Vancouver, Canada – When Leslie Macfarlane found out she and her husband were being evicted from a mobile home park in a Vancouver suburb last year, she said she felt “absolute rage” – then fear.
Her home was set to be demolished as part of a huge low-rise apartment complex redevelopment.
The 67-year-old retiree knew how difficult it would be to find rental housing in the notoriously expensive Lower Mainland region. She predicted correctly: Her housing hunt proved futile.
“We couldn’t afford anything,” Macfarlane told Al Jazeera.
The couple’s housing costs would have almost tripled, rocketing from about $1,100 to $3,000 for an apartment with half the space. The pair decided to move out of the city and back to Macfarlane’s hometown of Gibsons, a small coastal community in British Columbia.
“I remember when I was raising my children, if you had a job, you could afford a place to rent. It may not be a great place to rent, but you could afford something. That’s not the case any more,” Macfarlane told Al Jazeera.
Expenses in the small town, accessible only by ferry, are “higher on everything”, Macfarlane said, particularly for groceries.
As the cost of groceries goes up, she’s been buying less.
“It’s getting to the point where we’re buying hand baskets of food per week instead of carts.”
For Macfarlane, housing affordability and the rising cost of groceries are the two biggest issues of this year’s federal election set for April 28.
Post-pandemic inflation
Former Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised “sunny ways” when first elected in 2015, but as the Canadian affordability crisis intensified over his tenure, many Canadians have been caught in an inflationary storm.
Since Trudeau’s re-election in 2021, the cost of consumer goods rose dramatically. In June 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the inflation rate was 8.1 percent more than the previous year, the largest yearly change since 1983, according to Statistics Canada. Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem attributed the high inflation to shipping bottlenecks and pandemic-related delays, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
While inflation has slowed since then, and is now at 2.3 percent, actual prices remain much higher than they were in 2020.
Canadians have struggled to keep up with the rising cost of living.
Consumers feel the effect more profoundly on regularly purchased items such as food and petrol, according to David Macdonald, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
“People feel that inflation more personally,” he said.
Housing affordability in Canada has been a concern for years prior to the pandemic, but Macdonald said it got “much worse” as the Bank of Canada started raising interest rates.
Rates started rising in 2022, climbing to 5 percent in 2023. The Bank of Canada finally cut rates midway through 2024; the rate is now 2.75 percent.
“You weren’t safe anywhere,” Macdonald said. “It didn’t matter if you were renting, it didn’t matter if you owned; both sides were getting hit hard by much higher interest rates.”
In some key Canadian cities, like Toronto and Vancouver, Macdonald said rent increases have been “mind-boggling”.
Since March 2020, average asking rents across Canada have increased by almost 18 percent.
Inflation means bad news for politicians in power, according to Macdonald, regardless of country or political persuasion.
“[Inflation] didn’t just happen here; it happened everywhere,” Macdonald said. “If you were in power over that period, then you got pummelled at the election box in the next election.”
Immigration pressures
Some Canadians began to point to Trudeau’s high immigration targets as a reason for out-of-reach housing costs.
“They grew the population almost three times as fast as the housing stock,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said last year. He has lambasted the “massive uncontrolled population growth that put strain on our housing market, our healthcare and our job market” under Trudeau.
Trudeau had been elected on a platform that included changing the discourse around immigration to be more positive and multicultural, according to Irene Bloemraad, a professor of political science and sociology at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Centre for Migration Studies.
Immigration numbers rose until 2020, when the pandemic caused a “dramatic drop” in the number of people coming to Canada.
As the economy began opening up in 2021, Canadian businesses, universities and provincial governments felt a huge need for more workers, students and others, especially after a period of little migration, Bloemraad said.
The federal government rapidly increased the number of temporary visas for workers and students.
“There’s an argument to be made that the government overshot, that they were just too aggressive in doing this,” she said, as the rapid influx of new people in certain metropolitan areas put pressure on those housing markets.
An Environics poll in late 2024 showed 58 percent of Canadians believed the country accepts too many immigrants, up from 27 percent in 2022.
“Immigration tends to be an easy target for people’s concerns, because it’s identifiable,” Bloemraad said. “People forget that housing prices were really high before COVID, too. It’s not like this just happened overnight.”
Trudeau’s government scaled back its immigration projections in October last year, setting a target for about 395,000 permanent residents in 2025, down from the planned 485,000 permanent residents in 2024. Bloemraad noted the numbers expected for 2025 are now a little higher than they were in 2019 and called the reduction more of a reset than a huge shift in direction.
Affordability crisis compounds
Toronto resident Shahad Ishak said Trudeau may also have bitten off more than he could chew when it came to election promises.
“He sold a lot of promises to people,” she told Al Jazeera.
When she immigrated to Canada from Kuwait in 2013, she could have potentially bought a house.
“But from there, it got worse. At this point, never in my life will I buy a house.”
And it wasn’t easy settling in Canada.
In 2016, she had to use her savings and pay six months in advance because the landlord would not rent to her without a credit history. It was not the only time she faced barriers due to a lack of Canadian experience.
She had to take minimum wage jobs including one at a call centre with “very harsh conditions”.
She eventually got a job at a bank, but she was hired at the bottom of the career ladder, as a bank teller, despite having almost nine years of experience working in corporate banking in Kuwait.
The job paid little more than minimum wage, and her lack of seniority meant she had to work weekends. She eventually quit, because the weekend babysitter for her two children was so expensive it did not make sense to work. Ishak returned to school and is now a PhD student in sociology.
Four of her close friends, all engineers, left Canada due to the affordability crisis after immigrating.
“It makes me wonder,” Ishak said, “How do people survive here? Because the pay – it’s not enough.”
She hopes the next government will prioritise making rental housing more affordable.
This election feels different, according to Ishak, in part because of the affordability crisis, but also because foreign policy will be an important factor.
Trudeau calls it quits
In January, after political turmoil in the Liberal Party and dismal polling numbers, Trudeau announced his resignation as party leader.
Conservative Party leader Poilievre, who had aggressively campaigned on removing Trudeau, had been on track to sweeping victory and was favoured to win a “comfortable” majority, according to a Nanos poll.
Trudeau stepping down took much of the wind out of Poilievre’s sails. The Conservatives’ “huge” advantage began a freefall.
As anxiety has grown around United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Canadians have downgraded affordability on their list of election priorities.
Trudeau’s replacement, new Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, now leads in the polls, capitalising on public perception of being the best politician suited to negotiate with Trump.
Macdonald, the economist, said Trudeau quitting may have “washed this election” of inflationary anger – to some extent.
“Regular people are still really angry that prices are 30 percent higher on grocery store items than they were five years ago,” Macdonald said. However, Canadians at this point are likely angrier with the US, he added.
“But the cost of living is a close second in most places.”
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