While all attention is on the Trump-induced global economic (military, environmental, biological, etc) chaos, Canada was in perilous straights for entirely different reasons. It was a perfect storm that could have been calamitous.

Since the late 2010s and through COVID, we had a real-estate based economy that was juiced by outrageous levels of migration1. Housing prices spiralled upwards and we were all “rich” on paper. Everyone was a real-estate agent, and the few who weren’t would “invest” by buying pre-con condos in the expectation that you’d just flip it for a big profit when complete.

Housing sales were super hot as everyone had a FOMO and newspapers would (and still do) breathlessly report on whatever “it only ever goes up” nonsense real estate groups would feed them. Various levels of government netted big on land transfer taxes, service taxes for fees, and so on.

The government would herald every GDP gain fuelled entirely by a massive influx of people, while Canadians got poorer.

This has collapsed, and was always doomed with an expiry date. Housing prices were utterly detached from any semblance of reality, and could only be rationalized by stuffing a dozen international “students” in your basement. It was a pyramid scheme that was utterly doomed.

So it’s impressive that the hard landing has been softened from this disastrous setup that Canada was in. That is what I was most concerned about — not the frantic chaos from the clown show South of the border — and ultimately Canada seems to have slowly started returning to the rational and became a country that makes stuff and innovates and invents, and doesn’t just go on insanely boring conversations about real estate constantly, which was where we were at as a nation.

There is still a lot of correction that needs to happen for the health and wellbeing of the country, and things are going to be pretty flat for a few years.

Footnotes

  1. Various far-left people would always wave-away the outrageous destruction caused by this ridiculous influx by declaring that it was just illusory, and these people are “temporary”. These are exactly the same people who are now demanding that the government give everyone who came here under one of these temporary visas some sort of permanent status. ↩