parents struggling.

From confusing leave rules and income replacement gaps to the challenges of finding childcare, building community, and balancing finances during the first year of parenthood, they take a candid look at what Canada gets right, where it falls short, and why supporting families requires more than just time off.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: Since Canada expanded employment insurance parental leave from ten weeks to 35 weeks in 2000, and Quebec launched its own provincial parental insurance plan in 2006, the share of new mothers taking leave has consistently been around three quarters. Say what you will about Canada, but when it comes to pregnancy and parental leave, we do a lot right. Our policies are popular, they’re widely used, and they’re among the most generous in the world. But of course, that doesn’t mean they’re perfect.

Today we’re joined by Jasmine Steffler, who you might recognize from the YouTube channel Oh The Urbanity! and who now writes a Substack called Walkable Parenthood. She’s here to talk about her experience navigating parental leave, what surprised her along the way, and where she thinks Canada could be improved.

First of all, thanks so much for joining us. I’m so happy to have you, Jasmine.

Jasmine Steffler: Thanks for having me.

Cara Stern: What did you know about the parental leave policies before you got pregnant?

Jasmine Steffler: I generally knew you get about a year of maternity leave, but I had a lot of confusion around exactly what that looked like in terms of how many payments you got, how long you get payments, and how that fits with how much leave you can take from work.

That was one of my biggest confusions—how that worked beyond just generally figuring out personally when to take leave, when you’re financially stable enough, and when you feel like it’s a good time at work.

Cara Stern: Yeah, it’s a thing that wasn’t intuitive to me either. The fact that it’s like two separate systems where you’ve got your protected leave, which is one part of the system, and then you’ve got your employment insurance—or in Quebec, it’s their own program—but you’ve got basically employment insurance for parental leave over that period of time. Those are two separate things.

It’s not that simple of a system, which is a little frustrating, deciding when to take leave. What did you decide to do?

Jasmine Steffler: I ended up taking 14 months, which seemed like a good compromise between a little bit more than a year, but not the full amount of time because I just didn’t quite feel like I could justify being away from work that long. I think the financial strain would have been a bit too much for that amount of time.

Cara Stern: In Quebec, though, you guys have a better system in the sense of the income replacement part of it, right? Because I know in Ontario and in most provinces, you end up basically getting the same as what you’d get through the EI system. It’s capped at 55% of your salary up to somewhere around $60,000—it changes every year.

For a lot of people, especially if you’re a middle-class family, you’re probably taking a significant pay cut. No matter where you are [outside of Quebec], it’s going to be 55% at best; you’re going to lose 45% of your income. For a lot of people, it’s a lot more than that. For you, it was different in Quebec, right? They have a higher income replacement rate. Is that how it works?

Jasmine Steffler: Yeah, that’s right. That was a pleasant surprise when we were going through all this research.

Comparing that to 55% in the rest of Canada is actually pretty significant when you think about what that would look like in terms of money in your bank. It gets better than that as your income increases because Quebec doesn’t have the same cap. In Quebec, your income can be up to $103,000 for the income ceiling, so you’ll get 65% of that if you make that much, which most of us don’t, but it’s a pretty big difference.

Cara Stern: That’s huge. I wonder how much that impacts how comfortable people are. I know that Quebec has, at least in eastern Canada, the highest fertility rate. I wonder how much of a role this plays. How much of this did you consider?

Jasmine Steffler: I think it was a pretty big consideration, just doing the calculations and figuring out the difference. It wasn’t only that, but it definitely made a big difference for imagining what our lifestyle would be like the year I’m off. It just seemed a bit more attainable than it would elsewhere. It wasn’t just that, though. In combination with that, knowing that Quebec has a pretty strong subsidized daycare system and looking ahead to things like that helped too.

Cara Stern: Oh my gosh, your daycare system seems so much more robust than in Ontario. I know that here you end up calling all the daycares and having to basically follow up. Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and it’s very frustrating, especially if you’re someone who isn’t comfortable calling and bugging people and saying, “Hey, I really need a spot, can you help me out?” Because I understand in Quebec it’s a centralized system, right?

Jasmine Steffler: Yes, exactly. It’s a pretty easy system and there are just so many more available spots. There’s still competition for your ideal spot, but it’s just not such a Hunger Games thing because there is more availability. It’s not rewarding the richest and most organized people as much as I think it is in other provinces.

Cara Stern: Yeah, and that’s kind of nice. It’s a much fairer system because a lot of people don’t know how to navigate the system, especially if it’s your first kid. With the first kid, you don’t have any sibling priority that a lot of people get when it’s their second or third kid. When it comes to the amount that you get, for me with the first kid, I was thinking about how we’ll just figure it out. I knew that I had, at the time, a top-up through work for the first four months. I think that is something that some people have—big companies often offer that. But a lot of Canadian employees work for small businesses and don’t have any top-up, so it’s a huge hit.

Once you experience one parental leave, you know exactly how dire the situation can be for your budget. There’s no way to avoid thinking about this when deciding whether to have another kid because it’s going to affect your income. I heard from a financial planner one time that if you are not going in the red during mat leave, that is a huge success. That’s all you’re aiming for, and a lot of people can’t even do that. It makes sense because the cost of living is really high and the amount you get is not that high.

Jasmine Steffler: It really disincentivizes middle- and lower-income people from having kids; it’s a huge barrier. Obviously, if you’re a bit better off, you have more capacity to have one partner be off for a year or two years, and it doesn’t hurt you that much. Maybe you’re reducing your investments or you’re not going on as many trips as you would normally. But for lower-and middle-income people, it actually can be a very big hit to your lifestyle. We are in the advantageous short-term position of not owning a home, not having a mortgage, and not having a car. If you do have those big, regular monthly expenses, it seems almost impossible if you’re a middle-income person.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I was thinking to ask you if you were one of the people who decided once you have a kid, you have to get a car, because I was like, that would be very off-brand for you guys. But I wondered about that because a lot of people feel like it is a necessity when you have a kid. I know that you have a Substack that talks about all the ways you get around the city without a car and what your experience is like. Can you tell a bit about what your experience has been with that?

Jasmine Steffler: Yeah, so we don’t have a strong opposition to ever getting a car, but we did want to see how long we can go and how it goes having a baby or a kid now without a car. There are some areas that can definitely be improved in Montreal. Montreal has pretty good transit, but they are really lacking on accessibility on the Metro. I don’t know the exact figure, but it seems like 10% or less of stations are accessible. I think Toronto is a lot higher, so that has been a challenge. It definitely makes us take the bus more than the Metro, which has been fine, it just limits your options in a way that full accessibility wouldn’t. If we want to go somewhere, we might walk to the closest Metro station, and that might be a 20 or 30-minute walk just to get the elevator, so it definitely adds some complications. Other than that, we do live in a walkable area, so we can do our day-to-day needs on foot, and it’s been mostly fine.

Cara Stern: How old was your baby when you first took him on a bike?

Jasmine Steffler: Technically the first time he was around eight months, but he was in a car seat in a cargo bike. When we really got him on it more often was when he was about 14 or 15 months. It was finally not winter in Montreal and he had good head and neck control. We have a bike seat for him now, which has been great for being able to do similar rides that we did before.

Cara Stern: Will you be taking him in the winter?

Jasmine Steffler: Good question. I think that’ll have to be a discussion for later, but we’re definitely a lot more cautious when we take him out. Maybe we’ll get there.

Cara Stern: I wanted to go back to the parental leave side of it because you spent a lot of time on parental leave. How did you find navigating and understanding not just the systems on how to collect the payments for it, but how did you integrate into the community of people who are also on parental leave? How did you find people who have kids the same age? What did you do?

Jasmine Steffler: I actually found it kind of challenging. In the first three to five months of having a baby, you’re so preoccupied with the baby, you’re spending so much time taking care of them, worrying about them, and googling things that your main focus isn’t really building community, even though it’s maybe the thing you most need.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I always thought about when I was on parental leave that there was this ratio between how much you liked them and how close they lived, and that just has to be a happy ratio. As long as they live nearby, if they’re decent enough people, you spend time with them, even though sometimes the only thing you have in common is being a mom. But sometimes that’s all you need when you’re on parental leave and trying to find your people. It can be tough, right?

Jasmine Steffler: Yes, exactly. Getting that human interaction regularly can be pretty important because it can be pretty isolating if you don’t have that, especially if you don’t have family or a pre-built network right around you.

Cara Stern: Oh yeah, because you live far from your family, so I guess you had to kind of build that community where you are. It’s a tough thing.

I always tell everyone who’s going on parental leave, look for your local EarlyON if you’re in Ontario because they’re all over the place and they’re all individually run, so they’re a little bit different. If you don’t like the one you go to, try another one. When it comes to going on parental leave, what’s something you wish you understood before you went?

Jasmine Steffler: I think beyond understanding the basics of how much money you’re entitled to, how much leave you can take, and figuring out what works best for you, like not just assuming that you have to take only 12 months or only 18 months, it’s pretty idiosyncratic. You have to be honest with yourself about how long you really want to spend with a baby. It’s rewarding, but it can be really hard, and it’s a very different type of job.

Cara Stern: Yeah, and it’s okay to not know that ahead of time. Some people think that they will enjoy it a lot more than they actually do, so I guess that’s where the flexibility comes in of being able to change it. I really appreciate that they don’t lock you into a certain amount of time when you take parental leave.

Jasmine Steffler: And then beyond that, thinking beyond one year or 18 months of leave and thinking about what infrastructure, services, and things exist around you to support you. More of us are living more individualistic lives, and that’s become more normal than it was in the past. We need community groups more than ever.

Cara Stern: Yeah. Childcare used to be such a big expense, and I know it was before this program came in. I started my first kid in daycare right as the program came in. Our deposit was $2,300 for the month, and then what we actually paid was more like $1,000 a month, and it just went down from there. Now it’s around $450, and if you can access the spaces, it’s such a benefit. It’s amazing what it does.

What ends up happening is that the year off is probably the most significant cost in the early years because of the loss of income, the loss of momentum at work, and sometimes losing connections if you take too long off. I was reading about what kinds of things have worked for helping people feel more comfortable having as many kids as they’d like to, and what I found was that extending how long they’re off doesn’t always work beyond a year. About a year seems to be the sweet point. Some countries tried doing two years and three years and then pulled it back to 18 months because they didn’t find it made a big difference. But what makes a big difference is that income replacement, because without it, it just makes it impossible to make ends meet, especially in such a high cost of living country.

Jasmine Steffler: You need to have already decided you want to have kids, and then you’re going to figure out how to make it work. But if you’re someone on the fence and you’re not sure, our programs don’t necessarily do enough to make it look super appealing.

Cara Stern: You recently took a trip with your kid. You said kid, I still think he’s a baby. He’s only three weeks older than mine, and mine is still a baby, so yours is still a baby. What was that like?

Jasmine Steffler: It was different than traveling before a kid, but it was better than we thought it would be. It takes more prep work, just like you do at home, and you have to temper your expectations a little bit. You expect to cover less of the city every day, but it is entirely doable. I don’t know how much harder it gets when we’re fully in toddler mode, but it’s entirely doable with an 18-month-old.

Cara Stern: So that’s awesome. Yeah, I guess it’ll be different to see as they change. There’s always something new that’s great and something new that’s horrible—that’s my experience, anyways. I only have a four-year-old. I don’t know if it changes as they get older, but as something changes, I’m like, “I’m so sad this phase is over,” and also, “Thank goodness that phase is over.” Everything’s bittersweet.

Jasmine Steffler: For sure.

Cara Stern: Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate you taking the time to come here today.

Jasmine Steffler: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Cara Stern: Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. And thanks so much to our producer, Meredith Martin, and our editor, Sean Foreman.

If you have any questions about putting a baby on a bike, send them our way: missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

We’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review

Does Parental Leave Affect Fertility and Return-to-Work? Evidence from a “True Natural Experiment”

The Daily — Fertility and baby names, 2024

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

From housing reforms and accessible education to immigration, community, environmental spaces, and a uniquely Canadian sense of humour, the conversation highlights the people, values, and progress that continue to inspire optimism.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Mike Moffatt: Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Sabrina Maddeaux: Happy Canada Day!

Today we’re doing something a little different. We often spend a lot of time on the show talking about the country’s challenges, but since it’s Canada Day, we’re taking a moment to focus on what makes Canada great and what’s making us feel optimistic about the country.

Cara Stern: Summer is finally here, and I love summer in Canada. There’s something about having four seasons that makes the summertime extra special. I find our cities really come alive with people who know that they cannot take the warmth for granted, so we’re all going to soak it up. Every year reminds me how lucky I am to live somewhere that has all four seasons, and I just can’t imagine living anywhere else.

I think there’s a lot to be optimistic about living in Canada. If you told me a few years ago that we’d be seeing citywide up-zoning to four-plexes, six-plexes, even eight-plexes in this country, I would not have believed you, but we’ve seen it happen. And we’re now seeing meaningful change on the development charge front, on the taxes applied to new homes, and these are temporary measures. But the fact that they’re happening at all shows the politicians are starting to understand how dire the housing crisis is to an extent that was just unthinkable a few years ago.

There’s a long way to go before the housing crisis is resolved, and a lot more changes that need to come to make these projects viable, not just legal on paper, but there’s progress, and it’s slow, but it’s happening, and that gives me optimism for the future.

Sean Foreman: Hello, everybody. I am Sean Foreman. I am the technical director here at Missing Middle. Happy Canada Day! What do I love about Canada? I love a lot about Canada, but something I’ve been thinking a lot about is the Canadian sense of humour.

We have created some of the funniest people on the planet, and we are proud of it. Some of our prime ministers have also been funny, some on purpose and others not so much. But I think this quality goes beyond just laughs. I think humour is connected to humility and that’s a good thing. We are a humble country.

We are certainly not the most powerful country in the world. There is a guy just south of the border who keeps reminding us of that, and we are not perfect. But that is okay, because if you are humble, you’re capable of self-reflection and you can change.

I think Canada has the potential to change for the better. And while we all love Canada, there are some things that need changing. So have a great Canada Day. Maybe you’re listening to this at a barbecue. I don’t think it’s weird to listen to a podcast at a barbecue at all. So don’t listen to your friends and have a great Canada Day.

Kelly Hoban: I’m Kelly, Missing Middle’s summer co-op student. I’m currently in university, and being originally from the United States with dual citizenship, one of the things I appreciate most about Canada is the accessibility of education here. There’s a big difference in university costs and student debt between the US and Canada, and moving here has made me see education as more attainable rather than overwhelming or out of reach.

Beyond that, I think the universities here feel very community-oriented. I’ve built a lot of close friendships since I moved here for school, and since then, Canada has stopped feeling like somewhere I visited when I was younger and started feeling more like home.

This is what makes me optimistic about Canada’s future. When people feel supported and connected to their communities, it creates a more welcoming country. While there’s always room to improve, the support and sense of community I’ve experienced living here give me hope for the future.

Meredith Martin: My name is Meredith Martin, and I’m the producer of the podcasts. For what I love about Canada, I’m going to go hyperlocal to Tommy Thompson Park.

Like millions of people, I took up birdwatching during the pandemic and discovered that I live very close to a migration superhighway for birds, so every spring and every fall, I get to go down and witness thousands of birds migrating into the northern and southern hemispheres. I love it. I also found out that Tommy Thompson was built out of leftover debris from the construction of the Toronto subway system, which I think is pretty wild. It was allowed to rewild over many years, and now it is a phenomenal place to spend time alone in the wilderness, and yet within the boundaries of a city that is home to over 3 million people. If you haven’t been, you should go.

In terms of what I’m feeling positive about, I am feeling positive about immigration, and I’ll explain why. I know this is a topic that we talk about a lot on this show, and some people think of us as being anti-immigrant, and that is the furthest thing from the truth. Canada is a nation of immigrants, and I feel both confident and hopeful that we can figure out a way to align our housing goals with thoughtful immigration policies, because that is how we built this country, and we do it better than anywhere else on earth.

This summer, my nephew is getting married to an Iranian woman, and three years ago, another nephew of mine got married to a woman from mainland China. So this is very personal for me. I’m now the great-aunt of a beautiful baby girl. And what could be more optimistic than babies? Let’s have more of them.

Sabrina Maddeaux: What I love most about Canada isn’t the postcard stuff. It’s something that I think gets dismissed too easily in the current conversation, which is this country’s instinct to look out for people. To try to do right by its citizens and by the world. This isn’t a marketing play. You can see it in the way we’ve shown up historically, whether that’s on the world stage as peacekeepers and mediators, when other countries weren’t willing to play that role, or in the social programs we built, because we really believe no one should fall through the floor.

There’s something in our Canadian culture, an inclination toward kindness, a baseline assumption that your neighbour’s well-being is at least partly your business. It does run pretty deep, and I don’t think we should just throw it out because it’s been taken advantage of lately or it hasn’t always been paired with the rigour it needed to actually work.

That’s really the problem right there. Good intentions without clear thinking, without urgency, without a willingness to take risks or make hard calls - that’s not real virtue. It’s just comfort. And there are two ways that comfort becomes dangerous. One is external. In an era where those good intentions can be so easily manipulated by private interests, bad actors, or the incentive structures of social media, kindness without backbone becomes a liability.

But the other way is internal, and that’s maybe even more corrosive because it turns into complacency. The belief that because we mean well, because we have good values, we’re somehow protected from the worst outcomes, that we don’t have to do the hard work because we’re already on the right side. Our Canadian values should be assets, but we’ve too often allowed them to be blind spots.

What makes me hopeful is that I think more and more Canadians are starting to understand this: holding on to our values doesn’t mean being naive about how they get used against us, or assuming they’ll save us on their own.

The work we need to do is to figure out how to actually keep what’s inherently good about Canada and its people intact while building the common sense and the spine to act smarter and faster. That’s not a small thing to figure out, but I know we’re more than capable of it, and I think the conversation is more serious than it’s ever been in my lifetime, including on The Missing Middle. So today I’m holding on to that and proud of it. Happy Canada Day!

Mike Moffatt: At the Missing Middle, we’re often critical of government policies and the people who make them. That’s not because we’re anti-Canada. It’s because we love our country. After all, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. We’ve taken positions that have made those in power uncomfortable, sometimes even angry, and we plan to keep doing it. Yet, despite being a regular thorn in their side, no one in power has ever tried to silence us. The only censorship we face is self-imposed, guided by what we believe is true, appropriate and helpful.

But what makes Canada truly remarkable isn’t just the relative lack of government censorship; it’s that those same politicians, bureaucrats, and planners that we criticize still call us. They subscribe to our Substack, they invite us to meetings, and they seek out our perspective.

They want to hear from us precisely because they don’t always agree. They see the fundamental value in well-researched, independent opinions. That open-mindedness is what makes Canada great. And I hope we never lose it.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Thank you so much for watching and listening.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about what used to be called Dominion Day, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

A History of Tommy Thompson Park

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

In this episode of the DemograFix, Mike Moffatt and Cara Stern unpack a major problem hidden inside Canada’s housing statistics: the country is building fewer family-sized homes than it did 20 years ago.

Why are three-bedroom homes becoming so difficult to find? Why are developers building more small condos instead of homes for families? And how do zoning rules, development charges, land shortages, and housing policies shape what gets built?

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: Housing starts across Canada over the last decade have been relatively high compared to historical averages, but it’s still much harder to find a family-sized home to raise children in than it was a generation ago.

A lot of that shortage does have to do with unusually rapid population growth, which we’ve discussed on a number of episodes, but that’s actually only part of the story. Our housing start data masks a dramatic shift in the type of homes that get built in this country, and it’s a big shift away from building homes that work for families with kids.

Mike Moffatt: So, Cara, you’re a mom of two kids, so let’s say your family needed to move for whatever reason. You’re out there, you’re looking for a new home. What kind of features do you picture in your mind that would suit you and your family?

Cara Stern: It’s somewhere that definitely has enough room for the kids; they need space indoors to be able to play. They need some sort of outdoor area, I don’t care if it’s a backyard, it could be a local park, it just has to be somewhere they can go and be in green space. And they definitely need to have three bedrooms because I’m going a little bit bananas with my kids sharing a room and waking each other up all the time.

Mike Moffatt: We could ask a lot of parents that question, and they’re all going to have different lists. They might want to be within walkable distance to a school, this, that, or the other. I think, though, you’re going to find with most parents of kids that the three-bedroom thing is a must-have. If you have to have three or more bedrooms, then you are almost certainly going to be looking at either a single-detached, semi-detached, or maybe a townhouse unit. You’re going to be kind of limited to those housing options.

But if you start to look at apartment units, and that could be rentals or condos, only about 16% of low-rise apartment buildings or apartment units (those with five or fewer stories) are going to be three plus bedrooms. And if you start looking at high-rises, only 7% of those have three bedrooms or more.

If you’re looking at apartments, you’re going to have a really tough time finding a place that meets your needs, particularly if those needs are more bedrooms. That is doubly true if you’re looking at newer buildings and big cities, because new builds, particularly in high-rises, have been shrinking all the time. Really, if you want three bedrooms, you’re kind of limited to single-detached, semi-detached, and townhomes.

Cara Stern: I’m actually surprised that 7% of high-rise units have three bedrooms or more. I would have guessed it was even less because it seems so rare. You see one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and studio units, but you almost never see three bedrooms, especially in the rental market.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I think many of those are older, and many of those are catering to folks who aren’t in the middle class. Think of the 62nd-story penthouse units and that kind of thing. It’s not the type of home you would think of when you’re running around with two small children, like, “I’ve got a $3 million penthouse.” I like to think we pay well at Missing Middle, but not $3 million penthouse well.

Cara Stern: Yeah. And when you talk about the apartment sizes shrinking over time, that’s a huge part of it, too. I remember looking at condos when I was looking to buy a place, wondering whether we should move into a house or a condo. I was totally fine with the idea of a condo because I actually like that lifestyle and I like having a lot of people in the building where you can get to know them. You don’t have to go outside to see them, which was kind of nice when I had a very young child on a winter day when we were in a high-rise.

But when we started looking at them, the prices of even the two-bedrooms that were 800 square feet, or even 600 square feet, were considered pretty big units because a lot of them were much smaller than that. Very quickly we realized that if you want 800 square feet, you could spend, at the time, probably around $1.2 million on a two-bedroom condo. Then we noticed that houses were less than that for about that same size, and you often get a basement or some sort of extra space. It didn’t make any sense to get one of those condos if you want space for kids.

What’s important here is that those housing types—the single-detached, semi-detached, and row homes—are actually getting increasingly harder to find. We’re building fewer of them. If we go all the way back to the year 2000—which I can’t believe was about 26 years ago because I remember it well—we were building at the beginning of the century somewhere between about 100,000 and 140,000 of these ground-oriented homes each year. That was between 2000 and the start of the financial crisis. But we were only building about 30,000 to 70,000 apartment units. What that really means is, for each apartment unit, we were building two or three of these ground-oriented homes which suit families.

The low supply of those apartments was a real problem—we needed to get those numbers up. Thanks to two decades’ worth of government reforms, apartment starts are on the way up, and I mean way, way up. Last year, we had about 165,000 housing unit starts in Canada. That’s an all-time record, and that’s absolutely worth celebrating.

Cara Stern: It’s really frustrating the way that politicians talk about this because they talk about “housing units,” not “homes.” When you think about it, what makes a suitable home for one family doesn’t necessarily work for another. We’ve said it before: they look at it as if a unit is a unit is a unit, and that’s not how people look at it. It’s just how politicians and people trying to count housing starts look at it.

If you build a 40-story tower with 400 shoebox condos, yes, you’ve added 400 units and are getting closer to hitting your target. The mayor might get to hold a press conference and talk about all the progress they’ve made towards their targets, but none of those units accommodate a growing family. Those 400 units are basically useless for a couple trying to transition out of the roommate phase of their lives and start a family. Those 400 shoeboxes have a lot fewer bedrooms than houses used to, or the kind of ground-oriented housing that you’ve been talking about, so they fit a lot fewer people than 300 townhomes.

Mike Moffatt: Exactly. Our housing start data is really misleading because of this “a unit is a unit is a unit” mindset. If we look at the number of bedrooms, it’s actually fallen quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong, small apartment units have their uses; there is a market for that. It’s not about saying, “Okay, stop doing that thing,” but we have to be looking at the entire universe of housing that we’re building, and that universe contains fewer and fewer family-sized homes. That is a real problem.

As long as governments, whether it be the federal government, provincial government, or municipal governments, simply think in terms of units and set targets in terms of units, we’re not going to be building the types of homes that work for all families. We’re going to bias the system toward building a lot of shoebox condos and not much of anything else.

Cara Stern: And we do need those shoebox condos. I sometimes get my back up a little bit when people say no one wants to live in them or they’re unlivable. There are a lot of people who would be very happy with them. Think about people who are living with a roommate and would love to live on their own; that gives them an option of a less expensive way to live on their own. I think about the homelessness crisis and how many people would be happy with those teeny-tiny micro-units—there is a market for that at the right price, maybe in cases where the government would make social housing out of them. We do need them. The fact that they’re still so expensive tells me that there still isn’t enough of them.

Mike Moffatt: You’re absolutely right that it’s not a lack of demand that’s the issue. It’s fair to ask that question because tastes for anything change over time, and when things become less popular, all else being equal, companies are going to start producing less of it. But something else happens when things become less popular, all else being equal, and that’s that the price goes down, particularly for resale items.

Let’s say people decide that they don’t want Beanie Babies, early 1990s baseball cards, or Nickelback CDs; the market gets flooded with them, nobody buys them, and the price collapses to nothing. That didn’t happen with three-bedroom homes. Prices didn’t go down; they went up. And not only did they go up, they grew much faster than incomes. Those homes became incredibly valuable, not something that you could get for a dollar at a garage sale.

Cara Stern: And they haven’t dropped as much as some of these other places have. I know lots of people right now looking to buy a home, and a lot of them are looking for that family-sized home. They haven’t dropped the same way you hear in the news, like, “Oh, real estate, there’s been a crash.” Yes, they’ve gone down since 2022, but they are so far from affordable right now.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. In many provinces, they’re at all-time highs right now. Yes, there has been some decline in the GTA, Southern Ontario, and the Lower Mainland in B.C., but in other places, prices have gone up. There’s a lot of demand out there. I occasionally hear things from older people suggesting that it is a demand problem. They’ll say things like, “Well, those homes aren’t getting built anymore because millennials decided that they don’t want to have to mow the lawn.” If that was truly the issue, again, we would be seeing a massive collapse in the price of those ground-oriented homes. That just hasn’t happened.

Cara Stern: Yeah, people definitely still want to live in these kinds of homes, and it’s really frustrating to see that they just aren’t building them at the rate that we need. You’d think that builders would respond to those higher resale prices by building more because when prices go up, they can make more money off of it. Instead of building more, they actually did the opposite—they’re not building them at anywhere near the rates they used to. What’s going on there?

Mike Moffatt: There’s a few different ways we can answer that question. I think the most straightforward is comparing two types of communities. In the first type, over the last 20 years—I would think of places like Alberta, Southwestern Ontario (shout out to Tillsonburg), Atlantic Canada, and so on—we continued to build those homes and, in some cases, actually increased the rate of building them over the last 20 years.

In other parts of the country, obviously the GTA, and I would actually say in particular the 905 belt around Toronto, you saw a massive decline in the building of family-friendly homes.

So you go, “Okay, well, what’s the difference between those two buckets of communities?” There’s a bunch of different factors. In places in the 905, approval times can be much slower than in, say, Southwestern Ontario, and zoning can be much more restrictive. There’s a number of reasons, and I’m sure I’m going to miss some. If I missed your favorite reason, please leave us a comment in the comment section; we’d love to hear from you.

But there are two in my mind that really jump out. The first one is land costs and scarcity.

Cara Stern: For a while, growing up in the suburbs, I would see the expansion of subdivisions farther and farther away from the city, and I kept thinking to myself that at some point it’s going to be too far to commute. There is that kind of limit, even if you don’t put the Greenbelt in there; there is a reasonable amount of commuting time that people are going to accept. I wonder how much that plays a role in this as well.

Mike Moffatt: I’d actually say it’s the opposite because what happened was a lot of those families moved to Southwestern Ontario and still continue moving into the GTA. We made a number of policy decisions to say, “Well, we don’t want people doing 30 or 40 mile commutes to their jobs on Bay Street.” We put in a bunch of policies, and now they’re doing 80 or 90 mile commutes to their jobs. Instead of living in the 905, they’re living in Oxford County and still driving in. In fact, we tended to make sprawl worse because of these land-use issues, but I think that’s a topic for another episode.

Cara Stern: And at the same time, while restricting those urban growth boundaries, we of course didn’t allow multiplexes in cities, so you couldn’t actually build up. You’re limiting it in all directions.

Ironically, it economically favoured McMansions, because the development charges on a small 1,200-square-foot detached home and a 12,000-square-foot McMansion are exactly the same. This would be like if the government put a $5 tax on pizza, but that tax is the same whether you bought a small pizza, an extra-large pizza, or even just a single slice of pizza—you buy any amount of pizza, you pay a flat $5 tax. Under that scenario, who on earth is going to pay by the slice? Or in this case, who on earth is going to buy and build a small single-family home when you get taxed through the nose for it?

Cara Stern: No one would want to get the smallest amount of pizza if they can get the entire pizza for the same price, although I guess there’s a land cost, so maybe the base price of the pizza before the taxes would be different. At the same time, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That’s just a logical thing that developers would do. But then why didn’t they shift to building family-sized apartment units when they realized that there was a shortage of family-sized homes and people were going to want them?

Mike Moffatt: The reason is project cost. The cost of construction for a high-rise is much, much higher per square foot than for ground-oriented buildings because of their complexity.

The other day I was looking at a Bloomberg Associates report for the City of Ottawa. It showed for the Ottawa region pure construction costs. This doesn’t count land, taxes, marketing, finance costs, or anything else; just drywall, electricians’ time, and so on. If you look at those construction costs, if you’re building single-detached, it’s about 205 bucks a square foot. It’s about the same for townhomes. But if you’re building high-rises, it’s about 320 bucks a square foot. It’s roughly 50% higher.

It’s so much more expensive per square foot in order to build high-rise units. But the costs are even worse than that when I say it’s about 50% higher because, for a single-detached home, if you’re a developer and you’re selling it, you’re selling 100% of the space. It’s really efficient. But for a high-rise, that figure drops to about 80% because you are selling the units themselves—you’re not selling the hallways, the elevator, or the lobby. That doesn’t go into the purchase price. There’s this efficiency loss just because you need all of these other components.

The project’s economics are brutal, particularly in the GTA. No middle-class family with kids is going to pay over $1 million to live on the 56th floor of a high-rise to get enough space; it just doesn’t make any sense.

Cara Stern: And if they’re trying to prepare their life for having a kid, they might not even have that kid because they would say they don’t have the room for it. It’s really tough for people trying to have a family if they’re looking at the options, like, “Where am I going to raise them? What kind of home can I have for them?”

If they find that they can’t afford something that’s big enough for their family that they can actually feel good about raising their kids in, then they’re just going to not have kids, and people are making that choice all the time.

We know our fertility rate is at the lowest it’s ever been—it’s at 1.25, and that is considered ultra-low. We’re seeing this affect what people are able to do with their families, how many kids they are able to have, and where they’re able to start families. We’re seeing a lot of people leaving cities because there are just no options for them within the cities.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. That’s the big issue—that we are creating cities without children because the individuals or the couples in that city are going, “Okay, well, I’m just not going to have kids because I just can’t make the numbers work.” Not that most millennials think like economists and accountants, but enough of them do.

Cara Stern: No, but they’re looking at their budget and going, “The numbers just don’t work. There’s just no way to make this happen.”

Mike Moffatt: Exactly. They can figure it out without the use of an Excel spreadsheet, doing calculus, or anything. If they really want to have kids, they’re moving out. They’re moving to the 519, they’re moving to smaller communities outside of the GTA, and in some cases, they’re leaving Ontario or leaving Canada. You get this big out-migration, and you actually weirdly get sprawl on steroids because you get people who are going far away from the city but still commuting back to work every day. It doesn’t make for a strong, inclusive economy when you basically price out middle-class families from having kids and also living next to, near, or in a city.

Cara Stern: When you say inclusivity, it sounds like saying it’s a goodwill thing to be able to do this, but it’s actually just looking at the economics of it. If you have all these parents who are basically the ages of people who are in their prime working years moving out of the city, that’s going to have an impact on what kind of jobs people can work in the city.

We need people to work in the city. There are lots of jobs; they can’t all be super high-paying jobs that are only for the most senior people and then the lowest entry-level ones. You need to have some of those people with experience in all different kinds of careers, and there are a lot of jobs where it’s impossible to find people in the cities.

Of course, if they’re not highly paid and they can’t afford to live in the city, then they’re not going to be there to work those jobs, so it’s actually a big economic problem for our urban areas.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. I often hear from particularly older folks saying, “Well, why don’t young people just move somewhere cheaper?”

Cara Stern: “Just move to Alberta if you’re in Toronto. It’s so much cheaper.”

Mike Moffatt: Exactly. But think about the logic there. We’re basically saying we’re going to have all the seniors live in Toronto and all the nurses and physical therapists living in North Bay. How is that going to work?

Cara Stern: They’ll just commute from North Bay to Toronto. A very good commute. It’s lovely, a beautiful thing driving through Ontario.

Mike Moffatt: Exactly. So I just go, “Okay, how is this going to work where you have a community of all old people and no middle-class people there to actually do the work?” It doesn’t work. You have to have cities that work for young middle-class families; there’s no way around that.

Cara Stern: So how do you actually go about fixing this?

Mike Moffatt: There are a few things that we can do, so I’ll give a list here. Again, it won’t be exhaustive. If I missed your favourite policy prescription, please let us know in the comments.

First, we have to fix development charges. They’re not only too high, but as I mentioned, for ground-oriented homes, the system is designed to favour McMansions. You hear this complaint, “Okay, well, why don’t developers build smaller homes? Why do they only build McMansions?” It’s because that’s what the tax system incentivizes.

Second, we need to be realistic about how much land we need, and that’s going to mean tough decisions about urban growth boundaries.

Third, we need to build a diversity of low-rise housing types, including multiplexes and European-style apartments, so that’s going to require both zoning and building code reform.

And finally, we need to reform condo regulations to make it much easier to be able to purchase a home in a multiplex and not just rent one. We had a report a few months ago called A Roadmap for Gentle Density. It mapped out the issue and provided recommendations on how to make it possible to own, and not just rent, a multiplex unit or other form of family-friendly, gentle density housing. There are four ideas right there. I’m sure there’s more that we could discuss, but this is a solvable problem.

Cara Stern: The idea that people could buy multiplex units is a good one, because right now it seems like a lot of people who build multiplex units live in one and rent out the others potentially, or maybe they just rent them all out. The system is designed for that. But there are a lot of people who still want to own their home, and if they can afford it, they’re going to make that choice. Once again, if the family-sized units are not available in the cities, even in these gentle density builds, then they’re not going to live there—they’re going to move away.

Cara Stern: Thanks, everyone, for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and our editor is Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about stuff that you can find cheap at a garage sale, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

From Policy Gridlock to Housing Growth: A Roadmap for Gentle Density

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

In this episode of Classonomics, Mike Moffatt and Sabrina Maddeaux dive into the real costs of hosting the world’s biggest party. They break down the billion-dollar price tags, FIFA’s business model, and whether taxpayers are getting stuck with the bill while others reap the rewards. (Producer note: This episode was recorded on June 5th, 2026.)

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: The World Cup kicks off June 11th, and Toronto and Vancouver are two of the 16 host cities. There’s been a lot of hype, a lot of controversy, and a lot of very optimistic economic projections flying around.

Mike, before we get into the weeds of who really wins when the World Cup comes to town, give me the basic overview of how these big projections are usually built and why economists tend to be pretty skeptical of them.

Mike Moffatt: Well, before I get into the economics of it all, which, to be frank, are really brutal, I think we need to acknowledge that there may be all kinds of hard-to-quantify non-economic benefits around, national pride, getting kids interested in sports, things like that.

I still remember being a kid in the late 1980s and all the excitement around the Winter Olympics coming to Canada. You really can’t put a price tag on that. And I really wish politicians and advocates of bringing events like the Olympics and the World Cup to Canada would focus on that side of the discussion, instead of engaging in this kind of dubious economic math.

Sabrina Maddeaux: There are some benefits. It’s not all bad news.

I also think of when the Raptors started to really surge and have success, and basketball became huge among youth in Canada, especially as a sport that’s not expensive to get into. It’s relatively accessible. That’s amazing. And the same thing will hopefully continue to happen with soccer. We’ve seen some of that already with, for example, TFC in Toronto and more kids playing soccer.

The other benefit I’d say is that these cities are actually undergoing the maintenance, repairs and upgrades they need, not just in terms of sports facilities. Being located in Toronto, I see it firsthand: the transit systems, the sidewalks, and how the city looks is finally being cleaned up when a lot of it was left to basically rot for years.

Now, the downside of that is we shouldn’t have to wait for a major event like the World Cup to come to town to get these things done. So it puts into perspective that we could probably be doing this on the regular, but it takes a major event to actually get politicians to act and get necessary things done.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. And I don’t want to downplay all the sort of importance of sports. I grew up in the 1980s, and a lot of us Canadian kids who were born in the late 1970s ended up becoming baseball obsessives. The Montreal Expos were good. The Toronto Blue Jays made the playoffs in 85, went to the World Series in 92 and 93. And that’s defined a large part of my personality and my life. So I think all of that’s important.

But what I think is problematic is this economic math. You hear these numbers up front like, FIFA’s claim that Canada is going to see $3.8 billion in positive economic output, but these come from economic impact assessment studies that are commissioned by the event organizers themselves and, frankly, are complete nonsense. Peer-reviewed research, which we’ll link to in the show notes, showed that the actual value of these events in economic terms is negligible and in some cases actually even negative.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s really interesting. Negligible is one thing, but negative is a completely different story. The public is skeptical. Tell me more about that.

Mike Moffatt: Well, it really goes to what’s measured. So, how the commissioned studies work is that they measure total spending. So every dollar that’s even remotely associated with the event- spending at bars, every hotel booking, every jersey sold and so on- it all gets counted. But the problem is they don’t measure the counterfactual. What would have happened anyway? Because we know that Toronto and Vancouver in June and July are already peak tourism season, and a lot of those visitors are going to displace other tourists who would have come but didn’t because they thought it might be too expensive or too crowded.

So we might actually get less tourism out of this because you’re chasing away a lot of potential tourists who hear that the World Cup’s going, they don’t have any interest in that, and go, “Oh, that’s going to be really busy.”

But at the end of the day, the World Cup amounts to 13 games in Canada. To put that into perspective, the Toronto Blue Jays play 81 games in Canada each year to similar-sized crowds. So it’s not that many seats that are getting sold. And there’s a lot of potential disruption around that.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Toronto’s definitely always busy this time of year. Hotels are booked up, restaurants are full, patios are crowded, and then you think about sporting events, concerts, and festivals. There’s already so much going on that you have to think: is it really worth this major cost for a handful of games? And, filling up hotel rooms that might have been filled up anyway?

Mike Moffatt: Exactly. The displacement here is really important. So if a local spends money at a FIFA fan zone, that’s money that they’re not spending at the neighbourhood bar down the street or going to watch a Jays game. So you’re moving dollars around more than you’re generating new ones. You’re going to the bar to watch a World Cup game instead of watching a Jays game. And keep in mind, a lot of that activity would still happen if the World Cup were somewhere else. If these games are still in the United States, I think a lot of Canadians would be going to their local bar and watching them anyway.

So we have to kind of understand that a lot of what they’re adding in would have happened anyway, regardless of where the World Cup was being held. And there’s both a countrywide effect and a local one here.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s really interesting that a lot of the economic benefit might have happened anyway, but it could also be actually taking away from whether that’s certain restaurants and bars or even just the downtown core. I think about being in Toronto, and there’s so much fear around the traffic situation during World Cup days, because our traffic is already terrible and you can’t get around in certain areas of the city, which might just come to a standstill. So people might not be going to businesses in those areas or just coming downtown to other areas because they don’t want to deal with it.

There’s talk of offices being closed on those days or people working from home, so maybe they’re not buying lunch or their coffee from the local cafe. There are all these knock-on impacts that we’ve yet to see.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. There are these things that aren’t getting measured that governments don’t talk about and so on, but they affect the economic outcomes.

Sabrina, you’ve written a lot about the gap between what governments promise and what they actually deliver. So when you hear that Toronto has set a $380 million budget for this tournament, Vancouver’s bill is somewhere in the $500 to $600 million range. And the parliamentary budget officer puts the combined public tab at over $1 billion. What goes through your mind here?

Sabrina Maddeaux: This is a pattern we know really well. Governments announce a big number with big promises attached, costs balloon, projected benefits get revised quietly downward, and the public only finds out years later.

Mike Moffatt: And this really bugs me. As a housing guy, I find it incredibly frustrating to constantly hear from municipalities and cities that they can’t possibly reduce development charges or other housing-related taxes, but all of a sudden they have this money to spend on soccer. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And meanwhile, FIFA is projecting 11 to 13 billion in revenue from this tournament. And host cities get essentially none of it, which I’m not sure the average person realizes. So ticketing, broadcasting rights, and sponsorships all flow back to Zurich.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. So even if we ask the general public, they’re not given the information that they need in order to make an informed decision.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So let’s dig into that FIFA revenue model just a bit more, because I think most people don’t realize how it actually works. All those broadcasting rights, sponsorships, ticket sales- that’s all going back to FIFA in Switzerland. So what do host cities actually get?

In Toronto’s case, BMO Field needed to be expanded to meet FIFA requirements. That’s a real cost. Vancouver’s BC Place needed significant upgrades, and ultimately that was paid for by taxpayers at the municipal, provincial, or federal level.

So what cities get in return is the economic activity that happens around those games. Again, the hotel stays and restaurants spending and so on. But there’s a catch here: FIFA’s contracts actually restrict what cities can do commercially in their own territory. So Vancouver has to maintain a commercial exclusion zone of around two kilometres around the stadium. That means that local businesses outside of FIFA’s approved sponsor network can’t advertise or promote themselves anywhere near the action.

So it’s a bit like being asked to throw a party at your house. You pay for all the food and drinks, but you’re told that you can’t invite your own guests or sell anything yourself. But I get to sell tickets to go to your place. I capture the revenue. So it’s a real imbalance where FIFA gets the money, the cities get the bill.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And there’s also a tax element to this I want to get into. What exactly does FIFA demand from host countries in terms of tax treatment? And what does Canada have to give up here?

Mexico is hosting some games. They went the furthest. They’ve enacted a comprehensive federal exemption for FIFA and all its corporate affiliates, basically creating a tax-free commercial zone for the tournament.

Canada, luckily, we took more of a targeted approach. We focused more on customs and event-related tax relief rather than a blanket income tax exemption. So it’s not quite as egregious, but it’s still foregone revenue that we could have used for something else, like housing.

So once again, FIFA captures the commercial upside, but they pay no taxes on it and then require the host nations to give a bunch of specialized tax relief. So it really is a complete transfer of risk and reward from the public, subsidizing this private organization that essentially gets non-for-profit, and in some cases, charitable status.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That is wild. Because there’s the cost of that headline number that cities and countries are paying to host these events. But when you talk about tax relief, it is a subsidy. So that should be added to the total, in my opinion.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. And once you do add it to the total, it makes the economics of these events look even worse.

We’ve talked a lot about the government, but let’s talk about what it means for the actual people on the ground. The regular people living in Toronto and Vancouver right now. So that’s you. I’m here in Ottawa, so that’s not me. But, for folks like you, beyond the kind of public balance sheet, I've got to imagine there are real quality-of-life effects hitting middle-class folks and working-class residents. So what are you seeing and hearing in Toronto?

Airbnb ran a campaign offering Toronto homeowners $1,000 to sign up and rent out their places during the tournament. So on the surface, that might sound like a nice income boost, but tenant advocates flagged it immediately because some landlords will just use this as cover to push out long-term tenants or to cash in on short-term rentals. So there’s an issue there, too.

And then we have the transit question. Transit systems are going to be extremely busy and overwhelmed during this period. Boston actually hiked their train fares to the stadium to $80 USD on game days. New Jersey’s transit authority inherited a $48 million bill to move fans and got nothing from FIFA to cover it. New Jersey’s governor literally tweeted that FIFA should pay for the rides. Ontario and Toronto said they’d hold fares steady and increase service instead. And that’s a good call. But there’s still a cost to that. And wear and tear on the system. And the fact that some cities are pricing out local commuters of their own transit network to subsidize fans going to a privately run mega event is a pretty sharp illustration of who gets treated as the priority.

And then you talk again about all the traffic and the ability to just get around your own city for everyday life: for work or for seeing friends during a time of year - we only get three months of summer. So, people are eager to get out, and a lot of them might be trapped at home - especially if you’re not someone who’s lucky enough to escape the city and go to a cottage during that time period.

So there’s that through line here with a lot of what we cover on the show. The benefits of a big economic event are flowing to property owners, hotel chains, and investors. And then the costs and disruptions land on renters, middle-class workers, small businesses outside the FIFA commercial zone, and people who just need to live their lives.

But I want to come back to the historical record here because I think it’s really important context. South Africa, Brazil, Russia, and Qatar all made big promises about the economic legacy of hosting their World Cups. Do you know how those actually played out?

Mike Moffatt: One of the biggest expenses here, and one of the things that really affects the numbers, is the cost of the stadium infrastructure, which is often cited as one of the benefits of hosting, but it’s also a real cost, as multiple World Cup host countries ended up with what economists called white elephants. Large stadiums that cost enormous amounts to maintain but sit mostly empty after the tournament.

To be fair, Toronto and Vancouver aren’t building from scratch. They look a little bit more like France and Germany. They’re upgrading existing venues that have genuine long-term use. And, 16 cities across three wealthy countries, Canada, the US, and Mexico. It’s a different risk profile than Qatar or parts of Russia. But I’d say the broader lesson from every past World Cup is that the economic projections tend to be somewhere between optimistic and just outright fiction.

Sabrina Maddeaux: It’s interesting because spreading it, though, across so many cities means that every city is getting fewer games. And especially with expanding the pool of teams that qualify this year, a lot of those games are considered not very good games to watch. So there are a lot of unsold tickets. There are questions around how many people actually pay the huge price tag for this, and what the benefit will be when it is so spread out.

But at the end of the day, it’s all about the fans. Or at least it should be if you believe the marketing. So let’s end on the fan access question, which has been a big one. And I think it’s the most visceral symbol of the class dynamics at play here. Who actually gets to go to these games, and what does that experience look like when you get in there?

Mike Moffatt: This is where it gets really stark. So FIFA introduced something called dynamic pricing, which is actually what my PhD thesis is on. I designed some of these algorithms, so I might be partly at fault here, but I changed my career, changed my ways.

FIFA is also getting a code of not just sales, but resales. At the final at MetLife Stadium, there were resale listings as high as $2 million a seat. If you wanted to follow your national team from the group stage to the final, through the official supporter route, it would cost you about seven grand per person, and that’s over five times what it was in 2022. But if you’re doing it, having to buy these tickets through unofficial channels is going to cost you a lot more than that.

FIFA is also nickel and diming people even more than they have in the past. For example, there’s this thing called fan zones. And these were traditionally free public watch parties that are close to the stadium. Traditionally, they had been free. Now some cities are going to be charging. So there’s a lot of backlash here.

Sabrina Maddeaux: All of that is why we wanted to do this episode. We talk a lot about housing and infrastructure and economic policy, and an episode on a major sporting event, The World Cup, might not seem like a natural fit for The Missing Middle, but when you’re talking about investments this big and events that bring so many people to them, there are all of those ripple-on impacts. And they do impact the average worker in the middle class.

And, in the host cities, the economic gains from their presence flow to property investors and hotel chains. While the public picks up the security bill, waves the taxes and absorbs all the costs we’ve talked about. The civic costs are socialized, the financial gains are privatized, and the cultural experience is more and more commodified. (Boom! Mic drop)

Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. And to our producer, Meredith Martin and our editor, Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the 1981 Montreal Expos and how they created a generation of Canadian baseball fans, please send us an email to the missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

BMO Capital Markets -- Canada World Cup GDP boost (up to $6.5B):

The World Cup is expensive, but it’s our turn to pick up the tab

ProPublica -- ‘You do, you pay, we take’: how FIFA’s host city deals work:

FIFA estimates $3.8 billion benefit for Canada as 2026 World Cup co-host

BNN Bloomberg -- Why economic impact on Vancouver and Toronto may never be known:

Bloomberg Tax -- FIFA 2026 World Cup tax demands on host countries:

CP24 -- Toronto holds transit fares steady; NJ Transit $48M bill; Boston $80 game-day fare:

ESPN -- World Cup ticket sticker shock and dynamic pricing:

Victor Matheson / Holy Cross -- The Economics of the World Cup (academic; stadium white elephants, tourism overestimates):

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

They debate the idea of “housing triage,” explore the links between homelessness, social housing, and market-rate housing, and examine why increasing housing supply is critical to improving affordability for everyone.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: When someone is critically injured, doctors see them first in the E.R. before seeing the guy who just came in with a broken arm. Well, can the same be said about housing? There’s some tension between housing advocates who see the crisis as a situation that requires triage, and others who think we can attack all sides at once: homelessness, social housing, and middle-class market-rate housing.

Mike Moffatt: Specifically, when governments are spending billions of tax dollars to work on solving the housing crisis, where is that money best spent? That’s what we were thinking about reading a recent report from the office of the Federal Housing Advocate.

Cara Stern: Here’s what they recommended:

1. End homelessness by 2040, i.e. functional zero homelessness.

2. End housing need among very low and low-income renters by 2050.

3. Ensure that all Canadians have access to an adequate home they can afford by 2060.

Mike, I know you’re itching to talk about those targets, but let’s start with this: what is the federal housing advocate and what are the goals?

Mike Moffatt: The role of the federal housing advocate is set out in the federal government’s National Housing Strategy Act, and this was a landmark housing policy that was set out in Justin Trudeau’s first term as prime minister.

Section 13 of that act lays out all of the responsibilities of the advocate. It basically creates the position, and they have this pretty broad mandate to provide advice and conduct research. The advocate is housed at the office of the Federal Housing Advocate and is paid for by the federal government. The person who holds the position is chosen by the Housing Minister. They serve a three-year term which can be renewed once.

Since I’m sure we’ll get comments on this—and feel free to leave some in the comments section—I’ve never applied to be the Federal Housing advocate, I have no interest in being the federal housing advocate, and I think the housing advocate is doing a good job given her mandate. So anything I say here is not sour grapes or me auditioning for the position. I think she’s doing a fine job.

Cara Stern: But we know you’d do the job well. We’re just happy you’re staying here. Do governments tend to follow their advice?

Mike Moffatt: I would say they have in the design of federal housing programs, and I think there’s a fair bit of value in the research that’s produced or commissioned by the office. I think the advocate is getting results, but if they’re not, then I say we abolish the position. Literally, the advocate has one job, which is to provide advice to advocate, and the position comes with a federal government salary in the range of $150,000 to $180,000. So it is really important that they provide value for money.

Cara Stern: So 2060 is the target for solving the housing crisis for people who end up with market-rate housing. That, of course, is the majority of people, so I get this is a big goal.

Mike Moffatt: Well, they don’t really explain that 2060 number, but we can certainly say that, yes, it will take a while. In fairness to the report, that doubling of housing start goal doesn’t come from the report itself, but actually comes from the Liberal Party platform during the last election via the CMHC, or their interpretation of a CMHC report.

With recent reductions to immigration and non-permanent resident programs, doubling housing starts by 2035 might not even be necessary anymore. We do have to make sure that we build not just enough housing, but the right type of housing, and that’s going to be a challenge.

Governments can always reduce demand further by paring back immigration or non-permanent resident programs if they need to, so there’s no reason why we have to stick to this trajectory—this doubling of housing starts—in order to meet middle-class housing needs. I would question some of the underlying assumptions that went into this 2060 estimate, again with the caveat that those assumptions aren’t coming from the federal Housing Advocate’s Office themselves.

Cara Stern: I totally get it. If you are trying to double housing supply in this country, I can’t imagine what a big project that would be. But obviously, there’s a big problem if you’re telling people they have to wait three and a half decades to get affordable housing—that’s basically a person’s entire career. I was thinking about that number and that’s past the point that people in high school will even be able to have kids. If they’re waiting for a home before starting a family, they might as well just give up now, unless they can access capital from family.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and I could certainly understand the logic, though I think the idea of telling somebody in grade nine that they won’t be able to afford a home until they’re 50, which is what the math is here, is really problematic and troubling.

That aside, I also find the length that some folks will take this triage argument to be absolutely absurd. In my mind, it’s like asking, “What’s more important, healthcare or education?” and saying — let’s say we pick healthcare. “Until the healthcare system is fixed, we’re going to abolish higher education, get rid of the schools, and take all the money we put into the education system and put it into healthcare. Once we all agree that healthcare is fixed, maybe we can start to open the schools again.”

Even if we do that, let’s say we pick healthcare and go, “Well, what’s the most important healthcare issue?” We could look at mortality rates or whatever and say, “Cancer. Let’s put 100% of our research and healthcare dollars into cancer, drop everything else, only train doctors to be cancer specialists, and only do research on cancer. Celiac disease, diabetes, whatever else—you’re not getting a dollar until we cure cancer.” Then we ask ourselves, “But which cancer?” Given that lung cancer kills more Canadians than any other, let’s put all of our research dollars into that. Pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, testicular cancer—nothing for you. Let’s shut it all down, and let’s definitely shut down any health research funding for something that isn’t fatal.

It’s a ridiculous position. I absolutely agree that we need to make sure we get value for money, but what matters is where marginal dollars go and how effective those dollars are, not this absurd development of hyper-prioritization where we put all our eggs in one basket because we deem that basket to be the most important one.

Cara Stern: To be fair, all of those cancers can kill you, whereas there’s obviously a huge difference in how dire the situation is between someone who’s homeless and living on the streets, and someone who’s stuck in a rental when they’d prefer homeownership.

Mike Moffatt: There are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, if more ownership housing gets built, that frees up rental units, creates vacancy chains, and makes housing more affordable, which reduces homelessness. They’re not unrelated problems; they don’t come at the expense of each other. Solving the middle-class housing crisis helps with the homelessness issue.

But let’s go back to the triage idea. There’s also a big difference between someone who is homeless and someone who is struggling to pay their tuition. Do we cancel all supports for higher education until we solve homelessness? I hear this from the same politicians who say we’ve got to put our money into homelessness, and then they’re spending our money on soccer tournaments and renaming Dundas Square. If you’re going to use that argument, be consistent about it, but nobody ever is.

There’s this implicit assumption being made here that the opportunity cost is between one housing program and another housing program. If you put money into, say, reducing development charges, that has to come at the expense of anti-homelessness programs. That’s not how government spending works. Governments do shift the proportion they spend in one area relative to another all the time. If we cancel a housing program and say we don’t want to reduce development charges and we’re not going to put more dollars into that, that money doesn’t suddenly, magically go into anti-homelessness programs. My bet is it would be far more likely to go into something like Old Age Security than social housing.

Cara Stern: These housing crises are intertwined, though, so it’s not like trying to solve low-income housing problems. That would obviously have an impact on market-rate housing. There’s so much overlap in the way that you would attack these problems. The problem is when you’re trying to solve one and that comes at the expense of another—like when city councils implement so-called inclusionary zoning, where they push the cost of social housing onto buyers of market-rate homes, then you get a zero-sum situation. Ideally, a lot of the solutions overlap, like zoning issues and building code issues. If you fix that early, it’ll help across the board.

Ultimately, we need to build more homes. In any system with scarcity, money is always going to win—always. If there aren’t enough homes to go around, families with money are always going to outbid families without money, and you’re going to have homelessness regardless of how many social programs you have, because money always outbids not having money.

Cara Stern: That’s fair. I do think a big part of the expanded problems with homelessness that we’ve seen grew in tandem with home prices as they’ve gotten out of reach. But for low-income and social housing units, couldn’t the government just earmark them for people with the lowest income so that it doesn’t have people with more money outbidding them?

Mike Moffatt: You’d still have mass homelessness because you’re still going to have somebody on the wrong side of the cutoff for deeply affordable housing. If you have 100 families who need these types of homes and only five spots, you can allocate those five spots however you want. You can give them to the poorest, the tallest, or you could hold a draft lottery like the NHL. At the end of the day, you’re still going to have five families who win and 95 who lose. The mechanism doesn’t change that.

Overall, we need to build enough homes, otherwise money is always going to bid out money. Maybe they’re not outbidding the exceptionally poor; they’re just outbidding the very poor instead. The outcome is still largely the same.

Cara Stern: Honestly, even though I get upset when I think about 2060 being the government’s goal, if they did take that on as their goal, part of me thinks maybe that’s realistic. Maybe Canadians who don’t have access to generational wealth should accept that and plan their lives accordingly, instead of holding out hope that the government will fix it for them soon enough that it makes sense for them to dedicate their lives to living in Canada.

Mike Moffatt: I don’t think 2060 is more realistic at all. In fact, if we don’t solve it anytime soon, we just won’t—we’ll never get around to it. But I would absolutely agree with your premise that I would advise young people to consider their options. I would not tell somebody in grade nine, “Oh no, they’re going to fix this and they’ll do it soon, so you don’t need to worry about that.” That’s unrealistic.

I do have a lot of time for the idea that we need to be realistic in our targets, and I definitely support having targets. We’ve already blown through so many of our housing targets, climate targets, what have you. So I’m with the housing advocate on the need to have targets and that those targets should be realistic—full agreement there.

Then it becomes a question of what is realistic. I think we can absolutely solve this before 2060. We’ve already seen the federal government massively reduce the demand for housing through changes to immigration programs and non-permanent resident programs, such as international students.

But we still need to increase home building. There’s so much pent-up demand in the system. There are so many folks in their 20s and early 30s still living in mom and dad’s basement or living on the couch. We need more homes, and particularly, we need more family-sized homes. That is going to require governments to make a series of tough decisions on how we fund infrastructure, our land-use decisions, and so on. We need to make it much cheaper and easier to build the kinds of homes that families want and need. I don’t want to discount how challenging this will be, but I do think it’s absolutely doable to fix this in roughly a decade or so.

Cara Stern: I love your optimism for a decade. That seems like a very lofty goal, and I hope you’re right.

Honestly, I’ve heard governments announce program after program promising to solve housing. The big one that comes to mind for me is five years ago when Doug Ford was promising 1.5 million homes by 2031. We’re now halfway there from when they set that goal and we’re nowhere near that target—I think we’re actually worse off than we were at the time.

I remember when homebuilding started slow, the housing minister at the time said something like, “Don’t worry, we’re building up our capacity and eventually it’ll pick up. The second half of the decade, we’re going to be building like wild and we’re going to make that target.” That never happened. Now it seems like the Ontario government is just ignoring that target instead of admitting failure, so I don’t have a lot of hope. I get a little bit frustrated when I think about these goals because I’ve never seen them hit any of their targets on housing since I started covering this.

But even if it is possible to build enough homes to solve the middle-class housing crisis before 2060, is it possible to do it without tanking home prices? That is something I think we’ve seen the government is not super keen to have happen.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, or even talk about. I actually think that’s probably where the challenge is here; there is a political challenge more than an economic one. To be clear, governments should not be in the business of trying to impact the price of resale homes—particularly, they shouldn’t be in the business of trying to prevent them from falling. We talk a lot about how housing is an investment. Well, if housing is an investment, investments fall and investments go down. If anybody thinks otherwise, you’re welcome to buy my shares of Coleco and Atari off of me. This happens all the time; we have to allow asset prices to go down.

For instance, if the City of Toronto made it really easy to build family-friendly infill multiplexes, that would put a lot of downward pressure on high-rise rents and condo prices. A young couple who lives in one of those would sell it and go move into a multiplex. It would also probably reduce the number of families who move to a place like Brantford or Woodstock, reducing that “drive until you qualify” traffic, which is going to reduce the price of homes there.

On the other hand, it could actually increase the value of single-detached homes in Toronto, particularly in more urban areas, because the land under them would become really valuable since you would be able to tear down or renovate a smaller home and turn it into a four-plex, a six-plex, or an eight-plex. This new-versus-resale relationship is complex, and it’s not the case that if you start building more homes, the price of all other homes falls—but many of them would. That is a political challenge, to be sure.

Cara Stern: And we should be okay with it. I love what you’re saying about this. Housing should be more of an investment in that way. When you first say it, I’m like, “Oh no, we don’t want it to be more of an investment, isn’t the whole thing that we want people to treat it as a place to live?” But no, I get what you’re saying: prices need to be able to come down and move around with the market. That is what it means to be an investment.

New supply is so important because if someone is in the middle class, they are probably going to be forced to rent even if they don’t want to if it doesn’t make sense for their family to buy. That means they’re taking up a rental unit from someone who may need it more. Given the lack of family-sized rentals especially, I keep thinking that people who are lower-income and really need that won’t have access to it. Those units are being taken up by people who really should be able to afford market-rate homes and buy if they want to. That creates less turnover in the rental market and makes the whole situation worse for everyone else.

Mike Moffatt: It really is an issue. We absolutely need to be concerned about those experiencing homelessness or at risk of experiencing homelessness, but that said, I’m quite shocked by how cavalier some advocates are with the needs of young, middle-class Canadians.

If Canada is seen as increasingly hostile to their needs, those folks are going to leave. Or perhaps those young, middle-class Canadians are going to stay, but they’re going to want to burn the system down. This idea that as a country we can somehow simply tell young people, “Yeah, we’ve priced you out of ever having a middle-class life, but we’ll fix things for your grandkids and that will all be okay”—it’s simply baffling to me. I just don’t get where they’re coming from.

Cara Stern: It’s really scary to think that we’re going to lose everyone who has any other option of living anywhere else, who will go where they’re able to start their careers and have the life they want. I don’t think we want to make that our goal, and I don’t think we want to signal to people that that’s our goal, because I don’t know that governments would want to follow that. If they think about the long-term consequences of that, it is a big problem.

I get why politicians don’t want to see change, because it could mean hurting the asset value of some of the most reliable voters, but it is creating big problems in our country.

I hope we get some actual targets from governments that they actually intend to follow through on, so people can at least make informed decisions about where to put down their roots.

Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about defunct 1980s tech companies, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

New reports offer guidance for strengthening the next National Housing Strategy

Rights-based intergovernmental agreements for the next National Housing Strategy

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

In this episode of the Missing Middle’s Classonomics podcast, Mike Moffatt and Steve Saretsky unpack the growing uncertainty surrounding Indigenous land rights in B.C. and how it’s already impacting mortgages, investment, and development. They also dive into falling condo prices, rising vacancy rates, rent control, and what Canada’s rapidly shifting housing market means for affordability and the future of housing policy.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Mike Moffatt: Hi everyone. Today we’ve got a special guest. We’re happy to welcome Vancouver realtor, real estate investor, and host of The Loonie Hour podcast, Steve Saretsky.

I’ve followed Steve’s Substack for years. I’m a big, big fan. We wanted to bring him on to provide our national audience with deeper insight into the B.C. housing situation. We’ll talk a little bit about Calgary and move beyond our typical Ontario-centric focus. This is something that you’ve been calling for in the YouTube comment section for us to do more non-Ontario content. We hear you. So Steve, thanks so much for coming on today.

Steve Saretsky: Yeah, thanks for having me on. Looking forward to this conversation. And we were delighted to have you on the Loonie Hour a little while back. So it’s good to be here.

Mike Moffatt: Here in Ontario, where I am, we don’t really understand what’s going on with the Cowichan decision - this land issue in Richmond, B.C., just south of Vancouver, the court case and the legal decision that was made. And I don’t think it’s getting enough attention out here.

So, my understanding, and noting that neither you nor I are legal scholars, we’re just people who know a lot about housing- but, my understanding of this is that, back in August last year, the B.C. Supreme Court recognized the Cowichan Nation’s Aboriginal title, but that doesn’t cancel out private property rights. Instead, they’ve come up with this complex system where the two are supposed to coexist, with Aboriginal title being recognized as a senior claim that requires further government negotiation.

That’s just my understanding as an outsider. Have I got that right? And what does all this mean?

Steve Saretsky: You’ve summarized it well. That’s the legal, technical decision that was ruled.

Just for some context, I grew up in Richmond, and I went to school; I actually lived in that little parcel of area that’s basically contested. I actually used to rent there. So I’m very familiar with the area. I’ve got friends who own land in that area that’s now under this sort of cloud.

To give you my perspective, again, not like a legal expert, but when people come out and say, “Hey, listen, there’s no one’s taking their homes away, right? Like the First Nations aren’t coming to take your house,” which is true. They’re not saying, “Hey, get out of your house; you need to leave.” But what you’re doing in real estate is that the judge has ruled the two titles can coexist. And like, the reality is, if you walk into a bank and you say, “Hey, TD, I would like to get a mortgage, can you give me a mortgage? And by the way, my title coexists.” It doesn’t work. That’s not how the real world works; that’s not how the lending world works. And so what we’re hearing on the ground is that it’s very difficult to get a new mortgage.

I couldn’t convince a buyer to say, “Hey, this is going to be a great investment. You should go in there and buy.” The reality is that the ruling has created a whole bunch of uncertainty around what is the ownership structure. Are you going to have to enter into a First Nations lease agreement, like a 99-year lease? And is there something we don’t know? And so until that ruling really gets clarified, all of these properties are now, in my opinion, illiquid.

And I’ll give you a real-life example, and this is from a close friend that I grew up with. They have a bunch of industrial warehouse land in that area. And so they built the roads and did all the stuff.

And they were in the process of building a new warehouse, and they had a lease agreement in place with a large corporation. And as soon as that judgment came to pass, that large corporation said, “We’re out.” We are no longer interested in this lease. There’s too much uncertainty. And that immediately killed the financing; it immediately died. Because if you don’t have a secure tenant, there’s no loan. So that’s the real-life implication.

Mike Moffatt: And I can see all that because we’re in a situation right now where there are a lot of projects fighting for capital, not just in real estate, in general. And you’ve got real estate downturns, at least in residential. So you look at this and go, “Okay, there’s increased risk. So why don’t I just put my money somewhere else?”

Now, when it comes to the public discourse and where the public is on this, when this decision came out and we had a tweet from one of your mayors down there, this blew up. Is the public sentiment changing at all? Is this dying down a little bit, or is this still as red hot as it was a few months ago?

Steve Saretsky: I would say, truthfully, I think it’s as red hot. I think when we look at B.C. provincial politics, for example, I think this will be the number one topic of conversation in the next election. This will be the number one political point. And that you’re seeing, for example, the NDP is currently in power, the Conservative Party of BC, which is their number one competition, is going through a leadership race right now with 4 to 6 candidates. And all of them are focusing on the First Nation stuff as talking point number one. So I think that, politically, it’s a very hot-button topic, and I don’t think it’s going to go away.

I mean, real estate in Canada, particularly in places like Vancouver and Toronto, is number one. It’s everyone’s favourite hobby or pastime. And so when you start to introduce things that can start to jeopardize home values, people get pretty interested. You’re seeing people who otherwise wouldn’t be following First Nations-type stuff are now suddenly very interested in what’s going on.

Mike Moffatt: A complete outsider perspective here, but my understanding is you have an NDP government that’s almost like the federal government here, where there’s not a clear majority or minority; they’re kind of down the center. You’ve got, what I think is, five major conservative leader candidates who are all talking about this. How do you see this playing out both in a political sense and also just in a market sense in, say, Lower Mainland B.C. over the next 6 to 18 months? Where do you see this going?

Steve Saretsky: I think that the NDP under Horgan was quite popular. Obviously, when Eby took power, I mean, you can see it in the data, in the polling, his popularity is way down. I think that people are just looking for change. And so I would be shocked if he doesn’t get replaced. It feels to me a little bit like the Trudeau era, which is like it’s run its course. I don’t know; we’ll see.

I think we’re seeing even municipal leaders, of course, coming out with all the First Nation stuff. We had the mayor of Richmond and Pocos come out. So there are all these mayors coming out.

I think what’s actually happening, ironically, is that it’s actually setting back the reconciliation culture or whatever you want to call it. I think it’s creating a lot of social friction and political rifts. So you’re seeing the NDP that brought in DRIPA, for example, which is like a First Nations policy. But they’re seeing them trying to walk that back and saying, “Okay, we’re going to try to repeal it, but we don’t want to upset the apple cart.” I think that everybody knows it’s probably gone a bit too far. And now they’re just trying to find a politically palatable way to walk it back.

Mike Moffatt: So you mentioned Trudeau. And one of the things I’m watching these days is that, as we’re recording it right now, Keir Starmer is still the Prime Minister of the UK. But I think by the time this comes out, he won’t be because he’s getting essentially pushed by his own party. Do you think Eby might be in trouble in his own party?

Steve Saretsky: I mean, there are talks. I’m certainly not a political insider, but there are talks about whether he gets shoved out and will the B.C. Conservative Party end up actually running against someone different, similar to the Trudeau-Carney thing. It’s like Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s going to be running against Trudeau. And then at the last minute, he gets replaced. I think there’s a decent possibility that could happen in B.C. as well. I think, as it is right now, I think that Eby, even with his own base, is becoming increasingly unpopular. It’ll be interesting to see how that all shapes up.

Mike Moffatt: It is going to be an interesting few months. Your politics in B.C. are a little bit more interesting than our provincial politics in Ontario.

Let’s do another Ontario - B.C. comparison here. So the GTA and Vancouver are experiencing this weird combination of events where we still have a housing crisis, prices are still unaffordable to the middle class, but we’ve got falling rents and we have vacancy rates that are surging. So can you provide a picture of what’s been going on over the last few years in the Greater Vancouver area? What’s changed? Is it like what we’re seeing in Toronto? Are there any subtle differences?

Steve Saretsky: The two markets move very much in unison; they’re so similar. What we’re seeing today in Greater Vancouver is home prices, particularly in the suburbs, that went up crazy during the pandemic - they’re coming down. I mean, it’s not unreasonable to see home prices down somewhere between 20 to 30% in the suburbs from the peak. And then you get into the inner cities, and those valuations have held up better; maybe you’re down 10 to 15%.

The psychology around real estate and investing in Canada has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. The idea used to be, “I’ve got to get one investment condo or two or three.” And it seemed like everybody wanted to build this investment portfolio of real estate properties. And what I see today, increasingly, is, “Hey, I’ve got three condos, Steve; I would like you to come and sell two of them. I’d rather liquidate, and I want to put it into whatever- the S&P 500 or pick your poison. But I don’t want to be in real estate because I don’t see the returns over the next 3 to 7 years.”

Look at the tremendous growth in purpose-built rentals. I think as much as we like to slam the government and the federal government and all the mistakes that they made, I think one of the programs that they brought in that worked tremendously well was the CMHC insurance for rental construction. It’s created a boom that we haven’t seen in many, many decades. And so what we’re seeing now in Vancouver is, you’ve got a 31-year high in the vacancy rate. Rents are down anywhere from 10% to 30%, depending on the suburb.

So, of course, developers are completely turning off the taps on pre-construction units, and some are converting to rental. But that’s going to slowly, I think, roll over as well.

Mike Moffatt: We’re seeing the same thing here in Ontario, where you had all these investors for years and years, basically being on the buy side when it comes to condos, either pre-construction or built units. And now we’re going on the sell side, which certainly accelerates things.

One thing we’ve started to see here - there was a report in the Toronto Star and a few other papers - is bulk selling of condo units to purpose-built rental operators at pretty discounted prices. So you’re looking at condos that may have gone for 1200-1300 bucks a square foot, and they’re being bulk sold in the 700-750 range. Are we seeing any of that activity in Vancouver yet?

Steve Saretsky: Not really. It’s a good point. Not really seeing any funds coming out, or at least publicly, that are saying, “Hey, we’re going to buy up all these unsold units.” I’m sure there are a few people out there, but nothing like that’s being caught in the newspaper in the GTA. I don’t think we’re there yet.

But I think what we’re seeing is just more and more stories of people who bought pre-sales that aren’t going to be closing, can’t close. Appraisal values are low. You’re seeing units that have closed. We’re seeing million-dollar losses in some buildings. It’s significant.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think so too. And I tend to mock that idea of: it’s a 15% premium, but prices are going to go up 7% a year. But there was a 15-year period where that wasn’t a bad bet at all. And people who took that did quite well.

But when it comes to investors, I’d like to talk about the purpose-built rental market. Part of what we’re seeing here is that you’ve got a set of developers who are looking at the units under construction numbers. They’re looking at starts, which are still strong, and they’re saying there’s no point. In the US, a 30-year T-bill is now at like 5.6% a year. Why am I going to take all this risk building a purpose-built rental?

But there are some developers who are still out there starting new projects. Do you see that in B.C.? Are there people still going ahead, or is everybody looking at the numbers, pulling back and just going, “There’s just way too much risk here”

Steve Saretsky: I mean, they’re definitely pulling back. I think you’re still seeing starts, though. It’s not like it’s gone to zero. I find it quite interesting. I agree with your point; the risk-reward to start construction on new rental today doesn’t look overly appealing.

But again, you look at every big major developer in the city that’s been around for 30 to 60 years, and all of them are laying off staff. And it’s not 100% of the staff, but 10% to 30% of the staff. Nobody seems to be immune. And so I think that’s just really telling of where the industry is today and where it’s going to be over the next couple of years. I think it’s going to be very challenging. We’ve got a full pipeline of rentals under construction today that will be completed over the next 12 to 24 months at a time when you already have a 31-year high in the vacancy, rents are falling, and there’s no population growth. I think the returns are going to be very subpar.

Mike Moffatt: It surprises me, but as you say, some of these companies want to keep the band together. As one developer said to me, “I’m in the business of building homes, not just sitting still.” So I do think they have this bias that way.

And I think when it comes to B.C., we don’t pay enough attention to it here in Ontario. And when we do, we use it as a cudgel to make a political point. And one of the political points that we’ve heard over the past few years, the Ford government basically exempted new units from rent control on the idea that that would help get more built. And I know the opposition, particularly some members in the NDP, would like to point to British Columbia and say, “Hey, they have really strict rent control, and they’re still building all kinds of purpose-built rentals. So that isn’t necessary.” So I guess my question is, what is the rent control regime like in British Columbia, and is it having any effect on development?

Steve Saretsky: Yeah, from my observation, looking at various housing markets, I think B.C. has the strongest rent controls or pro-tenant policies in North America. So if you’re building a brand-new condo building or you’re building a brand-new rental building, there are rent controls basically from day one. Which means if I just finished a purpose-built rental building, it’s ready to be leased up. I put a new tenant in there. The rent growth is capped every year from that day forward.

Under the previous B.C. Liberal government, they had a policy that stated it was whatever CPI was - CPI inflation plus 2%. So let’s just say inflation’s 2 plus 2%. So you could raise your rent 4% a year, which allowed you to maintain the buildings and cover rising costs of repairs, insurance and things like that. The B.C. NDP came in, and they said, during COVID, no rent increases- zero. And then they changed it to basically just CPI. So if inflation is 2.5%, you can raise your rents by 2.5%.

And when you look at the rental numbers, it hasn’t really throttled construction. I mean, I would argue that it disincentivized investors from deploying capital there. I think people have learned a valuable lesson over the pandemic era and the era of rising interest rates, which is what we saw on the ground: a scenario where you’d have a mom-and-pop investor who, let’s say, has owned a condo for ten years. They’ve had a tenant in there for the last six. And so they say, “Well, I don’t really raise my rent on the tenant. He’s so good. He always pays on time.” So they kept the rent pretty low. Then what happened was their variable mortgage went up, you know, 400 basis points in the span of 12 months, and suddenly, I just went from cash flow neutral to -$800 a month. What do I do?

We’re like, “Well, there’s nothing you can do because the tendency laws state you can only raise it 2% a year.” So effectively, you became a forced sale.

People go through that experience. So why would I want to be a landlord in B.C.?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think we can say that a lot about a lot of housing policies, where we had this era of fairly stable interest rates, about 25 years of 2% inflation. And that does change things.

Steve Saretsky: So Mike, just to add to that point on the purpose-built rental side. So what you’re seeing now, for example, again, because in Vancouver we’re not used to having a 3.5% vacancy rate. It’s always been like 1%. So the times have changed. You have a 31-year high in the vacancy rate.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. I always found that interesting as well.

And back when I taught business school for about 20 years, I’d always tell my students, “When you see a really bizarre pricing strategy or a bunch of add-ins, more often than not, it’s due to getting around some kind of regulatory factor.” So it’s not an unusual thing. We’ve seen that here in Ontario as well.

Now I want to pivot. We talked about one market where you have an NHL team that didn’t make the playoffs. And we’ll move to another market with an NHL team that didn’t make the playoffs. And that’s my Calgary Flames.

We spent some time and attention here. We had an episode on this, on Demographics, around the city council, which agreed to upzoning as part of the housing accelerator and then flipped that on its head and pulled that back.

What’s your perspective, as somebody who understands this market, on why that happened? Why did we see, after the municipal election, the council flip from being pro-intensification to taking a pause?

Steve Saretsky: I think it’s really interesting just around zoning and density. And there’s always that internal battle between the YIMBYs and the NIMBYs. But I think what happened with Calgary is because they just went so far so quickly. They did the blanket rezoning, which basically allowed every inner-city property to effectively build a multiplex or a townhouse or whatever infill they call them there. And so all of a sudden you’d have an old little rancher, and then you’d have a three-story stacked townhouse right next door.

So I think that’s a lesson in density. I mean, we actually, ironically, have seen it here in Burnaby, 15 minutes outside the city of Vancouver. They adopted the B.C. government’s mandate, carte blanche. The first townhouse multiplexes started going up. Neighbours complained, and immediately the council balked and changed their mind and adjusted the heights.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. Your background is real estate, but my understanding is you’ve actually done some development in that area. So what has it been like to shift from being on the real estate side to the development side and operating in these markets?

Steve Saretsky: I’ll sort of put an asterisk there, which is to say, I don’t consider myself a builder or developer. I’d say I’m a casual investor. I built a fourplex there from scratch. We were working on a 24-unit townhouse rental construction.

I can tell you from my experience operating day to day in Vancouver and then going and doing the investment side in Calgary - two very different markets - I think the ability to obtain a permit and the development fees in Calgary is a tiny fraction…It’s so quick to get a permit there compared to Vancouver. And it’s just dramatically cheaper, which is interesting because when you look at it, the ability for a city like Calgary to add density and add supply, it happens at a very fast pace. When the market gets hot in Calgary, they build, and they build really quickly. And so it’s not long before they become oversupplied, prices correct, rents decline, and the next cycle starts.

Whereas in Vancouver, once the housing bull market starts, you start working through your rezoning, you start working through your applications, and you’re waiting three years. By the time you get your permit, the bull market is almost done.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. And that lack of elasticity is a huge problem. And particularly when we see unexpected population growth.

I’ve been a fan of yours for a while. And one of the reasons why is that I feel like there were very few of us a few years ago who had connected the dots between population growth and what was going on in the housing market. You know, Ben Rabidoux, you and I and maybe a couple of other folks - it was a very small fraternity. We saw, here in Ontario, rents shoot up in cities and towns. And some of that was migration out of the GTA, but some of it was a big surge in population in college towns, like Kitchener, Waterloo, London, and so on.

We know at least anecdotally that B.C. had a similar phenomenon when it came to both permanent residency and nonpermanent residents. So how did that play out in B.C., in the Lower Mainland in particular? Was it like southern Ontario, or were there some subtle differences?

Steve Saretsky: I don’t think it was as extreme. Reading all these stories about basements filled with 10 to 14 foreign students, I don’t think we had that. I mean, certainly not in the city of Vancouver. I think if you go to the suburbs and the outskirts, obviously, we saw it, but the pressure on the rental market was so extreme. That was obvious in any market.

They’re all correlated. I think that’s the one thing where I advocate for what we’re seeing in the rental market today, which is the tremendous growth in purpose-built rentals. Giving people a healthy alternative to homeownership relieves the demand pressure on the purchasing side. If you have a stable rental in a professionally managed rental building, you might not be inclined to say, “Hey, I need to go and buy a condo,” because you’re happy in your rental place.

I think when you have a 3.5% vacancy rate compared to 1%, it takes a lot of the pressure off not only the rental market, but also the resale market, for home buyers. And so I think they’re all correlated.

Mike Moffatt: I’m really glad you mentioned that because it’s one of the frustrating lessons. I see policy makers and advocates silo off these things.

Look at Kitchener and Waterloo. A particular college brings in 30,000 international students, and you've got people going, “Well, that wouldn’t affect the single-family market because international students aren’t buying single-family homes.” It’s like, well, no, but investors are, and then renting them out to students.

So part of the lesson I’m trying to impart to governments is that housing is a system and if one part is broken it’s going to affect those other parts.

What other lessons do you see that the government should be taking from this experience?

Steve Saretsky: That’s a tough one. I don’t know. I just think a lot of the policies were created at different times.

I think developers have to pivot. I think that we’re sort of pivoting away from the dog-crate-condo, which was catered to the investor, and we’re moving back to more of an end-user market where you’re seeing changing of zoning that’s allowing multiplex ground-oriented housing.

I think ground-oriented housing is actually great. I understand that sometimes you have to move at a slower pace because people don’t like change. It’s just the reality of human beings. If you’re used to a single-family neighbourhood and all of a sudden you go carte blanche to multiplex, it can be challenging.

Obviously, it took governments some courage to get on board to alleviate some of the zoning and to allow those products. So I think it’s going to be a very useful product moving forward.

Mike Moffatt: I certainly think we need more of all housing. And I think there has been this resistance to building more family-friendly units. The counting of a unit, as a unit, as a unit, and you get a higher unit count when building a high-rise. But that’s probably another conversation you and I can have another time because we are running out of time here. But if you want to invite me on, I’ve got some thoughts.

Steve Saretsky: We’re going to have you back on for sure.

Mike Moffatt: But I have to say, big fans of your channel, you guys are hugely successful. You’ve been doing this for more years; you’ve got more subscribers. We’re trying to grow our audience - to get to where you are. So can you give us some advice? You’ve been where we are; how can we take this podcast and this YouTube channel to the next level?

Steve Saretsky: I think you guys are doing a great job. I think just keep doing what you’re doing. I think it’s just consistency, day in, day out.

I mean, I’ve been following your work predominantly on Twitter for the last number of years, and I think you’ve done so much of the homework, the deep dive on the numbers. Especially around population growth, immigration, and rents. I think you’ve been a strong advocate for shifting the narrative of the housing market and bringing in policies that really make a difference. So, I mean, I think you just keep doing what you do. I think good content and smart thinking stand out on their own.

Mike Moffatt: Well, I really appreciate that. And I’m going to always be who I am. And I’m a wonky, nerdy numbers guy. That’s never going to change.

So Steve, I really appreciate you coming on today, giving us the Western Canadian perspective, which we haven’t been doing enough on the channel.

We hear you, YouTube commenters, and this is something we’ll be doing more of in the future. So thanks again for coming on.

Steve Saretsky: Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Moffatt: Thank you so much for watching and listening. Thanks to our producer, Meredith Martin and our editor, Sean Foreman. If you have any thoughts or questions about NHL teams that didn’t make the playoffs, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

The Cowichan ruling isn’t a threat to private property

To recognize aboriginal title is not to abolish property rights, but to uphold them

What the Musqueam rights recognition agreement means and what it doesn’t

Real-estate firm bulk buys $30 million of downtown Toronto condos: ‘They’re sitting empty’

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

• Canada’s drop in homeownership has been caused by a multitude of factors. One that does not receive enough attention is how Canada has shifted away from building housing types that are typically owner-occupied and toward housing types that are overwhelmingly rental.

• If we want to restore homeownership opportunities for younger Canadians, we need policies that make it easier to build ownership-oriented housing, whether that’s single-detached homes, semis, and townhouses, or reforms that allow multiplex and low-rise apartment units to be built and sold individually at lower cost.

Some homes are more likely to be owner-occupied than others

Canadians, particularly younger Canadians, have been in free-fall since 2011. There are many reasons for this, including rapid population growth. However, one factor that does not receive enough attention is the change in the types of homes built in Canada.

Homeownership rates in free fall

The homeownership data tell a dramatic story: homeownership rates declined sharply in Canada between Census 2011 and Census 2021, as outlined in our January 2026 report, A Blueprint to Restore Homeownership for Young Canadians. The decline for Canadians aged 25-29 was particularly sharp, falling from 44.1% to 36.5%, a fall of 7.6 percentage points, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Change in homeownership rate in Canada, in percentage points, by age, 2011-21

Chart Source: A Blueprint to Restore Homeownership for Young Canadians.

The relationship between ownership rates and housing types

Certain types of homes lend themselves better to ownership. The vast majority of single-detached homes, as well as semi-detached homes and townhouses (row homes), are owned by their occupants. As shown in Figure 2, as of Census 2021, 9 out of 10 occupied single-detached homes are owner-occupied, with the rest being used as rentals, including student rentals. The data in Figure 2 is based on how the homes are actually used, not on whether or not they are purpose-built rentals.

The same does not hold true for units in apartment buildings, where the majority are rented out. Apartment units in low-rise buildings (fewer than 5 storeys tall) are most likely to be rented. In most places in Canada, for individual apartment units and units in a multiplex to be owned by occupants, ownership must be structured as a condo. In our report “From Cornerstone to Capstone: Building Canada’s Missing Middle Gentle-Density Housing”, we outline how this is prohibitively expensive in most cases, leaving rental as the only option. This is, however, a solvable problem, and the report provides recommendations on how to do so.

Figure 2: Proportion of housing type that is owner-occupied (for housing types exceeding 500,000 total units), Canada, Census 2021.

Data source: Statistics Canada Table 98-10-0233-01. Chart Source: MMI.

We can combine the two housing types with ownership rates over 75% (single- and semi-detached) into a single category, and place all other housing types in the other category. Figure 3 reveals that under such a division, the first category has nearly 90% ownership, while the second category has roughly 35%. Of the 10 million owner-occupied homes in Canada in 2021, over three-quarters of them were single- and semi-detached homes.

Figure 3: Total number of housing units by type and tenure, Canada, Census 2021

Data source: Statistics Canada Table 98-10-0233-01. Chart Source: MMI.

Using data from Census 2021, we can break down our housing data by unit type, use (rental vs. ownership), and construction period, as shown in Figure 4. Relative to 2001-10, a large number of “other” units (mostly apartments) were built from 2011-21 and used as rentals. This includes both purpose-built rentals and newly constructed condo units that were being rented out. As of 2021, there were slightly more rented single/semi-detached and owned “other” homes built in 2011-21 than in 2001-11. But this does not make up for the over-250,000-unit drop in owner-occupied single- and semi-detached homes built in 2011-21 relative to 2001-10.

Figure 4: Number of housing units by type, tenure, and period of construction, homes built after 1970, Census 2021

Data source: Statistics Canada Table 98-10-0233-01. Chart Source: MMI.

In the 2010s, Canada needed more rental apartment units to make up for four decades of relatively low construction. We still need more today. But we also need many more family-sized homes that families can own. That will require either reforms to make it less expensive and easier to build single-detached, semi-detached, and townhomes, or reforms to make it less expensive and easier to build multiplexes and small apartment buildings, coupled with regulatory reforms to allow units to be sold individually rather than just rented.

It’s an appealing theory. After all, Canada’s population is aging, deaths are expected to outnumber births within a few years, and millions of bedrooms sit underused in suburban neighbourhoods across the country.

But is a housing glut actually on the way?

In this episode, Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt unpack the assumptions behind the “just wait for the boomers” argument. They explore why similar predictions have failed before, how immigration changes the equation, why Canada isn’t building enough family-sized homes, and whether changing lifestyle preferences will really reduce demand for suburban housing. They also consider the scenarios where the theory could prove right, and what it would take for that to happen.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: There’s a question I’ve gotten often from people who know that I advocate for building more homes, and it goes something like this. Boomers own a massive share of Canada’s single family homes. Boomers are aging. When they die, all those homes are going to flood the market, and our housing crisis will be solved through sheer demographics. And if we’re not careful, we could end up in a situation where we’ve built too many homes.

So don’t stress. Wait it out. The glut is coming. And it’s a nice idea for people who are doing well with the status quo. But the question we have today is, is it true? Will demographic change save us? So let’s start with what that theory gets right.

Mike Moffatt: Well, I don’t think they’re right. But the folks that think that there will be a glut of suburban family sized homes, they do actually get quite a bit right. Though, since the 1990s, they’ve been overestimating how quickly these things will happen. But here’s what I think they’re right about now. They’re absolutely right that the baby boomers won’t live forever because none of us will.

And they’re right that the Baby Boomers also owned a lot of suburban homes, like millions of them, in fact, across Canada, with roughly about 12 million empty bedrooms. They’re also right that the number of Canadians dying each year is set to rise. So back in the early 1990s, the era of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, about 200,000 people died in Canada each year.

And that went up over time. And just before the pandemic, we hit about 300,000 people a year. And Statistics Canada projects that by about 2036 or so, we’re going to hit 400,000. And by the late 2050s, we’ll hit about 500,000 a year and then level off at that point. And they’re also right that births aren’t increasing that much, if at all.

But their story misses a lot.

Cara Stern: It makes me think back to when we looked back at the book Boom, Bust & Echo, and we were reading their predictions on housing, and they were basing it on demographics, too. So they were looking at the Baby Boomers, what their ages are, and what’s going to happen to the housing market.

They said it was going to collapse, that homes would no longer be something you can count on for an investment. It was now going to be somewhere to live in, and you’re not going to make money off of it. And that turned out to be very wrong. A lot of the books they got very right, but the housing part of it, it was missing something, which I suspect is some of the parts that we are missing now.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s start looking at what doesn’t work on this theory. So the first thing that doesn’t work is that they forgot about this thing called immigration. It is ultimately not births versus deaths that matter, but it’s population growth, particularly the growth of people in their 20s and 30s who start to buy and rent homes.

The population of those folks right now in Canada is absolutely massive because of high levels of immigration and non-permanent resident growth we’ve seen over the last decade, and they need housing. And Canada’s population is still set to grow by about 300,000 people a year or more starting in 2028. So although yes, births are going to be lower than deaths, our population is still going to grow by hundreds of thousands of people each year because of immigration.

Canada is not a closed nation.

Cara Stern: That’s what it’s been in the past for a very long time and it was supercharged in the earlier parts of this decade. But the thing I think about is how much of the countries that we bring people in from, they’re also dealing with below replacement rate fertility rates. So yes, we will see lots of population growth still for a while, I think.

But I don’t know. I’m starting to think that in the long run, it might not be easy to count on that people are going to be rushing to come here.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. But as economists like to say, in the long run, we’re all dead. So by 2100 or so that may be true, but I don’t see that really being much of an effect over the next decade or two. We have got to keep in mind that Canada could probably bring in tens of millions of people each year if it wanted to.

There’s that level of demand out there. The constraints that we have on immigration are our targets, our requirements, things like the level of education you have and so on, and just basically our desire to bring in folks. So, one example, you mentioned different countries. There are still 26 million births a year in India.

That’s not at an all-time high, but it’s pretty close to it. And they’re not going to be in their 20s and 30s until 20 or 30 years from now. There might not be the kind of supply of people wanting to immigrate here at some point, but that point is probably 2070, 2080, 2100.

It’s not going to be the kind of thing that’s going to be an issue, say, 5 to 15 years from now.

Cara Stern: I’m thinking it could happen sooner because we know that we need population growth to sustain our economy. And pretty much all developed countries are dealing with a problem of too few babies being born in their country. And so the solution for most of them is bringing people in from other parts of the world to supplement the population that isn’t being born there.

And so when we have so many problems, like a housing crisis, good luck convincing people to move here when the whole developed world is fighting for them. Like right now you have a lot of people wanting to come here. The political winds have shifted, and there’s a lot of people here who don’t want to see so much immigration right now until housing catches up, until our healthcare capacity catches up.

And that can change. I mean, in 20 years from now, who knows what the sentiment will be. I think it depends a lot on whether we build enough homes for people, but when we have to fight for immigrants to come here—and I think we will one day—I don’t know that it’s a given that they’re going to choose Canada.

Mike Moffatt: Well, I think there may be issues around competing for talent, competing for certain skills and so on. But, keep in mind we take about 1% of the people who want to move here. So yeah, I think if it becomes more competitive, we might only take 3%. We might only have a pool of 10 million people or 8 million people or 6 million people to choose from.

And I also don’t think it’s a given that other countries are going to be fighting for newcomers. The United States sure isn’t.

Cara Stern: Not right now.

Mike Moffatt: That’s for sure. I mean, if we went to President Trump and said, “Hey, we will take 12 million undocumented folks living in America and we’ll bring them up here,” we might be able to get a trade deal signed with the U.S.

I have problems with this theory on both sides of it, that I don’t think that supply of potential newcomers is going to shrink, or at least quickly. But I also don’t see that huge demand from other countries. I think the limitations are just whatever we put on them. I don’t ever foresee a scenario, at least in the next 30 to 50 years where we set an immigration target and we’re actually unable to meet it.

Cara Stern: Let’s assume that’s right and that immigration is going to continue at whatever rate we want it to be. And I expect it’s going to be fairly high still because of our whole economic structure relying on population growth. So if that’s the case, let’s go to the next thing that the theory misses in your mind.

And that’s not to suggest we don’t need condos and purpose-built rentals. We do need them. But there’s been this one-to-one trade-off. And it would be one thing if we were building fewer family size homes because of the lack of demand—if it was just like, nobody wants these things and we’re not going to build them.

But that’s not what’s going on. It’s rather that they have become prohibitively expensive to build due to land regulations, building codes, taxes, and things like that. So we’re not only seeing a big glut of population, but we’re also building fewer family-sized homes just because they’ve gotten prohibitively expensive to create.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we have in some markets, Lower Mainland B.C., southern Ontario, we have seen prices go down. But still, for a family-sized home, we’re looking at home values that are 6 to 8 times median family income; in the GTA they are closer to 12 to 15x. So it is not the case like 20 or 25 years ago when I bought my first home, when you could get it for two, maybe two and a half times income. So yes, prices have fallen. Yes, we have affordability, but we have a long way to go before the middle class can afford these homes.

There’s a lot of tropes out there that millennials are too lazy to mow the lawn and they don’t know how to drive a car, so all they want to do is live somewhere that they can take a subway or Uber, and they only want housing types where someone else does the maintenance. And I exaggerate, but only a little.

Like it’s absolutely true that there is a cohort of people who want to live in a walkable neighbourhood close to downtown. I’m one of them. But the challenge is there’s not enough of those to go around. It’s why those homes go for $2 to $4 million. And I don’t see that changing. That simply there’s not going to be that level of affordability and those many units to allow people to basically not live in the suburbs.

Cara Stern: I wonder, though, like you say that is something that planners get wrong. Which planners are you talking about? Are these city planners? Are they private urban planners? Who’s actually saying that about millennials?

Mike Moffatt: I think a lot of it is municipal planning. If you go through municipal plans, there’s a lot of underlying assumptions. And to be fair, to make a plan, you have to make assumptions. It doesn’t matter if you’re a municipal planner or an economist. You’re building a model, you’re building a plan, there’s going to be underlying assumptions.

And we’re not seeing that so far. Now, that may be true someday, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Cara Stern: It seems to be a bit of a mismatch, because I think that there is demand for that kind of living, maybe like in your 20s especially, before you’re raising a family. But the prices are so high that most people cannot afford a condo in a good, transit-oriented, walkable community at that time in their life when they actually might be most likely to consider it.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, that is true, that we haven’t built enough of them, and I don’t see us building enough of them anytime soon. But I think a lot of this also ignores immigration, that I say that like 90% of all bad planning and housing discourse has the unstated assumption that the only people who need homes are like seventh-generation Canadians with Scottish last names, who are all urbanists.

That’s the attraction for many newcomers, and that’s the kind of property that they’re going to want.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I think a lot of people want that. I just keep wondering, like it all comes down to this constrained optimization. There’s so many factors at play here. If you’re going to be working in a city and congestion is brutal because population growth is high and there’s not good transit, people might make the choice to live in one of these more walkable areas, even if it’s smaller — like maybe it’s a unit in a multiplex.

I keep thinking, I don’t know that we have the data to know what people are going to choose, because right now you’re not really giving them the choices that we are advocating for and missing middle homes. It’s often you’re choosing between an apartment and condo or moving to the suburbs because we don’t have the option otherwise.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I think the point here is that we’re not going to be building enough of those because you would have to basically flood the market with them and have them become so popular that these suburban homes become passé. So there’s a layer of assumption on top of assumption on top of assumption that would lead you to the place to say, “Nobody’s going to want these suburban homes.” And I just don’t see that as particularly likely.

We at the Missing Middle absolutely want to get more gentle density. We want to get more missing middle homes. But I’m also realistic about the level of success we’re going to have. I would love it if you and I and the team absolutely nailed it and like everybody did exactly what we said, but I’m just not that optimistic.

Our view is that families should have choice. We want to be able to create as much choice as possible. And I just don’t see us ever getting to a point where we’ve created so much choice that people are going to go, “yeah, I don’t want to buy that four-bedroom home in Mississauga.”

It just strikes me as incredibly unlikely.

Cara Stern: I think it’s unlikely, although I do think it depends on cost, because we know that suburbs are so much more expensive to run because you have a high level of services, and you don’t have the density to support it. So we end up with basically everyone else subsidizing it to make it the cheap option, and that makes it very attractive.

But if people actually have to pay the full cost of living in the suburb, it would be a very luxurious choice. And that is something that a lot of people would like. But I think right now we think of it as that’s the cheap option and maybe it really shouldn’t be. It all depends on policy of whether that will continue to be the case, because I think that you’re right that most people do want to have their own home, ideally. It’s just that we don’t live in an ideal world. So when you have other factors at play here, they might make other choices.

Mike Moffatt: My point is we don’t live in an ideal world, so they are going to choose the suburbs. Because I think that’s ultimately it. And keep in mind the infrastructure for those homes is already built. Because we’re talking about the demand for the homes that the Boomers already live in, so we’re not building a lot of greenfield infrastructure for them.

Yeah, there’s maintenance. And yeah, a lower density neighbourhood costs more to snowplow. Yeah, those things are absolutely true. But I put it this way. It’s like, you can live in Cabbagetown and have a $3 million home or you can live in, I don’t know, Brantford and have a $700,000 home.

$2.3 million pays for a lot of snow plowing. So yes, some of these neighbourhoods are more expensive to service for municipalities. But I’m skeptical of this idea that if we could somehow internalize those costs, that people will go, “Yeah, I’m going to save 500 bucks a year on my property taxes by buying a home that’s $2.3 million more expensive.”

Like, I just don’t see the math working there. But I think it’s also like a moot academic point, because I don’t see the nature of property taxes changing anytime soon.

Cara Stern: Okay, let’s go back to the argument that there’s going to be a glut of single family homes out there. We don’t need to build more, we just need to wait. So let’s look at that argument and figure out: Is there any way that they’re right?

Mike Moffatt: So when I taught a course at Ivey—I taught this course for over ten years on global investment and the strategies that firms use when making foreign direct investments. And we used a lot of tools to analyze these things. And one of the tools we used was called a pre-mortem analysis.

And the idea behind a pre-mortem analysis is that an organization—this is often done in the military—you come up with a plan and then you analyze that plan as if you did it, but the plan failed, and you work backwards and go, “Okay, what could have caused that plan to fail?” It’s a red team exercise. And if I was to red team this or do a pre-mortem analysis and go, “Okay, actually, you know what, my prediction is wrong. Why might they be wrong?”

The obvious answer is immigration, but a little bit different than what you suggest. I don’t think the immigration issue would be a supply issue. I think it would just be a demand issue. That Canada just decides, for whatever reason, to go, “Okay, we’re going to further lower immigration targets. We’re going to further reduce the number of nonpermanent residents and so on,” for whatever reason.

And we could debate the economics of it, but that could happen. We could get to a point where our population continuously starts to fall. At that point, you probably would get a glut of family size homes and suburban homes in the next 10 to 20 years. And in particular, I think it could be right in specific geographies.

So the other thing that we could see happen is, let’s say Western Canada grows more economically and say southern Ontario stagnates. Well, you might start to see, and we’ve already seen this, lots of families move from southern Ontario to Alberta or other parts of western Canada. So you could have that, the same way that we’ve seen Rust Belt cities in the U.S. hollow out and their suburban homes in places like Gary, Indiana, basically go to zero.

That could happen in specific pockets. So those are the things that I would be looking at. The glut of family home people could be right, either because immigration goes way, way down or they could be right at a specific geographic level, because economies go into decline and people move from one community to another.

So I guess those are the communities you’re thinking of. I’m thinking of Oshawa and I’m thinking of Tillsonburg and all these places that really, really, really shot up during the pandemic. And I believe they’ve all, maybe aren’t affordable, but come back down quite a lot.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, though they’re still way higher than they used to be. So that could be part of it. But I was just thinking more about the economics of it. So, let’s suppose we have a 20 to 30 year run where oil and gas does really well, but manufacturing doesn’t. Then you’re going to see people move out of those manufacturing centres, like in Oshawa, but also like a Windsor, a London, and so on, and move out to the patch or vice versa.

We could have a 20 or 30-year period where oil and gas prices crater, there’s not a lot of demand out there, and you see folks move in the other direction. And we’ve seen this before in Canadian history. My dad’s family is from a community called Southey, Saskatchewan. And during the depression, Saskatchewan basically depopulated because of droughts. And you had this diaspora who moved out of Saskatchewan and moved to places like London, Ontario.

That could happen again. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a drought, but if you have some part of geography that doesn’t do well or some industry that goes into severe decline, you could absolutely see a level of outmigration that causes suburban homes to become quite available and cheap.

Cara Stern: I keep thinking about what you said about if we did close the taps on immigration. Like that definitely requires major structural changes to our economy, and I just don’t even know how Canada would deal with that. I guess that should be an episode, we should come back to that. But how do you restructure your economy if you can’t rely on population growth?

Cara Stern: Yeah. What I’m getting from this is we are not going to slow down on our advocacy to build more homes because, I guess worst-case scenario, if there are too many homes, I would probably choose a problem where homes are too affordable for people over one where homes are completely out of reach for the middle class.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. Put me on Team Abundance and Team Affordability.

Cara Stern: Thanks so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about Southey, Saskatchewan, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

No, aging baby boomers will not trigger a glut of suburban homes for young families

StatsCan population projections

The panel also debates the future of condos, rentals, non-market housing, and the political decisions shaping Toronto’s future, warning that without meaningful reform, the city risks becoming unaffordable for the very people it needs most.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Well, good evening, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us for the first-ever live taping of the Missing Middle podcast.

We’re so excited to have you here tonight at the National Club. I’m Sabrina Maddeaux, your moderator for the evening. And if you don’t know about The Missing Middle, we talk about the economic pressure shaping life for the middle class and especially young Canadians: housing affordability, fiscal policy, what governments are getting right, and more often, what governments are getting wrong, and we never pull any punches.

Toronto is in an election year, which means the people in this room have a rare chance to shape the future of the city. And the stakes are real. If housing stays unaffordable, if the middle class keeps getting pushed out, we’re not just talking about a tough market. We’re talking about a fundamentally different future for the city and the people who call it home.

And so that’s what we’re here to talk about and figure out tonight. And we’ll be opening up to all of you at the end, so start thinking about your questions. But first I’ll introduce our panel. We have Mike Moffatt next to me, the founding director of The Missing Middle, my podcast co-host, and one of Canada’s leading housing economists.

Cara Stern is also a Missing Middle co-host and has been one of the sharpest voices on what housing policy is doing to families, young families in particular. And Ron Butler, we cannot forget him. You’ll know him very well by the end of the night. He’s a 30-year veteran of the mortgage industry and the host of the Angry Mortgage channel on YouTube. Someone who tells Canadians the very blunt truth about what this market actually looks like from the inside.

And with that, let’s dive right in.

Cara, I’m going to start with you. You’re a young parent in the city, so you have a front-row seat to something that a lot of policymakers or even older Torontonians seem to be missing. There’s this assumption that families will just move to the suburbs or go as far as they need to to find affordability, and that’s fine. They leave; everyone’s happy, no problem. But is it actually fine? And why does it matter if Toronto has kids or young families in it? What do we lose if they all leave?

Cara Stern: Well, I think we lose a lot of the vibrancy of the city if families can’t afford to live anywhere near here; it’ll be a lot of retirees, a lot of professionals, and no families there. It’d be very sad.

But I also think about who the parents are. What age range are they? They are at the prime of their career. We need people in that age range able to work in the city and at least in commuting distance from the city, if not in the city itself. And it’s a really tough thing if you lose families, which we are losing a lot of. You obviously have grandparents who don’t see their grandkids, so that’s pretty sad.

It’s really hard to reverse that trend because people leave the city, and schools close. We’re seeing that happening now. There are fewer kids entering kindergarten this year. So there are fewer classes, and schools will eventually shut down in areas where there aren’t families. You can’t really get that infrastructure back and have it reopen at any point because it becomes much more difficult.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Mike, could you put some perspective on how far gone exactly is Toronto when it comes to losing young families and especially young parents?

Mike Moffatt: Well, I have one of my colleagues at the Globe here, so I don’t want to say too much because I’ve got a piece coming out in about a week on this. But families are leaving the GTA, and not just the city of Toronto. The GTA is large, the latest numbers that we have are about 90,000 more people are leaving the GTA for other parts of Canada than are coming back.

And it’s disproportionately two groups. Some folks sell their place in Cabbagetown and move to Kawartha Lakes or what have you. That does exist, but it is largely people between the ages of 25 and 44 and kids under the age of five.

Now, this is no longer technically true, but it was a few years ago that the most common age to leave the city of Toronto was zero. It’s kids under age one, and you can understand why. They live in an apartment; they live in a condo, a small unit, and a baby comes along, and they’re like, “This isn’t going to work.” And they drive until they qualify, until they can find a place they can afford. At some level, that’s always happened. But it used to be that they would drive to Etobicoke or whatever. And now they’re driving to Tillsonburg and Woodstock and Belleville and so on.

Cara Stern: They’re flying till they qualify.

Mike Moffatt: Yes, exactly. So it is a real problem for exactly the reasons discussed. And it’s hard to come back. Once a neighbourhood loses that school, it’s even harder to attract those families.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now, Ron, are you seeing this day-to-day on the ground in your work?

Ron Butler: Oh, we see it every single day.

Now, 40 is wildly crazy because if you drop back into the 1980s, it was 27 years old. That is an unbelievably big change. And apropos of families, the fertility rate in Canada has just broken through another level; it’s gone down to 1.2. So that means you’re so far away from the replacement rate it’s not even worth talking about.

We’ve started to do a little work on figuring out a place where there is an exception to this family formation problem. One of the strange outcomes was that Bruce Power saves the world. It’s so wild because the incomes are so high for the Bruce Nuclear Reactor program, which is growing in Ontario. And the prices of the homes have only just gotten up to an average of half a million dollars. Prior to that, if we go back to pre-COVID, they were much less, in the $200,000 range. Because the incomes are so high and the price of homes was very reasonable for a long time, there’s actually family formation within the radiation zone of the nuclear reactor.

Which might be another story for another day. But this is a fascinating thing. If you go back to the late 70s and 80s, family formation was very normal. People got married in their early 20s, had kids, and that was when you could go directly from high school to a factory job that paid you a living wage - an adequate wage.

So one of the things that we have to think about more, other than affordable housing, is that we’ve got to start thinking about how people’s incomes are nowhere near where they need to be to be able to form a family and buy a home and pursue the same thing that I’m guessing most of the people in the room have been able to achieve.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now I want to jump off of that because, Mike, one of the problems and complaints is that there aren’t suitable homes for families these days. Everything is either too large and unaffordable or too small to have the quality of life most people are expecting or wanting when they have kids. So why is everything either a McMansion or a shoebox right now?

Mike Moffatt: It’s just the economics of how we do taxes and land in this province. We haven’t really allowed other forms of home - missing middle - because of zoning and building code issues. We haven’t allowed for the use of new development land because of urban growth boundaries and Greenbelt-type issues.

So if you’re not allowing a lot of land, that land is going to be very expensive, and nobody’s going to build an $80,000 structure on a million-dollar piece of land. Even if you did that, that home would still cost about $1.1 million. So that only leaves you with high-rise, and high-rise has many uses, but the expense and challenge of building high-rise and building code issues make it very hard to economically build larger units. So it’s this combination of land use policy, taxes and so on - particularly in the GTA and southern Ontario - that has created this dichotomy where you’ve got very small homes and very large homes and not a lot in between.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So, Ron, being on the ground every day, where do you see the future going? You have that ground-level view that the rest of us don’t always have. Five years from now, in the GTA, condos, purpose-built rentals, single-family what’s your honest read on what happens with each?

Ron Butler: Prediction is a crappy business. It’s really bad. But here’s something I feel a lot of conviction about. The dog crate condos will be doomed for a long time.

I’ll give you a great quote. A group from Montreal come to Toronto to buy wholesale numbers of condos. It’s called the Gesta Group. They’ve got half a billion dollars to buy unused, unsold dog crate condos in Toronto.

A great quote from the person managing this effort said, “The only thing we won’t buy is condos that are laid out like a bowling alley with a glass wall for the bedroom.” And the great quote he said was, “These things are unlivable.” Think about that for a minute. They’re unlivable. They are so bad they’re unlivable, both for the owner occupant and for the renter. He’s talking about something so awful, finishes so bad, a concept so horrendous that even renters won’t live in them.

So that’s the only thing I can say for sure, Sabrina, is that I think the situation with tiny condos will be just as bad 3-5 years from now as it is today.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Cara, I want to dive into the policy side of this because what we hear from policymakers is always one thing: they love families, they love affordable housing. But then it’s the dog-crates that get approved and the three-bedroom family homes that get the “no.” What would you like to see from Toronto candidates and policymakers to make it genuinely easier for young people, families, and children to stay in Toronto?

Cara Stern: I think we’ve started seeing some changes. We’ve seen some zoning changes happen, which is really important. All the city can do four-plexes. We have six-plexes in old Toronto, some in East York, and one place in Scarborough. That’s great, except that’s only on paper. But can you actually build them? Can you actually do it in a way where it financially makes sense, so that you can actually fit that on the lot when there are all these other building code rules?

We need to see some changes that make it actually feasible to build these homes, not just the bare minimum of making them legal.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now, Mike, you’ve written a lot about what you call Potemkin reforms—changes that look meaningful on paper but don’t move the needle in real life. In a Toronto election year, what’s the one thing you wish every candidate understood about why our housing crisis keeps not getting solved?

Mike Moffatt: I think we need as-of-right to actually be as-of-right. Have a list of criteria, and once you do that, then you’re gold. We see this in places like Edmonton where for subdivision permits and several other permits, it’s actually assessed by AI, and something that, if you’re lucky, takes six weeks in the City of Toronto takes six minutes in Edmonton.

There are solutions out there. I think it’s looking at that and looking at one that I’ll have to work with the province a little bit. One of the objections to multiplexes is that in Ontario they’re almost all going to be rentals because to parse them out and sell them as individual units, you get into condo regulations and the economies of scale don’t work. It’s the same amount of paperwork to do a 300-unit condo as an eight-unit condo.

But this is a solvable problem. In British Columbia and other jurisdictions, - in the United States - has several policies to make it easier to subdivide units. There are different methods depending on the type of home, but there’s really not that much difference from doing a semi-detached duplex. So I think it’s looking at that, but it really does come down to as-of-right should mean as-of-right.

Cara Stern: Those delays are huge. Think about how much it adds to the cost of the home for every month that it’s delayed. A lot of these projects take a long time to get approved, even for fairly simple things. So we really need to see some of that red tape go away.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Ron, Mike mentioned land costs. Do you think governments are willing to make those tough decisions necessary to either make it easier to build infill or to make more development land available? Or did the Greenbelt scandal make this a third rail that no one’s going to touch again?

Ron Butler: Well, we live in a province where the premier could do the most preposterous, outrageous, and semi-corrupt things, and all he has to do is apologize two days later and take it back. That is a different kind of political environment than I’ve been used to in my life.

But a couple of points here: The land prices are astronomical until we completely set aside this whole Greenbelt insanity. It’s really a brown belt or a bush belt or a rock belt - the idea that it’s all farming land is preposterous. Every single organization goes to the barricades every time you talk about the Greenbelt.

When you go back in the lineage of the organizations, it’s just a bunch of NIMBYs who live there and don’t want anything to change in all of those Greenbelt areas, and it’s ridiculous. There’s no sense to it. There’s no reason for it other than an idea that a couple of people in the Harris government dreamt up all those decades ago, and it’s no longer appropriate.

And by the way, if you ever hear anybody refer to the Greenbelt as a critical watershed, you need to point at Lake Ontario. There is never going to be any shortage of fresh water in this region. There’s been so much mythology built around the Greenbelt that’s completely false; it’s so hard to tear it down.

Cara made a great point about the insanity of building multiplexes in the city of Toronto. A friend of mine tried to do it just a few streets off the Danforth. He started three projects, and in the end he said we just gave up.

There was a requirement to increase the water coming into the building, so we had to put in a pipe for the water coming into the six-plex, and that required us to have the provincial arborist come and see how close the pipeline was going to be to a tree. And that took seven weeks. We couldn’t do anything for seven weeks. I’m not even going to talk about the guy who ran three different shade complaints. You can do that. You can just keep going with the shade complaints forever. Or the person on the other side of the project who wanted a significant bribe to allow materials to come in too close to his property.

I’m not making any of this stuff up. This is the way it works. Under those circumstances, how are you going to build this stuff?

Sabrina Maddeaux: Mike, you’re a guy involved in climate initiatives. You care about the climate. Is Ron right or is he just an evil, pro-development…

Mike Moffatt: Well, those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

But no, I do think we need to look at these. In particular, the Greenbelt is one issue. But on the urban growth boundary thing, it’s increasingly clear that they actually cause more sprawl than they prevent because what happens is you get the leapfrogging effect.

You see this a lot in my hometown of London, Ontario, where you get a council that puts in a really tight urban growth boundary, and then people just move out to Lucan or Komoka. They move out 10 to 15 minutes north or west of the city, and then they drive back to their jobs at the university or the hospital. So you haven’t stopped sprawl; you’ve just moved it 15 minutes north and west.

And, by the way, when you do that, all of those families pay all their property taxes to Komoka and Lucan. They don’t pay them to London. So now you’ve got all these people who are commuting using London’s infrastructure, but they’re not paying a dime of local municipal taxes. So, I do think we need to look at these things.

Cara Stern: I think people need to realize that good housing policy is good climate policy. They can be done together, and that would really make a huge difference.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Cara, I’m curious because we’ve talked a lot about ownership, but a lot of people are coming to terms with the idea that they might never own. They might be forever renters. Is renting for life a realistic and dignified path in Toronto, or does that only work if we fundamentally change how this city treats rentals and renters?

Cara Stern: I think it’s definitely a dignified path. Some people do want to rent, and if they want to, I think that is a totally great choice. I don’t think that we need to be a place where people have to own, but we do have a lot of financial incentives to own a home. You don’t pay capital gains tax on that increase, and there’s no equivalent for renters at all. When you look at the rental market, there are very few family-sized rental units out there; it’s almost impossible to find one in Toronto.

And so we are ending up with smaller families. I think that will continue to be the case because you can’t make it work in these tiny condos.

I don’t want people to have to rent because that’s their only option. I’m not one of these people who think, “Oh, you know what, if corporations buy homes.” Those are often decent people to rent from because they know the rental laws, unlike a lot of landlords out there, but at the same time, it can’t be that people are forced into this. It has to be that the choice is theirs.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So if a young person is in a position where they could put down a down payment and afford a home in Toronto, right now, Ron, can you give us the honest answer? Would you recommend it?

Ron Butler: Would I recommend buying a house in Toronto?

Sabrina Maddeaux: Right now. If you’re a young person and you have a down payment, you can technically afford the mortgage payments. Is it a good idea?

Ron Butler: If you can wait six months, you’ll have lower prices in almost every region. The thing that we misunderstand about housing is that it’s not like the stock market. There’s no such thing as a whole market that moves with momentum. There are some dog companies that get pulled up by the success of other companies in the stock market. That’s not true in real estate.

If you have a sought-after neighbourhood, a great street, and a great home, you will get a great price out of it. And we hear the story, “Oh, the market’s turned and everything’s getting a lot better; you better jump in and buy right now, or you’re doomed.” I can show you a lot of homes in Scarborough that have been sitting there for seven months. Not every single place is that unique, sought-after property. Those sell; others don’t. And if it’s the wrong price, it doesn’t sell at all.

So will the price come down a bit more in the city of Toronto? I think yes, if we talk about the whole city and not just those ultra-specific neighbourhoods close to the core. I think yes, prices will come down. And here’s one thing for sure: if you wait six months and save $50,000, you’d like to have that $50,000, right?

Sabrina Maddeaux: I’d take it.

So, Mike, Mayor Olivia Chow has made non-market housing a signature of her time as mayor, and anyone running against her in this election is going to have to take a position on that. Is she right to say that non-market has to be a bigger part of the answer, or is that approach getting in the way of solving the affordability crisis?

Mike Moffatt: No, I definitely think we need more non-market housing. We can debate where the money comes from, which order of government, and so on. I think where it becomes problematic is when it’s tied to a market building or proposal where you go, “Okay, if you want to build this missing middle or mid-rise apartment building, x percent has to be deeply affordable.” Then the math breaks.

Cara Stern: Is that when they’re paying for it through development charges, through inclusionary zoning? Those are the things where we’re able to put the cost onto other buyers.

Mike Moffatt: Don’t put it on development charges.

Ron Butler: You know, I think there’s a huge need for social housing. Homelessness is the greatest curse of our society as we sit in these large cities today. But it’s important that the mayor and all the council realize that their long-term social housing is making them famous as slumlords. They have neglected to maintain these properties for years.

So there’s a lesson there that if you’re going to build these things and take federal incentives to build social housing, you better have a realistic commitment to how you’re going to look after it for multiple decades and not end up being even more famous as the biggest slumlord in Toronto, as is the City of Toronto.

Sabrina Maddeaux: I’m going to do a couple of rapid-fire rounds before we go to audience questions. Let’s start with Ron. If you could tell the next mayor of Toronto, whoever that might be, one thing about housing, what would it be?

Ron Butler: First, wear fewer costumes. After that, understand that development fees only do harm. They give the government a completely wrong idea of where and how money should be spent. Because ultimately, if there was no taxation on the new construction of housing, a lot of people say, “Oh, no, if you do that, the developers will just run wild and take all the money and profits and be terrible.” But there’s a reason why the prices got so high on these condos- why they went from $375 a foot to $500 to $700 to $1,400 a foot. It’s a combination of land costs, which are speculation unto themselves, and huge taxes and development charges.

So say to yourself, “Why is there tax on new construction?” Then, if you decide there shouldn’t be, there will be a lot more useful new construction.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Cara, same to you. What do you tell the next mayor?

Cara Stern: I would tell the next mayor to really focus on housing. I was really disappointed when the six-plex debate came up that Olivia Chow did not use her strong mayor powers and didn’t advocate for six-plexes all over the city. She recused herself from the discussion, and I thought that was such an abdication of responsibility.

As the Mayor, you have a responsibility to make sure that these things get passed. Those strong mayor powers were put in place so that people could actually get housing passed when the council isn’t agreeing to it. I see the way they cut it back to only being part of the city as such a failure. I would like the next mayor to actually use the powers available to them to make housing available in the city.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Mike?

Mike Moffatt: I’ll tie it back to an earlier question. Lose the market versus non-market mindset. There are no non-market electricians, no non-market sewers, no non-market building code, no non-market zoning. If you fix the issues with housing, you’re going to help both the market and non-market sides at the same time.

And I think we get into this market versus non-market, deeply affordable versus market, whereas 90% of the policy solutions help both at the same time. So focus on that 90% and don’t create artificial conflict that you don’t need to create.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Last rapid-fire round. I know Ron hates predictions, but too bad, it’s my show.

I want all of you to tell me one prediction that you think will happen. It can be a policy or something in the political landscape to do with housing the middle class in the Toronto area over the next five years. What do you think we’ll see? Cara, let’s start with you.

Cara Stern: I think we’re going to see a problem as housing is not being built right now. We’re seeing condos not getting built.

I think in a couple of years we’re going to see housing prices go up because the things that would come on the market aren’t going to come on the market. I’m very concerned about that. I don’t see any other way around it when building was frozen for a little while.

With the elections coming up, I hope people are going to talk about housing, but I’m pretty concerned. My prediction is that we’re going to spend more time talking about the jets on the island than we will about housing in the city.

Why are we spending so much time on this compared to affordable housing and housing for middle-class families? That is a huge crisis in the city.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Mike?

Mike Moffatt: I think we’re going to have more young people and young kids leave Toronto. Furthermore, I think we’re going to have more people leaving Ontario and more people leaving Canada.

We’re already seeing record numbers of young Canadians move to the US. I think if their political situation ever stabilizes, we’re going to see a far larger out-migration. I hope I’m wrong about that. I hope our policymakers at all three orders of government can do something about it. But I’m really worried about the exodus of youth and talent, particularly from the GTA.

Sabrina Maddeaux: I’m going to add in my own quick prediction before we get to Ron.

Cara Stern: That’s the thing with the second-time buyers’ problem. I hadn’t heard that the first-time home buyer is now 40 years old. And I didn’t think about how everyone always said to me growing up, “You want to buy your starter home, and you work your way up.” At that point, you’re probably in need of the biggest home you’ll ever need in your life. That’s when you’re probably having kids. So it becomes even worse when you need to be able to buy something that should be considered something you work up to.

Ron Butler: Yeah, that’s a serious number. It’s national, which is even worse.

Cara Stern: It’s got to be worse in Toronto.

Ron Butler: Oh, I’m sure it is.

The nice part about being really old and really fat is that I can make a five-year prediction and I’m probably not going to be around to be proven wrong. My cardiologist would agree with that.

Here’s a political prediction because I have a lot of fun with it. I think that we will have a new Prime Minister at the end of five years and a new Premier. I think the Premier will just wear out his welcome. But I think the Prime Minister might just think five years is enough and go on and become the General Secretary of the United Nations.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And that’s why we close with Ron.

Editor’s note: The panel discussion was followed by a lively Q&A, during which participants explored topics including a Land Value Tax and the tension between housing as an investment vehicle and housing as a place to live. To watch the full exchange, check out the video on YouTube.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

‘It’s not like we’re sitting on our hands.’ Toronto’s biggest landlord sees 7 more complexes fall into critical disrepair

Drug deals in doorways and a stranger in the living room: Why Toronto Community Housing residents say its $38M security force is failing them

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

• There is a persistent belief that the combination of low birth rates and rising death rates will “solve” the housing crisis without the need to build more homes.

• While it is true that deaths are on track to exceed births by the end of the decade, that’s only part of Canada’s population story.

• Immigration and non-permanent residents will remain the primary drivers of population growth under current federal policies.

• Statistics Canada projects Canada will add roughly 3 million people per decade for the foreseeable future, similar to the 1980s, when Canada built a substantial number of homes.

• Unless immigration levels are slashed well beyond current levels, natural population decline alone will not eliminate the need for homebuilding.

When a theory gets it half right

One thing we hear a lot at the Missing Middle is that Canada won’t need to build all that many homes, as birth rates are low and deaths are slated to increase due to an aging population. As such, the argument goes, our population won’t grow all that much, and homes will “turn over” from generation to generation.

Part of that argument is true. Statistics Canada provides population projections through 2025 (Table 17-10-0058-01). Their M1 projection, based on current trends and government policies, shows deaths overtaking births by the end of the decade, resulting in net population decline from non-migration sources.

Figure 1: Births and Deaths by Year, Number of Persons, Canada.

Data Sources: Statistics Canada Tables 17-10-0008-01 and 17-10-0058-01. Chart Source: MMI.

However, the “we don’t need more homes” argument neglects to consider the role that immigration and non-permanent residency play in population growth and demographic-based housing demand. While Canada’s current immigration plan only extends until the end of 2028, the federal government has made the following three long-term immigration commitments:

• reduce our temporary population to less than 5% of the total population by the end of 2027

• stabilize permanent resident admissions at less than 1% of the total population after 2027

• increase the Francophone immigration target to 12% of permanent resident admissions by 2029

The third commitment is not particularly relevant to our discussion here, but the first two inform Statistics Canada’s population projections. Figure 2 shows the number of new immigrants (permanent residents) and non-permanent residents by year, projected from 1971 to 2075. The post-2015 run-up in immigration and non-permanent residents is clearly visible, along with the 2025-27 reduction in non-permanent residents.

Figure 2: Net Newcomers (Immigrants and Net Non-Permanent Residents) by Year, Number of Persons, Canada.

Data Sources: Statistics Canada Tables 17-10-0008-01 and 17-10-0058-01. Chart Source: MMI.

The fluctuations in the 2015-28 period overwhelm Figure 2. We can correct for that by displaying the number of newcomers by decade. In Figure 3, we see that under current Canadian government policies, the number of newcomers to Canada will be just over 4 million in the 2030s, eventually surpassing the 4.8 million in the 2020s and reaching 5 million by the 2060s. In contrast, Canada added only 2 million newcomers in the 1990s.

Figure 3: Net Newcomers (Immigrants and Net Non-Permanent Residents) by Year, Number of Persons, Canada.

Data Sources: Statistics Canada Tables 17-10-0008-01 and 17-10-0058-01. Chart Source: MMI.

Adding all of the components of population growth and decline together from births to deaths to immigration to emigration, Statistics Canada projects that Canada’s population will grow by just over 3 million persons per decade moving forward, roughly the same level as in the 1980s, a period where Canada built a lot of homes, particularly family-sized homes. Figure 4 shows that while Canada’s population growth rate will be much lower than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, our growth in terms of the number of people is projected to be equivalent.

Figure 4: Population Growth (Number of Persons) and Population Growth Rate by Decade, Canada.

Data Sources: Statistics Canada Tables 17-10-0008-01 and 17-10-0058-01. Chart Source: MMI.

There are all kinds of assumptions baked into these projections, with future immigration policy being at the top of the list. If Canada alters immigration targets, makes drastic increases (or decreases) to the number of non-permanent residents, or finds itself in a position where it cannot achieve the targets it has set for itself, growth rates and growth levels will be substantially different than what is shown in Figure 4.

Barring large reductions in immigration, however, deaths surpassing births does not create a Canada where homebuilding is no longer necessary.

Cara Stern talks with The Hub's Managing Editor and Scout leader Harrison Lowman about why modern life feels increasingly isolating, and how everything from scouting to neighbourhood pubs can help people rebuild trust, friendship, and a sense of belonging.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: We talk a lot on this program about the physical parts of a community —the housing, the zoning, the transit, the density. But you can build the most perfectly designed neighbourhood in the world and still end up with a bunch of strangers living next to each other. So the physical design matters, but something else has to be there too. And we have a guest today who’s been thinking hard about what that something else is and how we build it. Harrison Lowman is the managing editor of The Hub. He’s an enthusiastic scout leader and someone I was very lucky to work with for almost a decade at TVO. So I’m thrilled to have you here today.

Harrison Lowman: Thank you for having me on. I guess I’m a community expert, or a community organizer. Wasn’t Obama that?

Cara Stern: Yeah, you’re basically Obama.

Harrison Lowman: Okay. Thank you.

Cara Stern: Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve talked about Scouts, and how important Scouts is, and how everyone should be doing Scouts and putting their kids in Scouts. So let’s start there. Why?

Harrison Lowman: I don’t want to make this like an advertisement, but I think often when we’re focusing on extracurriculars for our kids, we’re interested in their individual development, their skills, and I’m interested in extracurriculars that are feeding the community.

A lot of this conversation can be very corny, Cara, because I tell them things like, if the neighbourhood’s a machine, then you guys are all little cogs in that machine, and we all get to be well oiled and we all go to be turning around with our teeth fitting into one another for this whole thing to work. So that’s why I say people should sort of join scouting is because they’re sort of giving back. I can get into examples of that later.

Cara Stern: I love that idea of community as a machine because it gives you this visual where we’re all taking part in it. It’s not a machine that works on its own. You need people to operate the machines or be the cogs, as you said, be a part of it.

Harrison Lowman: We keep talking about Canada being broken. And I feel like these metaphors work in terms of like, okay, how do we fix it? And I feel like this is part of the fixing.

Cara Stern: You and I both love Canada, but are both very frustrated with Canada because there’s a lot of things we both see as moving in the wrong direction. I obviously focus a lot on the housing side of it because I subscribe to the housing theory of everything. Fix that and everything comes together. And you’re focused a little bit more on, I guess it would be the international role of Canada and Canada’s identity in some ways.

Harrison Lowman: Yeah, the international. But again, I think you and I would agree it starts at the local level. It’s all bottom up. I think we’ve learned that top down doesn’t really work and people have to be invested. And where are they most invested?

We see this in municipal politics. The politicians that are getting the calls are the ones that are having folks angry about their garbage not being picked up or some sort of zoning bylaw being broken and something being built in the backyard. It starts local. That’s where people start to notice things and where they start to get frustrated and hopefully where they start to fix things.

Cara Stern: I think a lot of people talk about community as something that they think you find if you’re lucky. You move somewhere and you’re like, how is the community there? Is it good? I don’t know that people realize how much being part of a community is an active thing. And I was wondering why you think people don’t quite get that—the role that they have to play in the community?

This is going to sound kind of corny, but when I feel overwhelmed at work or with my new baby and I feel like the world is imploding, helping out—with scouting, like making sandwiches for the homeless or delivering food to needy families or delivering garden care stuff to our neighbours so they could see our faces—that makes me feel better as a person. So I think it’s something we should be looking at.

Cara Stern: There are also studies to back that up. I was looking at some and there is some evidence that if you are volunteering, you will feel more connected, and therefore feeling more connected makes you feel less lonely and happier.

Harrison Lowman: Right. Over the last few years, Cara, there’s been, I think in the last five years or so, a 20% drop in volunteering in Canada. Obviously Covid played a big part in that. My message during Covid, obviously while still being safe, was: this is the time when people need to step up the most and help each other, and people really showing when it came to helping one another.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. During the pandemic, people were so isolated. It was like, “Stay home on your own, don’t see other people, don’t go outside of your bubble.” And then that made for an extremely isolating experience. So I guess if you have the community side of it, what did you do during it?

Harrison Lowman: Well, you mentioned bubbles, and it’s one of my catchphrases now. My fear is that we don’t just have bubbles during Covid, it’s that we now have them during regular life. You wake up in the morning, get in your bubble car, you go to work or in your bubble cubicle, then you get back in your car. People are now having lunch in their cars, I see on Instagram. It’s very weird.

Cara Stern: That’s very weird to us because when we were in our office, when we worked together, there were five of us who were like, “Let’s take turns making lunch for each other” because we thought, this brings people together, eating lunch together. So my mind is blown by the idea that someone would just want to eat in their car. Although I suppose there are more introverted people out there than us, so that’s fair.

Harrison Lowman: Those introverts!

I want a world free of bubbles, I want cross-pollination. I was very shy as a kid, Cara, as much as you think I was an extrovert. I was afraid to talk to strangers. You force yourself to talk to strangers when you’re a journalist; it’s just part of the job. But it is amazing now that I’m in a neighbourhood—and it’s the neighbourhood that I grew up in—that I just know the people around me will lend a helping hand if I need it.

A few months ago, I was here working from home and I had to finish a big piece, and I didn’t have a charger for my laptop. I mentioned on Facebook this happened, and then a random stranger in our neighbourhood, who then became a neighbour, let me borrow hers. I was welcomed into her home, she told me about her kids, I got to meet her dog. This is the zest of life, Cara.

Cara Stern: I think about how we designed so much of our cities in a way that it makes it kind of easy to avoid accidental encounters with neighbours. We don’t have a lot of neighbourhood pubs, for example. It’s not a thing anymore unless you’re in old parts of the city. You just can’t build them, you’re not allowed to build them. And if you look at our suburban neighbourhoods, there’s pretty much nowhere to walk to. So people are getting in their cars and going places; that’s just the way they’re designed.

How do you counteract that? Because that’s great if you can go out and be like, “hey, can I borrow a charger?” I would totally do that, just maybe knock on a neighbour’s door and ask for that. But a lot of people don’t want to do that. It takes a lot of effort to do that and a lot of pushing yourself if you’re a shy person.

Harrison Lowman: Yeah. For some, I would just say you got to do it, and then it’ll be uncomfortable at first but it’ll pay off in spades after the fact. We talk about third spaces. And I have one near here, thankfully due to the efforts of — I think she’s 85 0— Madeleine McDowell, an icon in this community, an amateur historian who basically saved a place called the Lambton House down by the Humber River. It’s an old coaching house hotel from the 1800s, and it’s got this storied history.

It’s not just a historical site. These places increasingly, as you said, there’s a need for a lot of activities. I can hear young kids taking instrument lessons from these places, people taking tours, there’s pub nights, there’s meet and greets for seniors in the community who feel isolated, and they just become neighborhood drinking holes, which I think we need more of. The church that we do scouting out of, that we’ve almost done for 100 years, they’ve lent the space to us for free. And we pay back in spades; the scouts do by, a few weeks ago, helping to organize their rummage sale, putting stuff away and taking it out. That place is used. It does AA meetings, it does Scottish country dancing, they record musical albums there. So yes, it also is used as a place of worship, but increasingly it’s more so used for other stuff. And I am happy that my son, if he ends up joining Scouts—which he’ll be, being biased, I will obviously force him into it.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I was like, “You’re giving him a choice?”

Harrison Lowman: Yeah, but he will be in this historic church and also have meetings and have fun and learn valuable lessons in the same space that I did when I was five years old.

Cara Stern: Man, if only people didn’t have to move out of their communities they grew up in. That’s a very lucky, privileged thing to be able to do.

Harrison Lowman: And that’s the other thing. I think those of us that do have these things should realize how fortunate we are, pay it forward, and also feed that community because we have to realize that we’re unique here and that not everyone has this. Some people are stuck. There are people that choose to live in the suburbs like you’re talking about, but then there are also people who are forced to. And I’m sure that obviously there’s community in the suburbs as well; people find community in various places.

Cara Stern: And in condos, you have to make an effort.

Harrison Lowman: Yeah. We introduce architectural barriers that make it more difficult. You don’t end up meeting that person because you don’t have a park or a parkette by your condo, and so you are just like passing ships in the night.

I used to live in a small loft in West Toronto. Did I know my neighbours’ first names? No, you just hear them through the walls. It’s kind of depressing in a way. I had no parts of their lives, I’d never be able to really understand who the heck they were, and they didn’t really care who I was.

Cara Stern: I knew a lot of my neighbours when I lived in high rises, but that was a choice where if I saw them, I would talk to them, and then I’d write down on my phone, like, remember who that person is so next time I see them, I’d remember their name. Because otherwise I’ll look at them and be like, “I know you, who are you?”

But it definitely takes a lot of effort. You have to counteract the built form that’s there in order to get there. Do you think that we have to live in a high trust society to have this kind of community you’re talking about?

Harrison Lowman: Well, it’s harder. It’s harder in urban areas, right? Like you hear all the time in rural areas, and increasingly, whether it’s people in mental crisis, using drugs, etc., it gets more difficult. People are obviously hesitant about trying to form some of these connections when they have their guard up.

I don’t think it will get to this level, but I described to you a situation where in my wife’s family’s community in Lakefield, Ontario, near Peterborough, we came out of a church service and everyone has their car doors unlocked, which I think is just nuts. But there was a pie on her father’s dash of his car; someone had just left that there as a thank you. And I was like, wow, this is like peak community—unasked-for pie that you’re greeted by when you come out of the church. Come on, man.

I do think you need that trust. It’s not just going to come, it can’t be manufactured or inorganic. It’s just about how do we build that trust? I don’t have all the answers.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever get to pie levels of trust in cities, especially given the number of car thefts here — I don’t think anyone’s leaving their car unlocked. But you do have other forms of community in the cities at a different level.

Harrison Lowman: I don’t know, I really think, Cara, you just have to dive in. And it’s like dating; I tell people you have to put yourself in as many situations as possible where you’re rubbing up shoulders next to like-minded people as possible, where your Venn diagram overlaps with like-minded folks. So often that means being out of your comfort zone. If someone’s lonely, whether they’re on mat leave or moving into a new neighbourhood, they need to pick up the community newspaper, look at bulletins on poles around their house, or go online and try to see ways of interacting with others.

A friend of mine—which I think is amazing, I hear about expats—in this case, my friend is in Berlin. How did he get to know people there and how did he tick some of the boxes we’ve just been discussing? He moved to Berlin and he joined a litter-picking community of people, mostly from the UK, who go around Berlin and spend their Sundays picking up litter and beautifying the city that they’re so grateful to be able to live in. I think that’s amazing.

And in the process, they found friends and they have their own little community in some ways. And they call it the litter-picking community in Berlin. And does it get dicey sometimes? Are they picking up needles sometimes? Are they in rough areas? Yeah, but they’re in a group and they trust one another and they’re giving back and I think that’s great. That’s what I would encourage my friends to do.

Cara Stern: I guess they’re too old to join Scouts there.

Harrison Lowman: You could be a leader.

Cara Stern: If you’ve never taken part in Scouts, can you be a leader?

Harrison Lowman: Yeah, of course, it’s open to everyone. And again, it’s boys and girls.

Again, it sounds corny, but one of the mantras is to do a good turn for someone every day. It’s not that I always do that, but it’s in the back of my head, like I’m thinking that as a 34-year-old going about my day, I’m like, “did I do something for someone else?” And the kids will say, “Well, just doing the dishes or chores,” like no, no, no, that does not count. It’s a responsibility.

You need to go out of your way sometimes, out of your comfort zone, to help someone else. And again, it’ll feel really good. And if you foster that at a young age, those kids grow up in our community and they’re all giving back to one another. And then that cross-pollination starts to happen.

Cara Stern: It is also one of the most affordable things you can put your kids in. Is it super subsidized?

Harrison Lowman: We’re all volunteers, so we give our time. I often found, Cara, when I was doing it, I was like, do I really have time for this? I’m so stressed with work. And then I realized that when people are like, “Oh, I don’t have time for this,” you make time for the things you care about. If you’ve noticed something has dropped by the wayside, it’s because you don’t care about it.

If you really care about something, you will make time and you’ll come to the realization, like I did, that I can work on something longer and feed the employment side of things, or I can do this and—I’m not really religious—but you’re feeding your soul. You’re giving back. You see the smiles of all these young kids, you realize you’re having an impact on their lives, you’re trying to be a good role model and it feeds your soul in a different way. It distracts you from the bullcrap you’re dealing with elsewhere, and it’s just nice to have another track on your life for you to travel on.

Cara Stern: I think it would definitely pay off when you have kids. One of many things that drives me crazy when I talk to people who have kids is they are often shocked by how little community they have. You hear about how it takes a village to raise a child and a lot of people have a kid, and then they’re like, “where’s my village? I was promised a village.” And I think that people don’t understand that you have to be a villager to have a village. It’s something that I constantly remind people who say that. I see it a lot, like a lot of people online will talk about this. I find it in certain areas in my life also where I talk to other parents and they are saying how hard it is—and it is hard—but also how they have no support, and they thought they would have support.

Having a kid, you must be finding that you’re playing it a little bit on easier mode now that you have that sort of community and you’re lucky enough to live near where your parents are and where you grew up, right?

Harrison Lowman: My next-door neighbour said to me when he found out we were pregnant, he’s like, “Any time you need to, no questions asked, walk into my house and hand me a crying baby. I will say nothing to you and I will just look after him.” I haven’t played that card yet, but just the fact that he even said that, it’s lovely.

Cara Stern: You know the neighbour, right?

Harrison Lowman: Yeah, I know him pretty well. There are so many kids here, so to be able to have families on either side that are willing to help. It’s like you said, you build up your supply so that you have it when you have to use it. But again, I don’t care if they pay it back. It doesn’t have to be returned to me.

I was picturing like a glossy brochure, for housing construction, like “Come to Roncesvalles, trendy, hip communities just around the corner.” And again, it becomes this weird selling point when really it’s organic. It has to be fed. It’s not just this talking point for some developer to put on their brochure.

Cara Stern: Well, I think you can build something that encourages community, as you said, if you have the parkettes, if you have local retail or little cafes and things that you can walk to. I think you can build things that encourage it.

Harrison Lowman: Yeah.

Cara Stern: Yeah, it is organic in some ways, but it does take so much effort. And that’s something that I hope that if there’s anyone listening to this who’s feeling isolated takes that away from this—that it is out there, you just have to really make an effort and maybe volunteer, maybe join some sort of circles nearby that’ll get you there and be there for other people too.

Harrison Lowman: And for all the introverts out there you mentioned earlier, there are different roles, right? There are people who don’t want to be public-facing, and they can be the treasurer of some sort of community group. They don’t need to be the head leader, head honcho. We have various people that are more happy to sort of be in the background or deal with the numbers. And then there’s also extroverts like myself who want to be front row centre.

Every year we have a banquet, every year we’re kind of desperately encouraging parents to volunteer because with a lot of stuff, I often don’t know if a lot of people realize how many roles are volunteer roles, people doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, not with kids in the program sometimes. Their kids cycle through and get older and they’re still involved. It’s like a teacher, right? It’s amazing. If you’re a volunteer with young people, you’re leaving an impression on multiple generations of Torontonians. And I think that’s a lovely thing to think about.

Cara Stern: I’m picturing all these little minds shaped by Harrison Lowman out there, just mini Harrison Lowmans. That’s a little bit of a scary thought.

Harrison, thanks so much for being here. I love talking to you about this. I hope a lot of people can learn from your experience in community because you’ve figured it out.

Harrison Lowman: Far from figuring it out, but thank you so much for having me.

Cara Stern: Thanks to everyone for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman. And if you have any questions about being in Scouts, you can email us at missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com, and I will forward it along to Harrison.

Harrison Lowman: Oh my God. Okay, I’m waiting for a deluge.

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Volunteer wellbeing: what works and who benefits?

Exploring the Effects of Volunteering on the Social, Mental, and Physical Health and Well-being of Volunteers: An Umbrella Review

They explore what younger Canadians can actually do to push for change in a system that often seems stacked against them.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: One of the wonderful things about working here at The Missing Middle is regularly hearing from our audience. We read everything you send, but because we’re such a small team, we don’t always have the time to respond.

Cara Stern: So today we’re going to do our best to make amends for that.

Mike is off doing his fancy economist stuff, so Sabrina and I will make our way through the viewer mailbag. Predictably, there are a lot of housing policy-related questions, so we’ll start with this question from someone named Eamon who wrote:

Sabrina Maddeaux: First of all, you’re entirely right.

It’s a huge problem that seniors are largely overhoused in good neighbourhoods, near schools, and in homes with too many bedrooms they don’t need. The problem really is, though, that they don’t have anywhere to go, particularly if they want to stay in their own communities.

Not building that missing middle housing hasn’t only impacted young people, but we haven’t built the type of quality housing in neighbourhoods that people want to live in, as well as walkable neighbourhoods that are appropriate for seniors to downsize.

So when it comes to moving, at any point in time in your life, there’s a huge stressor there, and then you add to the fact that there’s not suitable housing stock. It’s no surprise seniors don’t want to and aren’t moving.

I think the biggest thing is increasing the supply so that they have options. I’m not really in favour of giving additional tax incentives to the wealthiest generation in Canada at the moment, who are already sitting on huge lottery housing gains. There’s already the principal residence capital gains tax exemption. However, I would be open to exploring things like reducing, for example, land transfer taxes. And of course, we talk all the time about reducing taxes on bringing new housing supply online, like development charges and the HST - I support bringing supply online. But I’m curious, Cara, about your thoughts here as well.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I don’t think they need a tax incentive because the tax incentive that they’re getting by doing this would be rent. They’d be collecting it every month. So it seems very unnecessary for us to then use our tax dollars to also subsidize it on top of that. I think that if seniors would like to have people living in their home and have younger roommates, they’re totally welcome to rent out rooms. And that might be helpful for them; it might be helpful for some young people.

Every once in a while, there are stories in the news. You hear of a situation, and it can be mutually beneficial. But yeah, they can get enough rent money out of it that I don’t think we should put our public tax dollars towards it.

This next question comes from Kate, and it’s in a similar vein as that one. And this one was posted on X or Twitter:

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, both those things are tied together. The scarcity of options is due to the lack of new supply. So adding in that HST break on newly built homes that will be primary residences, incentivizes seniors to buy those and plan to downsize, which then, if they successfully downsize, has the effect of hopefully freeing up family-sized homes that are desirable for younger Canadians as well, who are looking to either get into the market or to upgrade where they already live. It’s certainly not the only factor at play when it comes to downsizing, but we’re in a situation where anything to get more of that missing middle supply online, the better.

Cara Stern: I think when you have the time-limited discounts, maybe that would incentivize people to act now or lose that opportunity. And so, with the HST cut, which I think is only one year long, that gives an incentive to buy right now. And so maybe if they did that for seniors, that might be like, “Okay, we have to make this call right now, otherwise we’re gonna lose out on this opportunity.”

If they can build something new that actually appeals to them, then that’d be amazing, because then seniors are living in places that they really like, and they can live in a nice new build, and they would open up those homes for families who need to live in family-size homes. Getting more of them on the market is really what needs to happen.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Exactly. We need more houses of the right type for everyone at this point in Canada.

The next question is from Mary, and it’s been edited a little bit for length, but here’s the gist:

Cara Stern: So for the first one, are houses more expensive or is income simply failing to keep up? It’s both. If houses are expensive and incomes keep going up to keep up with that, then it’s not really a problem. But the problem happens when the disconnect is there, where the home prices are very high and incomes aren’t catching up at all.

I think that Mike said if incomes keep going up at the same rate and housing prices do not increase, it would be something like 25 years before they would catch up. That’s just not possible, which is why we advocate for things that would actually lower the cost of housing and, at least, lower the cost of units for people to live in.

Given the rise of single-person households, that part of the question about social isolation, I think that is very real. There is a lot of social isolation out there, partly due to social media, partly due to the fact that our cities are not really creating places for people to go and hang out and meet each other in a way that is affordable and accessible.

We did an episode on third places, the lack of them in cities and how that’s changed over generations. I really recommend watching it. I think that it’s very real that people are feeling disconnected from the community. There’s a lot that cities can do to make it better for people to feel connected.

Whenever I sign up for activities that are funded by the city, they always give a big discount to seniors, and I always think, “Why is this the case?” And I understand they think of social isolation for seniors, but we know that there are younger people who are more isolated than seniors are right now, especially the age 20 to 30. And so one thing I would like to see is cities not subsidizing it as much for seniors and spreading it across the board, or maybe giving subsidies for young people to take part in these things, because some of the activities can be quite expensive. I’d like to see it more across the board, and then maybe people would have more access to them and be able to make more friends and feel more connected.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, the answer is everything is bad all at once. Wage stagnation, unemployment, or precarious employment. And then, of course, housing costs. And the reality is that housing costs have soared by so much that even if wages did start to rise again at a normal rate, they would not catch up within years or decades. So housing prices do have to come down if we’re ever going to reach affordability.

I don’t think that cities result in social isolation in the way a lot of people think. People are out a lot. They make friends, and they create social networks. But what I’m seeing, particularly when people hit their late 20s or throughout their 30s, is that living in the city is so unaffordable, especially if you want to get married or have a place of your own without roommates or start a family, so many people can’t afford to stay in the city. So what happens is that the social group that you did make in the city starts moving an hour to three hours, or even to an entirely different province or country, away.

Cara Stern: They all move to Alberta these days. That’s where they’re all going.

Sabrina Maddeaux: A lot of Alberta, a lot of the far reaches of Ontario. And then you see your social group, once every six months if you’re lucky. And that is really isolating, especially if you start to raise a family. And often on top of that, you’re moving away from your family or potential grandparents. So it is lonely, and there is something to the cycle that you put in the work to make these friendships and these social connections, and then it feels like they’re constantly being torn away from you. So that is another impact of the housing affordability crisis that I think isn’t spoken about as much as it should be.

Cara Stern: That’s a really great point. And you’re right. As people are moving farther away and traffic gets worse and worse because there are so many more people, it becomes very difficult to visit people. It becomes a thing where it’s a whole-day thing if you’re going to go out to Hamilton to visit your friend; you’re not going just for the evening.

I hear a lot of people talk about how hard it is to make friends as an adult, and I think that is a big part of it, although I do think that so many people complain about how difficult it is to make friends that I’m like, “Most people seem to want to make friends; try making friends with them and make an effort.” If you can get over the fear of talking to people and rejection, hopefully you can at least make some new friends, ideally nearby, because proximity is a huge part of maintaining friendships.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s very true.

And when you also have a class of renters. They tend to move every few years, especially in this day and age. Not renters who have been in their place 10-30 years. But a lot of the time now, especially with unpredictability about rental evictions or rent increases or having to have a different commute for your job, that proximity is constantly changing.

And the point you made about congestion is such a good one. My friends who did move out of the city- when they initially went to Hamilton or beyond, you could go out for dinner, but the way congestion is now, for everyone to see each other, even for lunch, it requires an entire day’s commitment because it could take up to three hours there and up to three hours back, on a bad day. And even friends who now live on the west end of Toronto- I’m in the East end - even that takes an hour and a half. It used to take an hour and a half to drive to Buffalo. Now it takes an hour and a half to get from one end of the city to the other.

And public transit isn’t any better because literally every route from east to west has some sort of diversion or multiple, so it’s a major issue. I’m thinking we should do an episode on this now, but I’ll get us to the next question for the sake of time, which is from Chris and came from the comment section of our Greenbelt episode.

Cara Stern: I think it provides land for whatever we want it to provide land for. I think it depends on what the zoning is. I think for a lot of developers, it’s easiest and the least risky thing would be to just build a bunch of single-family homes that are nice country estates, as this person said, because they will sell and they don’t take that long to build. You don’t have to build a giant tower and take all the risk and get a certain number of investors to start building it. So people will build these single-family luxury country estates, if that is what we make it easiest to build.

But I think we can zone in different ways. They can provide incentives, and there are some ghost stations in the Greenbelt. If you look at transit-oriented communities, that’s where people are putting these high-rises where they can have more affordable homes. If we started looking at those ones in the Greenbelt and tried to incentivize building tall, I think that would actually happen. It all depends on policy.

Sabrina Maddeaux: I also want to say, I don’t think we necessarily need towers in the Greenbelt. I’m not against them. But there’s a difference between luxury country estates and single-family detached homes. And we have a shortage of single-family detached homes. They don’t have to be huge, but with a yard, three bedrooms, the ability to raise a child- maybe two children in them. It’s the lack of supply of those that is contributing to the housing crisis and affordability issues. So yeah, we do need more of those and probably in the Greenbelt.

Cara Stern: But of course, we know that it’s been politically very risky for Doug Ford. I don’t think given the controversy that happened there, I don’t think we’re actually going to see anything open up in the Greenbelt while he’s in power. So it might be a bit of a moot point.

And of course, immigration always generates a lot of conversation online @canucklhead asked a couple of questions in the comment section of one of our episodes, Out of Nowhere: How Canada Fell Behind Alabama.

Sabrina Maddeaux: I agree. It’s a big part of the solution, and we had such an unsustainable surge of immigration that we now need to course correct. And it can’t just be for a year or two. We really need to tie this to our ability to house people and other infrastructure stressors as well. So I entirely agree that housing is a demand-supply equation, and we need to keep demand low from the immigration front as we work to build more housing.

Cara Stern: The only problem with it is that a lot of people in Canada aren’t having kids, and we need population growth to sustain our economy and pay for all the benefits that people get- that a lot of seniors get, for example; old age security is the single largest line item in the federal budget.

When it comes to immigration numbers, I really don’t think the number itself matters so much as how it balances out with housing, because we can have high immigration if we have a lot of new homes being built.

If we are going to cut immigration and we are going to have slower population growth, we just need to understand that the sacrifices that need to come out of that are going to come from across-the-board, it can’t just be from young people. And I hope politicians have the courage to maybe upset some of the wealthiest people in this country and some of the very reliable voters and say that “sacrifices have to happen, and it cannot all be from young people.”

Sabrina Maddeaux: And the last question is for Cara. Emily writes”

Cara Stern: When it comes to Edmonton, Grow Together Edmonton is the organization I know of, the EMB group that has been very active in getting multiplexes built. I think you need to do all of those things. You need to get involved with your local politician, potentially write to your MPP, your MLA, or your MP. Write to your city councillor as well to let them know that you care about this.

I always let my politicians know that I’m a one-issue voter and that issue is housing. And it’s really important that they understand that being pro-housing is going to get them votes, because I think a lot of politicians think that we’re going to get votes from older people and we need to focus on what they care about. And that is true when you look at who’s actually coming out to vote. I think if they start to see a change there, they see a lot of young people coming out and caring about it, that would make a difference. People have to get involved for there to be change. No one’s going to come and solve it for you because the incentives just aren’t there. The people in power don’t have the incentives to make it better for you, so you need to step up.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Definitely. Young people, please vote. Politicians do pay attention to that. There’s this perception that even when young people care about an issue, they don’t actually show up to the polls. So get there, prove them wrong. Make sure that they’re listening to you and get involved in your community as well, because it is a major issue that it’s often very well-housed, wealthy retirees who are heard the most by politicians.

And part of that is they have the time on their hands. And our consultation processes are not effective. They’re set up a lot of the time to always listen to the loudest dissenters, whether they have legitimate concerns or not. So we do need to fix those processes.

But in the meantime, get out there, be heard, vote, and also encourage your politicians to fix those processes so that everyone is heard, not just the loudest voices with the most money and the most time on their hands.

Thank you so much for watching and listening and sending us your questions. And to our producer, Meredith Martin and our editor, Sean Foreman.

Cara Stern: If you have any thoughts or questions about how no one’s coming to save you and you’ve got to save yourself in this economy, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

The Disappearing “Third Place”: Why Making Friends Is Getting Harder

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

In this episode of DemograFix, Mike Moffatt and Cara Stern unpack the data behind Canada’s falling birth rate. They explore why childlessness is rising, why one-child families have become increasingly common despite the number of children women say they want, and how housing costs, delayed parenthood, childcare, culture, and shifting lifestyles are reshaping family life across the country.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Cara Stern: Canada’s fertility rate is considered ultra-low, with only 1.25 children per woman. But one of the questions we received last time we mentioned that number was: is this a case of fewer women having children, or is the number of children each woman is having going down too?

Mike Moffatt: So we decided to take a look at the numbers to find out what is actually happening here.

Let’s start with what the fertility rate is measuring. It’s the number of children a woman has in her lifetime, and it needs to be 2.1 children per woman to replace a population. But of course, much of our economy is based on a growing population, so if anything, it probably should be higher than that.

Cara Stern: And this isn’t just a Canada problem. Developed countries all around the world are facing this problem, but to different extents. Ours is falling much faster than other developed countries, though. We’re now in ultra-low territory along with South Korea, Japan, and Italy. It used to be that we could look at Germany and say, “Oh, that’s a low-fertility country,” and see it as a bit of a cautionary tale. But now Canada has actually surpassed Germany. So something is happening in some countries, such as ours, that is making them fall faster than other countries.

Mike Moffatt: And it’s not just Canada versus the world here. It’s not falling at the same rate across provinces within Canada. When we look at fertility rates, Manitoba and Alberta are well above the national average, while British Columbia is at the bottom. It’s cities where fertility rates and birth rates are dropping the fastest, with Victoria and Vancouver both having fewer than one baby per woman.

Cara Stern: Well, it’s not very surprising given that housing costs in Vancouver and Victoria are extremely high, so I’m not surprised that those are some of the worst places for fertility rates in Canada.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. Because what happens is that you can’t really afford to have a child there. Some folks just don’t have children there but stay in the city, and others decide to move elsewhere to raise a family. So we really do see a big lack of children in our big cities, just because it’s gotten too expensive to raise a family.

Cara Stern: It reminds me of when you pointed out that the most common age for someone to leave Toronto was zero. Of course, I was like, “That’s weird, how is it zero?” But I guess it’s a bunch of people with babies who are deciding to move.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, it’s not the babies that are deciding to move, at least not directly, but they’re certainly influencing their parents’ decision. You can imagine a couple living in a high-rise rental apartment or condo. A baby comes along, and after a few months, they’re like, “This just ain’t going to work.” So what they do is something called “drive until you qualify,” where you hop in your car and drive as far away as you need to go in order to qualify for a mortgage.

That’s why we’re seeing a big influx of young families into smaller communities like Brantford, Woodstock, Peterborough, and so on, because it’s simply gotten too expensive to raise a family, not just within the city of Toronto, but much of the GTA.

Cara Stern: So those are some of the trends. But now we’re at the question that I really want to dig into today, which is: what is actually happening here?

Mike Moffatt: Well, the first issue is that the proportion of women who have never had a child is increasing. We’re seeing a significant increase in the number of women who, by the age of 50, have never had a child. It used to be around 1 in 10 or 1 in 8; it’s now 1 in 6. That statistic looks at 50-year-old women, so it doesn’t really account for the fact that Millennials and Gen Z are having fewer kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if, over time, that inches up to 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 women in Canada who never have a child. So that is a large part of the story here.

Cara Stern: That’s a good point. Right now we see the trend of fertility rates going down, but we don’t know where it’s going to end, if fertility is going to push later and if there’s going to be any increase at all, or if it’s just going to get worse and worse over time. We know that the age of first births is pushing later over time, and we know that fertility becomes a much greater challenge as people get older. So I suspect that’s part of the story too.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. And here’s why I think we’re only going to see an increase here: there is a new StatCan report, and we’ll link to it in the show notes.

Cara Stern: Yeah. And that’s not a long period of time; I guess that’s basically one generation, right?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. It wasn’t that long ago. I was in high school back then, and I know I’m old, but I’m not that old. This is in the span of about 30 or 35 years or so, where, again, you’ve gone from 50% to 40%. If we keep on that pattern, you’re getting close to zero pretty quickly.

Cara Stern: Who are these women? Is it evenly distributed, or are there patterns in their life stages or in the choices they’re making?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, there are patterns regarding which women are more likely to have kids and which women are less likely. If we start with the more likely, it tends to be women who are either currently married or have been married at some point. Where it gets to be less likely is if you’re in a common-law relationship, or you were a couple but are now living apart, or you’re not in a couple at all. Those, not surprisingly, are less likely to ever have a child in their lifetime.

Cara Stern: I guess that seems obvious. Marriage and then children are still the traditional path for most people, so that seems pretty straightforward. Although it’s worth noting that marriage is still a key part of the story, I do suspect a lot of those common-law couples are people who will eventually get married. And then there are places like Quebec where marriage in general is on the decline, so there are a lot of people who are in common-law relationships who may as well be married. Many will have kids. Quebec, actually, I believe, has a higher rate of fertility compared to a lot of other provinces. I guess we’ll see if that changes over time, because there is a cultural change happening there.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, there really is. And there are, again, these trends more towards common-law couples. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rates of childbirth go up with common-law couples as it continues to get more common.

When we look at tradition, it turns out that women who more actively practice religious beliefs are more likely to have kids than those who do not. Which, again, is not all that surprising, but it’s nice to see Statistics Canada confirm some of the stereotypes that we might have.

Cara Stern: I guess a lot of religions still encourage having children, and some prohibit birth control. I guess that as society is getting less religious, that correlates with fewer children. That’s another one that seems pretty obvious.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I think there is a whole bundle of things—you mentioned birth control and just general beliefs and so on. We also see that women who have immigrated to Canada are more likely to have kids compared to those who were born here.

Cara Stern: What about education level? Because that’s what I constantly hear: as women became more educated, they wanted fewer kids. So we can look at that and say, “Well, that’s the headline. That’s the main story here of the dropping fertility rate.” Did they find a relationship there between education and whether people are having any kids at all?

Mike Moffatt: This is really interesting. This is where it starts to get a little counterintuitive.

Cara Stern: That’s interesting. So there’s a big difference there between looking at whether women in their 30s have any kids based on whether they had post-secondary education, but not much difference between the two cohorts in their 40s. It sounds like university might be delaying people having kids, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t having kids at any higher rates?

Mike Moffatt: This data is just a snapshot in time. We can make conclusions about women who are currently in their 40s, but we can’t really say what’s going to happen 20 years from now to women who are in their 20s. But I do think it is fairly safe to say that it seems to be mostly a delay issue rather than women in university never having children, though we won’t know for sure until 10 or 20 years from now.

It looks safe to say that over the long run, your probability of having a child as a woman doesn’t really depend on whether or not you went to university.

Cara Stern: And I can’t say it enough: Delaying having a kid leads to fewer kids because it’s harder to have kids as you get older. I think we have to always remember that, because there’s been some cultural change where we say, “Okay, well, lots of people are having kids in their 40s. You can delay it as much as you want.” And the truth is, you can’t delay it as much as you want. You can delay it to a certain extent, but it becomes harder and harder the later you go. If you’re in your late 30s, it just becomes harder.

So that probably leads us to the next part of this, which is when they do have kids, are they having as many as they used to?

Mike Moffatt: No, they’re not. This is not just the probability of a woman having zero kids going up, but we are seeing that drop from being more likely to have three going down to more likely to have two, and so on. And this drop began decades ago.

If you go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most common family type among families with children was three or more kids. Sometime in the early to mid-80s—the Family Ties era, I’m thinking of all those great family shows from the 80s—two children became the norm. So there was this drop from having three or four kids in the 70s down to two kids in the mid-to-late 80s.

Cara Stern: And what is it now?

Mike Moffatt: Well, now it turns out that one-child households are the most common in Canada.

Cara Stern: That’s a huge drop, man. When you think about three children or more in the 80s to one now. And that’s not a long period of time in history. I feel like when I was growing up in the 90s, I hardly knew anyone who was an only child, and now it’s so common. I wonder how much of that is due to choices versus economic constraints. Any idea?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, well, it’s funny because I kind of grew up the same way. I had one friend who was an only child, and that was actually noteworthy, so we always kind of pointed it out to him.

Cara Stern: Oh no, you were being mean to him.

Mike Moffatt: I’m sorry, Greg, if you’re listening; it was nothing personal.

But it turns out it’s a bit of both: it’s choice and economic responses. Because the big inflection points track with major societal changes. Obviously, the widespread availability of the pill and other forms of birth control started in the early 1970s, and women entered the labour force in much larger numbers in the mid-to-late 1970s. Then you get into economic responses like the 2008 financial crisis and COVID—all of these shocks have left a mark. Some of them are choice-based, but some of them are responses to changing economic conditions.

Cara Stern: And there’s that U of T study that we talked about in another episode on the connection between housing and fertility, which attributed half of the drop to housing costs. There’s a sense that you need to have your housing situation figured out before you can even think about having kids. We talk a lot on this program about how three-bedroom apartments are very hard to find, and people like to drive until they qualify for one of those three-bedroom units—whether they’re apartments, houses, whatever. Most likely a house if they’re not in the city.

A lot of people just wanted more kids than they had bedrooms. Even if you can get away with it when they’re little, it’s tough. I can tell you firsthand, with two kids sharing a room, when one wakes up, the other one wakes up. Especially when you’re trying to sleep train and do things to help your kid sleep through the night and help your other kid be rested for school. I can tell you firsthand that is very tough.

Mike Moffatt: It is. And I actually think that’s weirdly probably even more common now than it was in the 1990s, because family sizes were larger then, but you had a lot more four, five, or sometimes six-bedroom homes. Nowadays, young families are in a lot of two-bedroom apartments or smaller townhouses. You get a lot of folks my age or Boomers saying, “Well, you should have like six kids in two-bedroom homes.” But they didn’t do that; maybe their grandparents did. So it is a real problem nowadays that it’s almost impossible in a lot of bigger communities for a young, middle-class family to get a home that has three, four, or five bedrooms suitable for raising multiple kids. It’s just not economically feasible in many cases.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I’ve heard that argument many times from people like, “Oh, if you go back historically, people didn’t have their own bedrooms. You had many people sharing a bedroom; that’s how it used to be.” And the homes that are now considered starter homes were people’s full homes that they had several kids in. I get that; that is fair.

But when you grow up having your own bedroom, basically that was just the norm, so you don’t want to give your kids a lower lifestyle than what you had, right?

People don’t have to have kids, so it has to be desirable. And we know that there is still a desire to have kids.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I get a little frustrated at people saying, “Well, back in the 50s, people raised these large families in 900-square-foot homes.” Those 900-square-foot strawberry box homes in a lot of places in Canada cost over $1 million right now. So I don’t know that many young people whose noses are turned up, going, “Oh, a $1.2 million house is not enough for me.”

We have to make it clear here that those types of strawberry box homes that are 900 square feet, which had decent-sized yards where you could let your kids out to play, are really expensive.

Nowadays, when we’re talking about a smaller home, it’s like 500 or 550 square feet in a high-rise, and you’re living on the 37th floor. If you want your kid to go play outside, you’re telling them to take an elevator and walk through a car park. It’s a very different existence, and it’s one of the reasons why families just aren’t having as many kids as they used to. We’re seeing the StatCan report, the U of T report, all of these reports basically saying that families want to have more kids, but the economics of raising a child just aren’t making that feasible.

Cara Stern: Yeah, I’m thinking back to when I was looking at pre-construction condos, and I would go to the developer and say, “Hey, I’m looking for something where I can raise a family, so maybe 800 square feet.” And they were like, “Oh, that is like our big units; this is going to be the most expensive option.” Every one of them was out of our budget.

Even if you’re willing to raise them in a condo that is 800 or 900 square feet, it is just not affordable. It’s not going to happen because it’s a lot.

It was actually cheaper to go look at these old, small homes that, of course, need a lot more upkeep, but still, it was wild to think of the reactions that I got. It was like, “Oh, you’re looking for luxury living.” Like, am I really? It’s very strange.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, it is. And again, I think if we offered Millennials and Gen Z 1950s-style homes at 1950s-style prices adjusted for inflation, they would absolutely leap at that.

Cara Stern: Even at 20% interest, for sure.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, even at 20% interest, which they didn’t have in the 1950s. But yeah, this idea that people are turning up their nose at family-size homes that cost two times their income is just ridiculous. I really wish it would come to an end.

Cara Stern: The StatsCan report said that we’re seeing young people wanting more kids now than they did five years ago, which I thought was interesting. I wonder if that’s just a pandemic thing. They’re looking at 2021 to now, so I think about how that must have played a role.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, you don’t hear it at all. These comments go back in time. There was a whole movement in the 60s, 70s, and 80s—there’s The Population Bomb book—and a whole group of folks advocating for zero population growth. We don’t talk about that as much. One of my favourite characters from The Mary Tyler Moore Show once said that he was hoping to have six or seven kids in the hopes that one of them could solve the population problem. That’s kind of my hope with climate change.

There’s this idea that we should have fewer kids and that would help with emissions, but we have to remember that if we have more kids, we’re going to get more geniuses who figure out new technologies and new solutions to this. So I’ve never been a believer in this idea that fewer people are going to be our environmental salvation; I actually think it’s the opposite.

We need to have lots of people working together towards a common goal to figure out how we deal with these issues, whether it be environmental issues, issues around global conflict, and so on. How we’ve always solved these problems as a species is having really smart people get together, bounce ideas off each other, and try new things. I don’t think we’re going to solve the world’s problems by shrinking the population, shrinking the number of people working on these problems, and hoping that leads us to some salvation. I just don’t think it’s coming.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and that’s the important thing. I don’t think we should be setting a target birth rate or fertility rate or anything like that. I don’t think we necessarily should be saying higher is better or lower is worse; it’s all about choice. The thing that stays with me from all of this is that the desire for family, the desire to have kids, hasn’t gone away. But we’ve created a country where it’s become harder and harder to have kids.

Cara Stern: Thanks, everyone, for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and our editor is Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about mid-1980s family sitcoms, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Proportion of women aged 20 to 49 without children, by age group and selected sociodemographic characteristics, 2024

‘One and Done’ is the new norm: inside Canada’s growing one-child family trend

Living arrangements of children in Canada: A century of change

Fertility in Canada, 1921 to 2022

In this episode, Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt explore the capital gains exemption on primary residences, why it exists, why politicians are terrified to touch it, and whether it unfairly advantages homeowners over younger Canadians and renters.

They break down the politics, economics, and unintended consequences of taxing home sales, while comparing Canada’s system to other countries and asking whether fixing housing affordability has become politically impossible.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: In Canada, if you buy a stock or bond it goes up in value, then you sell it, you have to pay capital gains tax on the profits unless it’s a tax-sheltered vehicle like a TFSA. However, the same isn’t true of a home you use as a primary residence, which is exempt from capital gains taxes. This has led to concerns that the exemption has contributed to the housing crisis.

The Canadian Tax Federation notes that the exemption creates an incentive for families to overinvest in housing. And the exemption isn’t cheap either. It costs the federal government over $8 billion in lost tax revenue each year.

So, Mike, why does it exist in the first place?

Mike Moffatt: You’re not the first person to ask that question. And in fact, there have been proposals to change these rules over the years, but even the mere suggestion of changes tends to cause an uproar.

If we go all the way back to 2018, some Liberal caucus members from Ontario floated the idea of having capital gains taxes apply to homes that were owned for fewer than five years, as a way to deter housing speculation. This wasn’t even all homes - it it was just a small subset - but the Conservatives naturally pounced on it. And Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of the day, had to make it very clear that he or his government would never even consider such a move.

I know that any tax is bound to be unpopular. But why do you think a capital gains tax on housing is such a third rail, even one that’s designed to be an anti-speculation measure that would only hit a handful of people?

Sabrina Maddeaux: There’s always the fear that once you implement any tax, it just keeps expanding - which is a lot of the public’s experience in Canada.

But the idea that you put money into a home in Canada and then you’re entitled to its appreciation and it will be a retirement vehicle or something you can take out loans against in the hard financial times, is so psychologically baked in to the Canadian idea of home ownership and financial planning that it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to convince homeowners to ever consider forgoing that. And a huge swath of the public - certainly the older population who votes and donates more and interacts more with politicians - are those homeowners who stand to benefit the most from the capital gains exemption?

At the same time, even if you come down with more taxes on potential speculators or investors, so much of the Canadian public are investors, or have secondary residences, because of the fact that we let housing skyrocket for years. The psychology was that it would always go up. And that psychology went from it’ll always go up to I’m entitled to it always going up and making all the money associated with that.

Mike Moffatt: That makes a lot of sense. People are entitled to their entitlements, as one politician famously said about 25 years ago.

It does make sense when you look at who is more likely to vote. Homeowners are more likely to vote than renters. Older people are more likely to vote than younger people. If you pick the wrong group to pick a fight with, it would seem to be older homeowners who have generated a whole lot of capital gains in their houses.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And that’s been the demographic that’s primarily freaked out when changes like this have been proposed over the years. But I’m curious: why were primary residences exempt from capital gains in the first place?

Mike Moffatt: It’s time for Professor Mike to give a little bit of a history lesson here.

The modern capital gains tax system comes out of a 1966 royal commission. And there’s this famous report - at least famous to econ nerds like me - called the Carter Report. The Carter Report advocated this exemption.

Now, their concern was just that it would be hard to enforce a capital gains tax on housing because you have to sort of monitor a bunch of things that the federal government wasn’t used to monitoring. You’d have to sort of figure out how to deal with inflation. The Carter report basically said it’s too much of a headache. Don’t bother.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s a really interesting history, and that very much tracks - that they decided it was more trouble than it’s worth.

As we know, there’s still a lot of housing data that we don’t track in Canada. And the CRA is often a mess. So I can only imagine the extra complications that would come with having to take into account reporting, home sales and values across Canada. But I’m wondering if other countries have exemptions similar to Canada's, or if we’re some unique outlier.

Mike Moffatt: It turns out a lot of countries have made similar recognition (*** check wording in audio) as Canada. This is just too much trouble to track.

Countries in general aren’t great at imposing any kind of wealth tax, which essentially this would be.

Of those 40 countries, there are really only four outliers: Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the United States, where having to pay capital gains taxes on primary residences is pretty common, at least for high-value properties. But even when you look at those, you have countries like the United States where some people do have to pay capital gains on their homes, but they get to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes. It’s like, “We’re going to tax you on one end, but we’ll give you this deduction over here.”

Sabrina Maddeaux: So we’ve covered how this impacts homeowners and sellers themselves. But what impact does the exemption have more broadly on housing and the nation’s finances?

Mike Moffatt: The big one is that $8 billion in lost revenue each year that the government could certainly use for other things, or to cut the taxes of young middle-class people, something that you advocate quite a bit. They could tax me more and you less. And I’m sure you’d be all for that. But if we go beyond just what this means for the federal government, the capital gains system does create some lock-in for older residents. And I can refer to a Globe piece that I wrote a few weeks ago about what can happen for an older person.

Let’s say you’ve got this house that is appreciated to 2 to 3 million and you’re 65 or 70. One of the things people suggest doing is, say, “I’m going to downsize at home, go into something smaller, and then put the remaining million or two into stocks and bonds and things like that.” If you do that, any of the capital gains that you get on the stocks and bonds over time- the dividends, the interest- you’re going to have to pay capital gains tax on. It does discourage older people from downsizing their homes. It does have all of these distortions, but there’s not a lot of evidence that it’s a major driver of our housing crisis.

And you just look at the countries that people point to as having affordable housing systems, like France and other countries. They all have Canadian-style exemptions. On the other hand, the United States, which we point to as the poster child for housing dysfunction, has one of the more stringent rules when it comes to capital gains taxation for housing. If you do this kind of cross-country comparison, it’s hard to say that these countries that have capital gains taxes have been able to avoid a housing crisis and that we should follow suit.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That lock-in factor is interesting. I’m curious. I would think that would come behind other factors preventing seniors from downsizing, like the lack of appropriate downsizing options in their communities, affordable downsizing options, and also the psychological toll and the difficulty that comes with moving.

Mike Moffatt: I agree. The psychological side of it, that’s never going to go away no matter what policy.

I would say that there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing here: part of the reason why we don’t have those downsizing options is that it’s not tax-efficient. I agree; it’s not the only thing that prevents older people from downsizing.

There are some countries that have tried to deal with this distortion. I don’t think we can point to it and say, “That’s the reason that seniors don’t downsize.” There are a lot of complex factors.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s an interesting solution coming from Australia, too, especially as people start to live longer. I mean, in years past, you might have downsized and then not expected to be around for another two decades. But now people are looking for ways to ensure their financial future and security for much longer.

But beyond the politics of it, would there be any downside to treating primary residences like any other asset for capital gains?

Mike Moffatt: One big problem is it would give investors a leg up, because right now, if it’s a secondary residence, you do have to pay capital gains tax on it. This system that we have now, with the exemption for primary residences, makes it easier for families to compete with investors. But if you levelled the playing field that way, by treating single families as investors, it actually advantages investors. Because investors, if you buy a single-family residence, you’re able to deduct mortgage interest against your rental income. But if you own the home as a primary residence, you can’t. That’s actually one of the reasons why the US has those rules to make mortgage interest tax-deductible. Because if you don’t do that, you create a system where investors are advantaged over families. And I think most people don’t want that. If Canada did change those capital gains rules, we would probably have to change a bunch of other rules too, or else we would be advantaged investors over single families.

Sabrina Maddeaux: I do think we have to be wary of that with any tax changes.

Both you and I have been big proponents of the HST removal for new builds in Ontario that came through recently. But what we’ve seen is that a lot of investors are now planning to buy up large amounts of units, and they’re going to get massive tax breaks because of this. The question is, how much is this actually going to benefit families who are buying homes, and will it bring new supply online that isn’t just existing supply that’s empty? I don’t know if you have any perspective on how this is rolling out.

Mike Moffatt: The HST side, I think it’s too early to tell. I’m a little bit less worried about investors buying condos. I view it as one corporation buying a bunch of homes from another corporation. And if they’re going to rent out those homes, I would prefer that to them being vacant.

I think it is still an open question around how much the HST changes are going to help the already built homes get into other people’s hands versus how much is going to create new supply. I think it will create new supply, but it’s an experiment. We’ll have to revisit this in a year when we have a little bit more data.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Follow-up episode.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. We love those.

Let’s leave the HST aside for a second, but let’s go back to the personal residence exemption on capital gains tax. Would you support changes there, or do you think any changes would be worse than the status quo?

Sabrina Maddeaux: In theory, I’d support it, but it’s so politically untenable and would take so much time and be implemented and then maybe rolled back that it’s just not worth it. I think there are other ways that we can get there quicker.

What are your thoughts?

Mike Moffatt: That’s essentially where I am as well.

When people suggest putting capital gains on primary residences, they are trying to solve a very real problem. There is a lot of inequality that is going on here, but I don’t think it’s the right vehicle. It’s administratively complex. It’s a political third rail. I think there are other things you can do. You went to the carrot side. I’ll go to the stick side.

It’s never made sense to me that a home valued at $300,000 pays the same property tax rate as one that’s $3 million. We don’t do that with income taxes. I would love to see the property tax system made more progressive. That if you have a less expensive home, you should pay a lower property tax rate than somebody who owns a $3 - $10 million home. Everybody’s going to be paying tax, but the folks with the less expensive home, maybe their tax rate is one-quarter of 1% of the home’s value. And then you can go into tax brackets. And then once you get above $5 million, it’s a 2% tax on top of that. I think you can make the existing system more progressive without having to introduce a measure that would be hard to enforce and very politically unpopular.

Sabrina Maddeaux: You see, that’s another one I agree with in theory, but our housing system is so broken that you couldn’t do that right now without a ton of add-on consequences and pushback. And the reason for that is that home values have become so inflated that you have people who bought in much earlier who don’t have super high incomes, but their home might now be valued at $1 to $2 million or even more, and they wouldn’t be able to afford the property tax increases.

I think that’s actually one of the reasons why, in Ontario, they haven’t reevaluated homes for property taxes since 2016. And they should be doing that. But people would riot if suddenly their home was valued at $1 million - although they would like to sell their home for $1 million or $2 million - but then they would have to pay the associated property taxes as they exist today, let alone higher rates.

Mike Moffatt: All of that makes sense.

First of all, we would have to have accurate property values, and at least here in Ontario, that’s not the case. You also have a lot of seniors who bought their homes in the 1970s or 1980s for next to nothing. Now, they have multimillion-dollar homes on paper, but they’ve never earned the incomes appropriate for those homes. They would be burdened by that.

It’s one of those things an econ nerd like me, on paper, goes: “This might be an elegant solution, but it runs into all the political barriers that capital gains tax on primary residences runs into.”

Sabrina Maddeaux: And that’s the headline here: our housing affordability has become so out of whack and so screwed up that even common-sense, elegant solutions might not be tenable right now. We need to get things back in order.

Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening and to our producer, Meredith Martin, and our editor, Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about how common sense is no longer tenable, please send us an email to missingmiddlepodcast@gmail.com.

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Canada should look to Australia on eliminating barriers to downsizing for seniors

The Conservatives' misleading claims about a 'secret' Liberal housing tax

Differentiated Capital Gains Tax by Number of Houses Only in South Korea... OECD Countries Exempt Primary Residence Regardless of Number of Houses

Capital Gains Taxation in Canada: History and Potential Reforms

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative

• Canadian urbanism has a family problem: despite decades of anti-sprawl policy and record transit spending, families and young workers are increasingly leaving major metros for smaller communities where housing is attainable, even if that means longer commutes and more car dependency.

• Since 2016, Canada’s metros have experienced sustained net domestic outmigration, with roughly 60,000 more people leaving metros than moving into them last year, a trend that began well before the pandemic.

• The people leaving are not primarily retirees heading to cottage country. The biggest losses are among Canadians under 35 and families with young children, precisely the demographic groups our cities once attracted and retained.

• Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver continue to dominate the outmigration story, collectively losing more than 120,000 people through domestic migration last year alone. Meanwhile, smaller metros and rural communities across Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Alberta are seeing significant gains from domestic migration.

• Many of the communities losing the most ground are the very places planners and urbanists often celebrate as “success stories” in combating sprawl. Families are voting with their feet, and the data suggest current urban planning approaches are failing to deliver affordable, family-friendly, transit-supportive communities at scale.

When families vote with their feet

Canadian urbanism has a problem. Despite, or perhaps because of, the changing nature of our cities, families are increasingly voting with their feet and moving to smaller communities. Despite record transit investments, Canadians are increasingly moving to places where driving is the only option. And it is not just Canada’s biggest metros experiencing outmigration; the so-called urbanist success story of Kitchener-Waterloo is, too.

Urbanism is failing in Canada, and a two-decade-long effort to reduce sprawl through policies such as urban growth boundaries has caused sprawl to accelerate due to the leapfrogging effect, in which development is pushed out to smaller communities without transit, leaving middle-class workers facing long daily commutes back to the metros where their jobs are located.

Here is how Canadian families are voting with their feet and leaving our cities.

Defining our terms

For this piece, we’ll be examining metro areas, not municipalities. So think of the Greater Toronto Area, not the City of Toronto. Statistics Canada divides regions into three types: census metropolitan areas (CMAs), census agglomerations (CAs) and more rural or remote areas that are not in a CMA or CA, based on the following formula:

A census metropolitan area (CMA) or a census agglomeration (CA) is formed by one or more adjacent municipalities centred on a population centre (known as the core). A CMA must have a total population of at least 100,000, based on data from the current Census of Population Program, of which 50,000 or more must live in the core based on adjusted data from the previous Census of Population Program. A CA must have a core population of at least 10,000 also based on data from the previous Census of Population Program. To be included in the CMA or CA, other adjacent municipalities must have a high degree of integration with the core, as measured by commuting flows derived from data on place of work from the previous Census Program.

Currently, there are 41 different CMAs and 111 different CAs in Canada. As of 2025, 31 million people live in a Canadian CMA, 4 million live in a CA, and 6.3 million live outside of a CMA and CA.

Families are leaving our metros

Given that the majority of Canadians live in a metro (CMA), it would be reasonable to assume that these communities are gaining population from the other two regions. And for most of Canadian history, that has been the case. However, since 2015, Canadian CMAs are experiencing net outmigration to other communities in Canada.

Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01 provides data on net interprovincial and intraprovincial migration by CMA and CA. It tells us the net number of people who moved into a metro from another part of Canada. If more people moved in from domestic sources than moved out, the figure is positive; if more people left, the figure is negative.

The data is by year, from July 1 to June 30.

In Figure 1, we see that net migration to CMAs turned negative in 2016-17 and has been negative ever since. In Canada last year, 60,000 more people moved out of Canadian metros than moved in.

Figure 1: Net Domestic Migration by Community Type and Year, Number of Persons

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

While the pandemic naturally accelerated these trends, this is not simply a pandemic effect, as the phenomenon pre-dates the pandemic by several years, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Net Domestic Migration in CMAs by Year, Number of Persons

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

This phenomenon is not due to retirees selling their expensive homes in downtown Toronto and moving to cottage country, though some of that happens. Rather, it is due to the outmigration of those under age 65. A particularly worrisome trend is the outmigration of people under 35. It used to be that our metros were places that our ambitious young people moved to. Now they are places they move from.

Figure 3: Net Domestic Migration in CMAs by Age, Number of Persons, July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

Aggregating all 41 CMAs like this obscures the fact that most metros are, in fact, gaining population from the rest of Canada. According to Statistics Canada data, 16 places gained more than 2,000 persons through domestic migration last year, as shown in Figure 4. This includes rural and remote parts of Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. The other 11 were all metros, including the large metros of Edmonton, Ottawa, and Calgary. In Ottawa CMA’s case, most of this growth is occurring outside of the City of Ottawa, as we outlined in our feature on Lanark County.

Figure 4: Net Domestic Migration by Community, Number of Persons, July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

Conversely, eight communities lost more than 1,000 people through net domestic migration, with the Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver metros collectively losing over 120,000 people. Winnipeg, Regina, and Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo also lost over 1,000 persons through net domestic migration last year.

Figure 5: Net Domestic Migration by Community Type, Number of Persons, July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

Our three largest metros have lost population due to domestic migration each year this century, though the declines accelerated in 2015-16. Net outmigration peaked in 2021-22 at 160,000 persons and currently stands at 120,000 persons per year, well above pre-pandemic levels.

Figure 6: Net Domestic Migration in Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver CMAs by Year, Number of Persons

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

This domestic metro out-migration largely, but not exclusively, is an MTV (Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver) problem, as collectively, the other 38 CMAs experienced steady in-migration during the 2010s, which increased during the pandemic.

Figure 7: Net Domestic Migration by CMA Type and Year, Number of Persons

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

We can get a better idea of who is leaving by breaking the data down into five-year age categories. Because net outmigration in Toronto CMA is substantially higher than in Montréal and Vancouver CMAs, we will use two different charts. The largest domestic outmigration in Montréal CMA is among people aged 25 to 29, whereas in Vancouver it is among those aged 30 to 34. In general, early-career workers and young children are the most likely to leave these metros, though Montréal also experiences a fair level of outmigration among those aged 55 through 64.

Figure 8: Net Domestic Migration by Age, Number of Persons, Vancouver and Montreal CMAs

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

The trends for the Toronto CMA are quite similar, with young children and early-career workers most likely to move to other communities. It is important to remember that this data is for the Greater Toronto Area, not the City of Toronto, so it includes municipalities such as Oakville, Markham, and Brampton. As with Montréal, the data show a cohort of people in their late 50s and early 60s leaving the metro, but the numbers are relatively modest compared to the exodus of workers under 40 and children under 5.

Figure 9: Net Domestic Migration by Age, Number of Persons, Toronto CMAs

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

To get an idea of how these patterns have changed over time, we can examine the levels of net domestic migration experienced by a CMA and a CA relative to ten years ago. Figure 10 contains every CMA and CA that gained 1,000 more people through domestic migration than they did a decade ago. The top of the list is dominated by the GTA-proximate metros of Oshawa, Barrie, St. Catharines-Niagara, Hamilton, and Brantford, with Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo and Guelph as notable omissions.

Figure 10: Change in Net Domestic Migration by CMA and CA, Number of Persons, 2014-15 vs. 2024-25

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

In Figure 11, we show the communities that have seen their net domestic migration drop by 1,000 or more persons.

Other than the big three metros, the list exclusively contains communities in Ontario and British Columbia, and not just any communities in these provinces, but ones that urbanists and municipal planners often cite as success stories in fighting sprawl and creating livable, urban communities. Yet families are voting with their feet and moving out of these places or moving to them at lower rates than a decade ago.

Figure 11: Change in Net Domestic Migration by CMA and CA, Number of Persons, 2014-15 vs. 2024-25

Data Source: Statistics Canada’s Table 17-10-0149-01, Chart Source: MMI.

In short, if governments want to fight sprawl and create walkable, family-friendly communities with transit options, they need to examine their policies and determine what works and what doesn’t. Families are voting with their feet and moving out of the very communities urbanists and planners suggest those families want.

If that’s not failure, we’re not sure what is.