The cost of actually building a house does not vary that much across Canada The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong...
Housing Affordability
Return to Reason Podcast – Wendell Cox – How to Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis
The housing market crisis in Canada has hit an all time high. Expert in demography, Wendell Cox has an eye-opening discussion with guest host David Craig about the public policies surrounding this issue, and how to solve the problems with supply, demand and...
Wokeness kills Vancouver
“Harm reduction--somebody’s got a sense of humour, man. ‘Cuz that ain’t helping nobody, man. It’s helping everybody get high more.” Does passive policing and harm reduction improve health and safety? Vancouver is a living, breathing example to the contrary—or...
Deteriorating Housing Affordability in Canada
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has released the 2022 edition of Demographia Housing Affordability in Canada. This article includes the Executive Summary, with a link to the entire report. The report is authored by Wendell Cox, a senior fellow with the Frontier...
Featured News
Canada in 2073—Will There Be One?
“Ahead, Thar Be Dragons.” The world of 2023 is a scary place. One major war is raging, with others probably on the way. The Pax Americana that has given us freedom of the seas and allowed global trade to flourish might be breaking down. International piracy,...
World Cries out for Canadian LNG, “No Business Case” Feds have Totally Failed Us
Today, Canada’s natural gas sector is seeing its decade of darkness due to federal policy. And it’s not because the opportunity wasn’t there. It was because our government allowed its ideology, and that of its anti-oil and gas friends (also known as protestors) to...
Distributing the Risk: Mortgage Default Insurance
Mortgage Default Insurance (MDI) is mandatory in Canada for residential purchases where the purchaser’s down payment is between 5% and 19.99%.[i] Most MDI premiums fall in the range between 2.4% to 6.6% of the mortgage amount. The idea behind MDI is to increase the...
The Urban Revival Is An Urban Myth, And The Suburbs Are Surging
The past decade has seen a gusher of books arguing for and detailing the supposed ascendency of dense urban cores, like the inimitable Edward Glaeser’s influential Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and...
Day 10 – Frontier’s Advent Calendar
Day 10 - Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas. Here at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy we want to tell you about some of the things we would like to see under our tree. On Day 10 we wish that governments would replace rent controls (which...
Time to Address Middle-Income Housing Affordability
"Kudos" to the Trudeau government for proposing the use of vouchers for low income housing and homelessness. It is too bad that even in the most successful economies, many people have insufficient means to provide their own housing. Vouchers are a better way to...
RBC Report Highlights Increasing Housing Affordability Challenges
Households could face even greater housing affordability challenges in the years to come, according to the September 2017 RBC Economics (RBC) Housing Trends and Affordability report. In noting that " The days of ultra low interest rates in Canada are over," RBC...
Inter-Municipal Co-operation and Reform: Municipal Amalgamations
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just released Inter-municipal co-operation and reform: Municipal Amalgamations. This paper is co-authored by Wendell Cox and Ailin He. Wendell Cox is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the principal...
Why Young Canadians Can’t Afford To Buy a Home
Canada’s middle-income housing affordability crisis (unaffordable homes) is drawing considerable attention, with good reason. Families are being squeezed out of the market and the situation is only going to worsen. Frontier Centre publications, such as the Demographia...
Ontario’s Labor & Housing Policies: US Midwest Opportunities?
The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper, reports concerns raised by Magna International, Inc. that proposed provincial labor legislation (the “Fair Workplaces Better Jobs Act”) could result in seriously reduced economic competitiveness for Ontario, Canada’s...
Moving Away From Toronto and Montréal
The latest Statistics Canada data indicates that people are leaving Toronto and Montréal in large numbers since the 2011 census. Even so, both metropolitan areas continued to grow through the 2016 census as a result of net international migration and the natural...