Where does immigration fit into this picture? Hardly at all. Although there is occasional correlation between immigration levels and rising home prices, it is a marginal contributor to this. A recent Statistics Canada study found that immigration accounted for only 11 percent of the overall increase in housing prices. Notably, between 2020 and 2022, during the pandemic, house prices skyrocketed at exactly the same time that immigration levels dropped significantly. If it was immigration that was driving skyrocketing valuations, we should see them drop at the same time. By 2022, when immigration levels began to recover, the rate of increase in housing prices declined. Thus, in the past five years, immigration has been inversely correlated with the growth in housing prices.

Similarly, immigration has been blamed for overburdening Canada’s health care system. Once again, this is a misdirection from the real problem. Our health care system has been underfunded since at least the 1990s, when the Chrétien and Martin governments decreased federal health transfers to the provinces in exchange for loosening conditions on how they could spend the funds received. Regardless of immigration levels, Canada’s health care system is suffering from decades of austerity and neglect. Indeed, recent immigrants are less likely to access the health care system than those born in Canada, due to both a lack of familiarity and socio-cultural barriers. Meanwhile, these same immigrants are paying into the health care system through their taxes at the same rates as everyone else. As with housing, the problems with our health care system have little to do with immigration.