Hinesh Chauhan argues Canada's immigration levels are unsustainable. With 10% of Toronto residents using food banks and annual migrant inflows between 500,000 and 1 million, housing costs are soaring and affordability is collapsing. He calls for more dense development near transit instead of sprawl.
Questions this video answers
One out of 10 people (10%).
He states 'half a million' but says it's 'really closer to 1 million people a year' (0.5M–~1M/year).
Just over 2% per year.
Chapters
If this isn't a warning sign, I don't know what is. One out of 10 people in Toronto need to use food bank. One out of 10, that's 10% of the population. And that's going to be the same throughout other major urban centers throughout Canada. The rate our current government is bringing in people planned, half a million people with students, refugees, it's really closer to 1 million people a year. And let's be conservative. On a 40 million person population, that works out to just over 2%. The majority of these people go to urban centers, and we're looking about four to six urban centers that are already pushed to their limits. So rising rents with increased population means more demand for housing, which means higher rents, which means more unaffordability, which means more pressure on food banks, which ultimately means our society has become unaffordable. Interest rates are too high, cost of living, inflation keeps pushing those numbers up. And we're not, we, we as in the government, is not making the right decisions or is not incentivizing the right industries to provide the supply to, to deal with the situation. We've made decisions to bring in all these people and ultimately the pressure is too much in these cities, putting everybody at risk, the majority of our population, because that's where they're focused. So if this isn't making you think, what happens next? What does this look like in six months? Because this has really started to accelerate the pressures put on different cities and our population is rising at a rate faster than people recognize. What do we do? We need, we need meaningful solutions, meaningful solutions that look at increasing the provision of housing, which means incentivizing the private sector because the government isn't creating that. And there's a lot of developers and housing companies that are just printing money because they're able to build standard homes as opposed to increasing densification in urban centers. So you've got homes that are going up and you've got high rates of rent being charged for those places. Does it make sense? The market allows for it. So who's there to make a change? It's not going to be the private sector. You're not going to have a bunch of companies saying, hey, let's make affordable smaller units for people and put that close to transit lines. No, instead you've got land banking, land banking developers who facilitate urban sprawl because they've got decision makers and planning committees in their back pocket and the system is just not working. So let's put some thought into this.
