#it may just be my region but there's a weird possessiveness and entitlement to suburbs too

[awkward-teabag]

For the life of me I can't find a news article about how upwards of 100% of new developments are bought by investors or flippers but that's another issue. Supply doesn't meet demand but the majority of supply is bought before people who need it can get it (and is then rented back to them at a further inflated place if they're lucky).

A cabinet shuffle just happened so I don't know about the new housing minister, but the previous one had a rental property so had a vested interest in not addressing inflated housing costs (as did/do approx. 1/3 of the federal Liberal cabinet).

Then there's how more and more development is being put on hold because workers literally cannot afford to live in the area.

And that transit largely sucks so people get pushed further and further out to the suburbs—or completely different cities—because they can't afford to live even near the area they work.

The Canadian government got out of building affordable housing in the 90s so we're at decade 3 of relying on private companies with a profit motive to build all our housing with little control over what happens and politicians being happy to get kickbacks to keep it high (assuming they don't have investment properties themself). There's also zoning issues and NIMBYism which further restricts the supply.

And by the time anything gets built, what's considered affordable is now hundreds more a month while wages have stagnated since the 80s.

This doesn't even get into how while minimum wage is no longer enough to afford a 1 bedroom in some markets (nor a bachelor's nor studio) and disability is less than minimum wage. By a lot. It varies by province, of course, but some haven't seen an increase in decades and were considered low even back then.

There's also a societal view of it, by which I mean I've seen far more support for building institutions to forcibly lock up homeless folks and addicts than for building affordable housing and/or forcing housing rates to enter the same realm as affordable. To say nothing of how any mention of housing issues gets derailed to become xenophobic, racist BS about how immigration is bad and the immigrants are causing the housing crisis.

That last one is more anecdotal and could be my personal experience, but given the Americanization of our politics and the current Conservative party (to say nothing of the PPC...) I don't think it's just me.

tl;dr There's a multitude of issues that have compounded to make housing in Canada particularly bad. While in terms of landmass, Canada is one of the biggest countries in the world, much of our population is concentrated in a handful of areas while a lack of investment into public transit infrastructure further concentrates people into those areas or punishes people who leave them.

Is Canada's housing crisis as bad as people say?

* I'm a foreigner but the whole world is having this housing issue, is it actually worse in Canada

It is actually worse in Canada.