An intriguing, and disconcerting, claim by Martin Pelletier, CIO, that the minimum income to qualify for a mortgage on an ‘average house’ in Canada is now $200,000. Keep in mind this is just to get your foot in the door of the real estate market. The average house price in Canada is $735,900.
The average income in Canada is currently around $57,000, give or take a thousand or two. Keep in mind that many make far less than this, as the number is inflated by the (far fewer) higher incomes.
Simple math signifies that the current generation will not be owning houses anytime soon, without some major help – say, from well-off parents – which very few of them have.
We will have millions of quite literally dis-placed, homeless people in Canada, almost all of them young, and devoid of much hope, stuck in an endless loop of unstable rentals at crippling cost, moving from pillar to post, beholden to absent landlords, who are in it for the money. Trudeau’s housing plan is to cram them all into small apartments, and even this will be a drop in the bucket.
As a recipe for societal cohesion, this is not.
We need to return to the basics, to the teaching of the Church, to Rerum Novarum and all this necessary for a life well lived. That will require facing reality, a hard, but necessary, taskmaster. God always provides, in some way, for those who are faithful to Him.