Author: News Editor

Although the pace of increase has come down ever so slightly, the price of rental accommodation in Canada continues to go up, with the average new tenant now being asked to pay $2,117 a month.

That’s according to a new report from Rentals.ca and real estate consulting and data firm Urbanation, which tabulates the data every month from their database of the largest single group of rental listings across the country.

The $2,117 figure is an increase of 9.6 per cent from the average rent in August of last year. That’s down from an all-time high of 12 per cent recorded from August 2021 until August 2022, but still the highest-ever figure in dollar terms.

That’s spilling over into the rental market, as individual landlords are trying to pass those costs on to their tenants.

In response to demand and a slew of new Canadians coming into the country looking for housing, construction activity has picked up for purpose-built rentals.

But it’s not coming online fast enough to bring down rents.

“Despite rental apartment completions in Canada over the past 12 months reaching their highest level since the 1970s, rent growth has remained exceptionally strong,” the report said.

The ongoing tumult in the housing market has garnered numerous headlines of late, as the Bank of Canada’s campaign to tame inflation has caused mortgage rates to skyrocket.

That’s spilling over into the rental market, as individual landlords are trying to pass those costs on to their tenants.

In response to demand and a slew of new Canadians coming into the country looking for housing, construction activity has picked up for purpose-built rentals.

But it’s not coming online fast enough to bring down rents.

“Despite rental apartment completions in Canada over the past 12 months reaching their highest level since the 1970s, rent growth has remained exceptionally strong,” the report said.

Strained budgets

Since May, the average asking price for a new rental has increased by $103 a month.

That comes as no surprise to Cassandra Kranjec, who earlier this year begrudgingly agreed to a 14 per cent increase in her rent on a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in Toronto’s Liberty Village neighbourhood.

“I was originally paying $2,100 a month, which was above my budget, but he mentioned that we had to up the rent to $2,400 a month due to his mortgage,” she told CBC News

Kranjec works two jobs yet still spends more than half of her income on rent. Her main job could be done remotely, so she contemplated moving to a part of Ontario with cheaper rent, but quickly realized those options were also limited.

Prior to moving to Toronto last year, she was paying $1,850 for a similar unit in Kitchener, Ont., where she had to have a car. At least living where she does in Toronto, she doesn’t need the expense of a vehicle.

“It’s really not worth it … to move anywhere else, because the prices are being increased all over Ontario,” she said.

She’s not wrong. While Toronto and Vancouver still lead the way in terms of rent, the rest of the country is catching up fast.

Rents rising almost everywhere

According to the report, average asking rents in Ontario overall hit $2,496 last month, only slightly behind Toronto’s $2,898 average.

Prices in the rest of the province are actually going up at a faster pace than they are in Toronto — 9.9 per cent compared to 8.7 per cent.

In terms of the pace of increase, other parts of the country have it worse.

In British Columbia, the average rent clocked in at $2,675 during the month, up 10.8 per cent in the past year. Vancouver alone saw the average asking price for a rental apartment hit $3,316 a month — an increase of 7.3 per cent.

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Some renters in Vancouver say the city is already too expensive for them to face further increases in their rents, while others say the market should be allowed to dictate rental costs.

Bertug Ozer, who has lived in Vancouver for the better part of a decade, says he’s never seen anything like the current rental market. He’s currently paying $2,000 a month in rent, but was intrigued when his girlfriend showed him a listing for a one-bedroom unit for $1,850.

When he went to take a look last weekend, he was crestfallen at what he discovered.

“I saw a lot of people outside already, waiting. And at first I didn’t understand: Why are there so many people? And then it clicked — all these people are here to see the place, just like us,” he said.

His video of the incident on TikTok showing dozens of would-be tenants went viral. “People just kept on coming and coming and coming,” he said.

Rental nightmares in Toronto and Vancouver are well documented, but tenants in the rest of the country don’t have it much better.

For the fourth month in a row, Alberta led the country in terms of growth, with average rental asking prices increasing by 15.6 per cent to $1,634. Tenants in Calgary are feeling the squeeze most of all, where average rents increased by 17.3 per cent, to $2,068.

Rent increases were slowest over the past year in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, with annual growth of 8.3 per cent and 2.7 per cent, respectively, reaching average costs of $1,457 and $1,102.

Even Quebec, once a bastion of cheap and plentiful rental accommodation, is feeling the pinch. Average rent hit $1,932 across the province in August, an increase of 14.2 per cent. In Montreal specifically, rent increased by 16.4 per cent in the past year, with average rent topping $2,000 a month for the first time ever.

Booming demand

Steve Pomeroy, a professor at McMaster University’s Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative, says rents have skyrocketed across Canada for a variety of reasons. One thing all possible housing solutions have in common is that they take time.

“In the short term, it’s very, very difficult to solve the fact we have excess demand, because the only way to respond to excess demand is to significantly increase supply,” he told CBC News in an interview.

While he says Canada’s impressive population growth and surge in international students may pay off down the line for the economy, in the short term, at least, it is exacerbating an already acute housing shortage.

“There’s a drastic shortage of units at the lower end of the rental market, renting for less than $1,000 a month, and way too many people trying to chase after them now,” he said.

“People can jump on a plane this morning and arrive [in Canada] tonight, but we can’t put a house on the production line today and have it ready by tomorrow — it takes us three or four or five years to do that.”

Until that happens, he cautions that any tenant upset about a rent hike from their existing landlord needs to think long and hard about what alternatives they may have, before pulling the trigger and finding a new place.

“My advice to tenants is: don’t move,” he said.

Canada is gripped by a surge in homelessness that has seen tens of thousands of people priced out of the rental and real estate markets and left to live in the streets of the wealthy nation.

Researchers warn government data is vastly underestimating the number of homeless across the country, as the social ill spreads from major cities to small towns.

In Quebec, one in two homeless people can be found in rural parts of the eastern province, instead of mainly in Montreal as had been the case in the past, according to a new report published in September.

Danny Brodeur-Cote has lived for months in a makeshift camp in woodlands near a cemetery in Granby, a town of 70,000 inhabitants 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of Montreal, after being evicted in June from an apartment he rented with his girlfriend.

“I work five days a week,” the janitor with dishevelled brown hair told AFP, pushing a shopping cart to the campsite.

At age 39, this is the first time in his life that he has found himself living on the streets. “What little housing there is is much too expensive,” he said.

A few blocks away, a park has been transformed into a makeshift encampment for men and women of all ages, some of them employed like Brodeur-Cote

Nearly one in four homeless people found themselves on the street after being evicted from housing, according to the Quebec government report.

“In Granby alone, we need at least 1,000 affordable housing units,” says Karine Lussier, director of a local anti-poverty organization.

Between 2018 and 2022, the number of homeless people in Quebec increased by 44 per cent, their numbers swelling to 10,000 last year. Indigenous people, who represent five per cent of the Canadian population, are particularly over-represented in the streets, especially the Inuit, said Lussier.

“Visible homelessness did not exist three years ago in Granby,” mayor Julie Bourdon told AFP, admitting that “rents are very high now compared to two years ago.”

The city, rather than dismantling the camps and relocating the occupants, decided to opt for maintaining what it calls “places of tolerance.”

The situation, says France Belisle, mayor of Gatineau — a city of nearly 300,000 inhabitants across a river from the capital Ottawa — could only be the tip of the iceberg because these are “the figures compiled a year ago.”

With the rising cost of living and galloping inflation this year, she fears that the picture is much worse than recent statistics reveal.

People “are no longer able to make ends meet,” she says.

Humanitarian crisis

Quebec, the second most populous province in Canada, is facing a serious housing shortage because of factors ranging from the pandemic to record immigration driving population numbers higher, fuelling demand.

Real estate prices have become the main topic around the dinner table in recent months, and public opinion and opposition criticisms have forced governments to prioritize housing and cost of living concerns.

And Quebec is not alone in the quandary: homelessness is spiralling across Canada, experts warn.

Government data estimates there are some 235,000 homeless people across the country, but that is only counting people who access shelters, said University of Western Ontario professor Cheryl Forchuk, who — like Belisle — fears the true picture is far worse.

“We are largely underestimating the number… we could probably triple the current federal estimates,” she said.

“We now find ourselves in a situation where even well-off people have difficulty with housing,” Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau conceded in September.

Quebec leader, Francois Legault described it as the “perfect storm.”

This crisis “is not acceptable in a society that is nevertheless rich and modern,” he recently declared.

Getting off the street without help is practically impossible, opines Lussier.

“We are outraged, sad and angry because for years we have been saying: ‘Be mindful, we are almost heading towards a humanitarian crisis.’”

Still holding out hope of finding fairly priced accommodations, for now, Brodeur-Cote must continue bathing in a nearby river daily before work.

“I never asked my parents for a penny, except three months ago,” he says, not knowing what the next few months will look like as winter approaches.

Agriculture and Agri-Food is one of five occupational sectors that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has chosen to prioritize through Express Entry category-based draws in 2023.

In an attempt to aid key employment sectors with some of the largest labour market gaps in this country, IRCC introduced category-based selection draws for Express Entry earlier this year.

These draws, the first of which took place on June 28, are designed to attract immigration candidates with work experience in these particular sectors* to come to this country. This is because the government has identified a need for workers in these sectors for Canada to continue to develop and thrive.

*2023 Express Entry categories include healthcare; science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM); transport; trades; and agriculture/agri-food.

As a result, while standard Express Entry draws rank candidates based on their Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) scores, these draws instead prioritize candidates with specific employment experience.

Why agriculture/agri-food was chosen as a targeted Express Entry category

The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) projects that “[this] sector will have 123,000 more jobs than the domestic labour force can fill” by 2029.

Such a projection justifies why Canada sees this sector as one that requires focus as an Express Entry category, as agriculture and agri-food are key to Canada’s sustainability and development.

Also according to the CAHRC, “the agriculture and agri-food sectors … contribute over $122 billion dollars annually, or 6.3% of Canada’s GDP, and as demand for Canadian food and agriculture products increases worldwide, this contribution to the economy is expected to grow.”

This further reinforces the value of the agriculture and agri-food industries to Canada as a country, once again validating why IRCC chose this sector as worthy of its own category-based Express Entry draws in 2023.

How many agriculture/agri-food workers does Canada really need?

On April 29, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) released a story on agriculture industry labour. This story, quoting the president of Nova Scotia’s Federation of Agriculture, says that the province could face a shortage of more than 2,500 farm workers by 2029.

This comes at the same time that Government of Canada Job Bank data notes employment declines of more than 20,000 industry workers in one Canadian province over the last decade. Specifically, Job Bank data indicates that provincial employment “in this sector [across Alberta] decreased by 28,300 jobs (-44%) from 2013 to 2022.” As another example, in British Columbia, industry employment has declined by roughly 10% over the last 10 years.

Considering that certain provinces need more workers in this sector than others, this data is an indication of significant labour shortages across Canada in the agriculture and agri-food industries.

Just two weeks before the aforementioned story, CBC also cited a report which suggested that nearly 40% of Canadian farmers are expected to retire within 10 years. Add to this the reality that 66% of farmers “do not have a succession plan” and that researchers “expect the agriculture industry, [at the same time], to be down 24,000 farm, nursery and greenhouse workers” according to the same report.

Considering these factors, this older report concludes that Canada needs to “bring in 30,000 farm-focused newcomers” to fill the labour gap in this industry.

In all, recent stories and data seemingly suggest that Canada will need several tens of thousands of agriculture and agri-food workers to adequately address labour shortages in this industry over time.

What opportunity does this present for prospective immigrants to Canada?

Data from the CAHRC indicates that Canada’s agriculture sector has relied increasingly on foreign workers because this country has lacked the domestic talent required to fill labour gaps in this sector.

In fact, in 2017, over 75% of the labour gap in Canada’s agriculture and Agri-food industries was addressed by Canadian migrants “and more than one in six people in Canada’s agricultural workforce (17%) were foreign workers.”

Considering the fact that Canada was still unable to fill over 16,000 jobs in 2017, and factoring in the growth of the labour gap in this industry since then, prospective immigrants to Canada interested in agriculture/agri-food work may see a sizeable amount of employment opportunity through this targeted occupational category.

History of agriculture/agri-food Express Entry draws to date

IRCC recently held its first category-based draw for agriculture/agri-food workers.

Back in August this year, data obtained from IRCC by the Globe and Mail indicated that agriculture/agri-food category-based draws would account for “one to two” percent of all remaining Invitations to Apply (ITAs) issued under Express Entry across the remainder of 2023.