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Affordable Housing Is A Key Theme In Federal Budget 2022 Today’s budget announced a $10 billion package of proposals intended to reduce the cost of housing in Canada (see box below). The fundamental problem is insufficient supply to meet the demands of a rapidly growing population base. Thanks to the federal government’s policy to rapidly increase immigration…

Inflation Pressures Accelerating StatsCanada today reported that consumer prices rose 5.7% year-over-year in February, up again from the prior month’s 5.1% rise. This was the largest gain since August 1991 (+6.0%). This was no surprise, as the Ukraine War has stepped up inflation pressure worldwide. The US CPI rose a whopping 7.9% last month (see…

New Listings Finally Show Some Life Statistics released today by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) show that national home sales were up in February 2022 as buyers jumped on the first spring listings. The number of newly listed properties surged a welcome 23.7% from extremely depressed levels, hopefully portending a much-needed increase in supply…

Canada Reached Full-Employment in February Statistics Canada released the February Labour Force Survey this morning, reporting a much more significant than expected 336,600 net new jobs, with the unemployment rate falling a full percentage point to 5.5%. This is the first time the unemployment rate fell below its pre-Covid level and reinforces the expectation for…

Bank of Canada Starts Hiking Rates, Signalling More To Come The Governing Council of the Bank of Canada raised the overnight policy rate target by a quarter percentage point in a widely expected move and signalled that more hikes would be coming. This is the first rate hike since 2018. In a cautious stance, the…

Inflation Ticked Up Again in January StatsCanada today reported that consumer price inflation rose to 5.1% from year-ago levels in January, compared to 4.8% in December. This was higher than expected but still well below US inflation posted at 7.5% for the same period. Undoubtedly, this puts additional pressure on the Bank of Canada to…

Wanted: Home Sellers Housing affordability remains a huge political issue, and with the Department of Finance working on the upcoming budget, no doubt measures to reduce home prices will be front and center. With an election coming this spring in Ontario, Premier Ford’s Housing Affordability Task Force has made recommendations to step up homebuilding. Still,…

No Wonder The Bank of Canada Didn’t Hike Interest Rates Last Month Statistics Canada released the January Labour Force Survey this morning, reporting a much more extensive than expected decline in jobs last month. The Omicron shutdowns and restrictions took a much larger toll in Canada than expected, as employment fell 200,100 in January and…

Bank Will Hike Rates At Next Meeting While markets were 70% certain the Bank would hike their overnight target rate today, we remained of the view that the Governing Council would hold off until March or April because of the slowdown in first-quarter growth arising from the Omicron restrictions. The Bank announced today that economic…

Housing Affordability Erodes Further With Record-Low Supply Housing affordability remains a huge political issue and with the Department of Finance working on the upcoming budget, no doubt measures to reduce home prices will be front and center. What we desperately need is dramatic increases in new housing construction, which has been woefully constrained by local…