We’ve heard all the reasons for Toronto’s house price boom before: Interest rates are super low; foreigners are flooding the market with cash, job creation is super strong; home-buying millennials are an unusually large population group.
Well here’s a new one: Canadians are flocking to Ontario at the fastest rate in 29 years, according to Statistics Canada data.
Not since Whitney Houston professed that she wants to dance with somebody and George Michael told us we’ve got to have faith has Ontario been such a large draw for Canadians in other parts of the country.
“If that pace persists, it will add more than 0.3 percentage points to overall provincial population growth, nothing to snicker at for one of Ontario’s size,” said Robert Kavcic, a senior economist at Bank of Montreal.
The reason? Jobs, of course. Until recently Toronto was one of only two cities in Canada seeing any net job growth (though momentum has shifted to Quebec recently).
And the oil price bust has something to do with it too.
Ontario lost people to other provinces for years until the oil slump hit Alberta (though its population kept growing thanks immigration from abroad). But Kavcic says Alberta’s wage advantage is now disappearing, pushing people to move to Ontario instead. Alberta is now losing people to other provinces.
And all of this comes at a time when the supply of homes for sale in the Toronto area is sinking.
If this keeps up, the question on new Torontonians’ minds might soon evolve from “how will I afford a house?” to “is this bridge comfy enough to sleep under?”
Also on HuffPost
