Migration: Justin Trudeau Admits Young Canadians Are Locked Out of Housing Wealth

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks as he meets with President Joe Biden at the
Andrew Harnik/AP
Neil Munro

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted that a generation of young Canadians will be denied housing wealth because they cannot buy their way into the nation’s migration-inflated housing market.

“They’re not going to get the same kind of homebuyers’ plan, necessarily, that people a generation ago did in terms of what the retirement nest egg would be,” he said to an allied advocacy group, Generation Squeeze, which claims to advocate for the interests of young people.

“[Young] people who have great jobs, a solid side hustle, and shifted expectations, and they still can’t find a place to actually start on that path towards home equity or homeownership,” he said, while trying to blame older Canadians for the damage he caused.

Trudeau refused to acknowledge how his easy immigration policy flooded the housing market and dramatically inflated the price of housing for young Canadians.

The same generational wealth shift is underway in the United States, where President Joe Biden’s decision to import 10 million migrants since 2021 is cutting wages and inflating housing prices.

“Home prices are now 47% higher than they were in early 2020, with the median sale price now five times the median household income,” CNBC reported in June 2024. “For renters,… prices are still 26% higher than they were in 2020 and rising in three out of every five markets,” CNBC added.

U.S. investors and landlords also know they can gain more by renting homes and apartments to groups of President Joe Biden’s migrant workers than by selling homes to single-income families. In New York, “Soaring rents and high upfront costs mean that fewer than 5% of New York City apartments were affordable for the average local worker last year,” Bloomberg reported in May 2024.

Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, has repeatedly praised Canada’s immigration policy.

Young people in many other countries — Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and France, for example — are also being squeezed by investors’ demands for more migrant consumers, renters, and workers.

In the United States, President Donald Trump is also facing donor demands to expand the white-collar migration that helps to drive up housing costs.

Since 2015, Trudeau has crashed Canada’s housing market by accelerating migration. His huge inflow of renters, consumers, and workers has shifted vast wealth from young Canadians toward older landlords, investors, and the stock market.

But he tried to shift the blame away from his pro-migration policy in his Generation Squeeze talk.

Instead he blamed older Canadians for not preparing the nation for a future flood of migrants. The blame partly lies with “the underinvestment in housing construction over decades,” he claimed.

Trudeau also ridiculed older Canadians who say housing was cheaper when they were young. “Grandparents [say] ‘Loaf of bread used to cost me a nickel,’ or whatever it is. [But] housing was always the big expense, and it was always hard to get into housing.”

“There is something foundationally different in this generation,” Trudeau, without mentioning his immigration influx. “There’s other things happening, and getting seniors to understand that there is something different, I think, is a bit of a challenge that we’re still working on.”

Then Trudeau seemed to suggest that older Canadians move out of their homes.

You have a whole bunch of older folks who are living in houses that are too much house for them right now, but their connection to neighborhood, to community, means that no they don’t want to move out to the suburbs or to some different city to be closer to the grandkids. They want to still live in their communities … and there is no housing that they can afford, even to downsize other than staying in their big house …

[So] actually working to increase the amount of apartments or senior assisted living centers in neighborhoods where people currently live in a single single-unit, single-family homes … [could] give you a way out that will eventually shift those [housing] numbers in a meaningful way.

But Canada’s voters recognize Trudeau’s migration has wrecked their nation’s housing market at great cost to young Canadians, to family formation, and to Canadian birth rates.

Canada will hold a national election by October 2025, and Trudeau is now expected to lose because of his mass migration policies.

But his main rival, Pierre Poilievre, head of the pro-migration Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, said the migration inflow should be tied to Canada’s ability to build new houses, which suggests he will not reduce the inflow enough to help raise Canadians’ productivity and income.

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