2 days Ago By Lorne Gunter
Article content It’s called the law of supply and demand. If you have more supply than demand, prices go down. Conversely, if you have more demand than supply, prices go up.
Sometimes way up. Given that everyone has to have a place to live, just what did the Liberal government think was going to happen to home prices when they radically increased immigration and the demand for new houses, condos, apartments and townhouses? According to a new study by Vancouver’s Fraser Institute, over the past five years the Liberal government has more than doubled the number of immigrants it has let into the country annually versus pre-pandemic levels. Yet at the same time, the number of starts on all types of new housing has remained the same or even fallen slightly.
Where once Canadian developers were building one unit of new housing for every 1.9 new Canadians, because of the Liberals’ mad rush to admit millions of new immigrants, that ratio has fallen to one unit for every 5.1 newcomers, according to Fraser.
In other words, the Liberals increased the demand for housing by nearly threefold. D’uh, what did they imagine would happen to prices? So why have Edmonton and Calgary largely avoided sky-high housing prices? Housing prices in Alberta have climbed in recent years, but an average family can still afford to buy a home here, particularly in Edmonton. Even a single-family home with a yard, which is the preferred choice of over 70 per cent of families with children, remains within reach.
It comes down to supply. In Alberta, builders have kept up with housing demand even though we have had the fastest growing population in Canada for most of the past decade. So far this year our province, with just 12 per cent of Canada’s population, has been responsible for 25 per cent of all the housing starts in the country.
In practical terms, according to mortgage experts Ratesdotca, the average price for a home in Edmonton at the end of 2024 was $397,400. At that level, a family would need an income of $91,000 to qualify for a mortgage. The median household income in Edmonton was nearly $142,000.
Meanwhile, in Toronto the average price of a home was just over $1 million, not quite three times more than Edmonton, and for a much, much smaller home, often a highrise condo. Potential Toronto buyers required an income of $232,000 to qualify for a mortgage on their little box in the sky, more than $95,000 above that city’s median family income. No wonder so many young Torontonians (and Vancouverites and Montrealers) have given up any thought of eventually owning their own condo or townhouse, much less a single-family house on a plot of green.
So how come we’re so special? Among the country’s largest cities, how have Edmonton and Calgary largely avoided the housing crisis? In 2023, Calgary prices looked set to take off, then both cities opened up more land and investors started more builds. And the building boom continues. In the first quarter of 2025, Calgary builders started 6,271 housing units of one kind or another, compared with 5,385 in the first three months of 2024.
That’s an increase of 16 per cent. Meanwhile, Edmonton builders began 4,095 new homes from January to March this year, compared with 3,487 during those months in 2024, up 17 per cent. Across the entire province, starts are up 18 per cent.
Alberta municipalities charge developers lower fees for new constructions than in most other big provinces, they impose fewer needless regulations, and Alberta doesn’t have huge land transfer taxes. The province also maintains a “Stop Housing Delays” online portal that permits municipalities and developers to report red tape that holds up construction because delays equal higher costs. What the federal government needs to do is not spend more taxpayer billions on government subsidies for new construction or pre-fab homes.
What is needed is less government, cheaper government..
