Oliver Foote

Why Are People Leaving Ontario for Other Provinces?

People leaving Ontario for other provinces was a headline that really took off during the pandemic. Everyone was forced to work remotely and it opened up opportunities for mobility. It made good financial sense that you could keep your big city salary and move to a lower cost of living area to make your money go further. This led to a spike in inter-provincial migration numbers and local rural properties becoming more expensive as people left larger cities to find more space. However, for some people the choice to move may have backfired. I am aware of more than one person who moved out from Toronto with the expectation that they would be able to work from home for the rest of time and they ended up moving back in 2022 or 2023.

Migration out of Ontario has been quite variable over the years, from 2003-2015 there was net out-migration to other provinces, from 2016-2019 there was net in-migration, then largely due to the pandemic and skyrocketing housing costs Ontario saw out-migration from 2020-2022. However, Ontario is far from the worst. People have been leaving Quebec, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba every year since 2015 for other provinces. Alberta only recently saw more people come in than leave, as of 2021. Most of the Maritime provinces saw significant proportional spikes during the pandemic.

I could go on and on listing different datapoints, and really it wouldn’t matter all that much since the numbers of total migration between provinces barely tops 100,000 people per year in most years. When we’re bringing in 1,000,000 new residents to Canada in one year we have a larger issue at hand. The more important trends would be to see where people immigrate to, and as you might imagine people will immigrate to where they have the largest networks, or where the most jobs are which tend to be the larger cities. This means that the supply crunch in the Greater Toronto Area is not likely to see relief because people are unlikely to choose to immigrate or migrate in large numbers to other provinces where they don’t have a support network and fewer job opportunities. People want to be where things are happening, and the largest city in Canada, tends to be a solid go to choice.

If you have taken a trip on the TTC at some point in the past 2 years you would have likely seen at least one advertisement encouraging you to move to Alberta. The campaign Alberta’s provincial government came up with is called “Alberta is Calling” and they are pitching Alberta as “affordable, friendly, and rich in opportunity.” I’ve only been to Alberta once for a wedding in Banff, and from that experience I can say that it does have a lot of natural beauty. But from the news this past week, I can also say that it’s cold. -40° C cold. The -10° C in Toronto today feels downright balmy compared to that. Like most of Canada the cold doesn’t last forever and it does eventually just become part of your life, but I can’t help but point out the weather conditions as someone who prefers it to be a bit warmer.

I also want to touch on an article that I came across recently regarding Alberta’s immigration + migration capacity. As mentioned earlier, the whole of Canada is having a bit of a problem handling the number of people that immigrate here every year. Alberta’s campaign worked so well that there is a concern that they will not be able to meet the higher demands on their services like healthcare and education. They had 194,000 people come to the province last year which is a 4.3% increase in population. With the way things are going in Alberta and across the country. The investments and preparation to provide these types of services to a population influx has to take place years or months in advance. There is some concern that Alberta will not be able to just flip the switch to meet this new found demand. Eventually this problem will improve itself with the increased tax revenue from these new residents. But it will be reactionary, as most big moves in politics tend to be. Planning ahead seems to be verboten.

I do completely understand why some people might want to move to cheaper provinces with the current housing prices in Ontario and British Columbia. But comparing and contrasting Ontario with British Columbia shows an interesting trend. In 2020 Ontario saw net out-migration of -18,405, in 2021 it was -47,212. Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, British Columbia saw net in-migration throughout the pandemic. In the last 50 years BC has only seen 12 years where more people left the province than moved to it. Clearly, even with the highest costs of housing in the country, it is a place that people will sacrifice a lot, in order to have the pleasure of living there. If Alberta’s push to get people to move continues to be successful it is likely that a large number of the migrants into the province will come from British Columbia simply due to proximity, and of course high housing costs. As someone who has never been to BC but has dreamed of going there more than a few times, the pull of BC is quite strong.

The moral of all these inter-provincial migration numbers is that housing is still a crisis. People are not just contemplating moving to less expensive provinces, but are actually doing it. I believe this trend will continue for the foreseeable future, even with the historical investments in housing from all levels of government. Our economies have become so centralized, data is so accessible, and financial systems have enabled us to borrow huge amounts of money to purchase homes. We’ve underinvested in trades, have high numbers of immigration, and anticipate lower interest rates coming over the next decade. All of these factors combine to create a housing supply shortage and a financial system that will both work together to keep prices going up. We’re in a situation now that if prices do fall significantly it likely means there are much bigger problems in Canada than just housing. I want to be hopeful that this problem can be solved by a combination of investing in trades and housing. But I’m not sure that will be enough. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the migration trends in the coming years and I do wonder if at some point we will see emigration out of Canada, or if BC’s natural beauty will be enough to make people want to stay.

How Under-Investment in Early Trades Education Contributed to Canada’s Housing Crisis

As they say, hindsight is 2020. Under-investment in skilled trades has been a serious problem in Ontario (and all of Canada) for quite some time now. Something that will make the problem worse is that 700,000 trades people across Canada will be retiring between 2019 and 2028. We will have to find ways to replace those workers and more if we want to hit our ambitious housing targets. The Ontario government has created a plan to build 1.5 million homes in the next decade with the federal number totaling 10.5 million homes. In recent times due to a lack of trades supply, the labour costs to build housing has absolutely skyrocketed, which is great for wages, but not so great for building houses efficiently, affordably, and at a large scale. If we take a look back at history, it’s not so hard to see how we ended up with the shortage of trades people we are currently experiencing.

In the mid to late 1990s the Ontario government eliminated mandatory grade 7 and 8 carpentry and home economics classes (e.g. sewing, culinary, etc.). This was at a time when there were many cuts being made to education and many changes in the way education was administered in Ontario. A greater amount of standardized testing was being put into place as well as a compulsory curriculum where all students would learn the same “core” concepts. This “streamlining” of education made it easier to administer education (and less expensive) since most students would be learning the same things, but it also meant reducing students options in middle school and high school. Students were no longer being introduced to skilled trades in middle school which meant that when those same students entered high school, they would often just stick to the things that were familiar to them. Attendance in grade 9 elective carpentry and shop courses began to decline and this lead to many of those courses being removed from schools entirely due to under enrollment.

To bring a personal example into this post. At my high school I remember seeing the garages and warehouses of the school building that would have in past years housed (auto) shop class or carpentry. They were at some point replaced with arts and drama studios. Not to say that we don’t need artists and performers, it would be a rather bland world without them. But as someone who did not have much interest in those things and found myself more interested in how things are put together and more recently learning about cars on my own time (with lots of help from YouTube). It would have been nice to have had the option to introduce myself to those things back in high school and I think I would have really enjoyed it.

The only mention of skilled trades I remember was during my high school graduation ceremony, the superintendent basically said, “think about a trades career, you’ll make lots of money.” This was in stark contrast to the amount of fairs and events we would have with every Canadian and American University, often times coming directly to our school to recruit students. In this regard I have to consider myself lucky that my mother worked in construction and building maintenance, because she had amassed a good amount of power tools from her various jobs and absolutely any questions I had about using power tools, or how to properly sketch and design something, she had answers for. This meant that I had the opportunity to learn how to design and build things and I built most of the furniture that I used during my university studies and I learned valuable skills in the process; I also learned about economies of scale (it was not cheaper to DIY). However, now I feel confident in repairing things and learning about other trades. If the house I grew up in wasn’t big enough, or my mom worked in a completely different industry, I likely would not have even thought to try to learn how to use a table saw.

By removing these types of courses from the curriculum it makes sense that university admissions would go up. As would the emphasis on grades and thus grade inflation as university became more competitive and trades school admissions did not keep pace. Students were all being steered towards a knowledge related education or entering the workforce immediately, there was not much in between anymore. I believe that this emphasis on universities also had a secondary effect; devaluing university education. Universities began to admit more and more students to meet the demand for their programs, and it was also around this time that the cost of university began to skyrocket as did student loan debt. Many student were attending university because they did not feel there was another option or didn’t have enough information about their options to make an alternative choice, and I’m not just speculating when I say that. This means many students taking on student debt and going to university for an additional 4 years because you feel like you “have to” and then ending up with a degree that can’t land you a job. We have spend decades wasting human capital and real capital by not creating opportunities to discover diverse career options in high school. We are also continuing to drive up university costs due to increase demand (domestic and international), so why compete on a cost level as an institution when students can just take out loans to fund education and people are practically begging you to take their money. The scales are extremely unbalanced and as the past 30 years of relatively slow housing construction have shown, it may not have been a good idea to stop investing in early education for trades.

I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture, but things aren’t all bad. The Ontario government, however unpopular they might be at times, have spent over $1 Billion in the past 3 years addressing the shortage of skills trades workers, and they are seeing results. In the 2023 apprenticeship registrations have increased from 21,971 to 27,319 a 24% increase from 2022. They also rebranded the Ontario College of Trades with Skilled Trades Ontario, breathing some new life into the corporation with the new injection of funding. Skilled Trades Ontario has been able to advertise more and provide more skilled trades fairs that high school students can attend. The government has also made a change to the Ontario curriculum mandating that all Grade 9 and 10 students starting in September 2024 will be required to take at least 1 Technological Education course, which focuses on opportunities in STEM related technician jobs or skilled trades. Prior to this 39 percent of students had enrolled in a tech ed course and 63 percent were male, making this course mandatory will also introduce women who are under-represented, like my mother was, to a skilled trades careers.

Writing this post I was happy to discover that the skills trade shortage is an issue that is being addressed as we speak, and changes to provide students more options to learn and discover are very welcome changes. I’m not certain that we will be able to accomplish the goal of building 1.5 million homes in the next 10 years. But there does appear to be a surprisingly well thought out and robust plan to at least somewhat improve the skilled trades situation in our province. It’s going to be difficult to undo decades of underinvestment in our future workforce, but one step at a time I think we can get there.

All the best,

Oliver

The Future of Interest Rates: Will They Fall in 2024?

The economy is like trying to steer a cargo ship but the captain is missing and all the wheels are the wrong size. If you change the angle of the ship heading by 1 degree, you won’t notice the subtle change for the first few minutes, similarly the Bank of Canada’s (BoC) interest rate decisions can take 12-18 months to show up in the data. Well here we are around 21 months since the first rate hike in March 2022 and we’re finally starting to see those decisions showing up in the economy.

I’m not going to pretend I can predict the future, but I do want to talk about some economic signs that I’ve been reading about recently that point towards the next step in the BoC’s rate setting to be more holds and eventually a rate cut. If I’ve learned anything about this past interest rate and inflation cycle, it’s that things take longer than most forecasters had predicted.

To being the discussion I wanted to talk about the most recent Monetary Policy report from the Bank of Canada published October 2023. It indicates slightly negative GDP growth in the second quarter (Q2) of 2023 and a return to positive growth in the third quarter (Q3) of 2023. (*Note: Statistics Canada recently reported Q3 GDP as declining 1.06% and revised Q2 up from -0.2% to +1.4%) Their overall projection for 2023 is positive GDP growth. However, the per capita GDP declined 1.6% compared to last year. In my opinion per capita growth is a better indicator of the direction the economy is heading since Canada has a rapidly growing population. This effectively means that on a per person basis spending is declining and our economy is slowing. Additionally, businesses aren’t borrowing as much money to fund their capital expenditures because of the high interest rate environment; more business investment generally indicates a growing economy.

Secondly, the most recently reading of CPI inflation from the Bank of Canada was 3.1% in October 2023 which is getting very close to the BoC’s target range of 1-3%. A decline in gasoline prices was the largest contributor to the lower inflation reading. This also happens to be one of the more unstable components that make up the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Depending on what is happening globally energy costs can be very volatile. On the flip side the BoC has stated that supply chain issues have very significantly improved compared to this time last year. As a result, the bank will likely want to wait and see how things play out in other sectors of the economy in the coming months before making any more rate decisions. I don’t anticipate their decision will come quickly since there are still large components of CPI like energy, and rents which are continuing to be inflationary.

Thirdly, as it relates to housing. The housing market has seen a significant increase in supply over the past 3 months with the fewest number of sales for an October period since 1999 according to an Urbanation based on TRREB data. Due to the higher interest rates many people are opting to rent rather than purchase which has put a significant amount of upward pressure on rental prices. We are entering a seasonally slower time of year where many people tend to put off looking for new housing until the new year, so there has been a bit of a short term softening in rental prices.

However, if housing prices continue to remain elevated while interest rates are high, rents will also continue to climb. Sellers are having a hard time coming to terms with the value their home will sell at right now because there is so much competing inventory on the market. People who took on variable rates during 2021 and the beginning of 2022 are the ones who are hit the hardest right now with their borrowing costs more than doubling since then. Banks have been very accommodating to borrowers in some cases extending amortizations to 40 years or beyond in order to keep people in their homes, which has kept mortgage delinquency rates near all time lows and partly why we haven’t seen any significant increase in bank sale homes or general fire sales.

Continuing on the resale housing side of things, the average selling price of a resale home has increased from this time last year. This is mainly due to a skewing in home sales towards higher priced homes and a significant reduction in activity in the first time buyer category. Move-up buyers are finding homes more affordable comparatively to a year or two ago. Meanwhile, first time buyers are finding themselves priced out because purchasing power has declined 40% from the low rates at the end of 2021. An interesting development in the downtown Toronto core (C01) market is that condos are now oversupplied with 7 months of standing inventory. Part of the explanation for this could be that many investors took on variable rate mortgages during 2021. Since 40% of condos in downtown are investor owned if they bought at elevated prices its likely they are now negatively cash flowing and spending a good chunk of money every month to own their investment which partly explains the flood of inventory.

This presents a very good opportunity if you are a first-time buyer and want to break into the downtown condo market. Finding a tenanted property could provide more of an advantage to getting a good price. Due to many other buyers purchasing as investors they will likely want a vacant property and will not want to take on a tenant because the rents will likely be too low to carry their new mortgage and applying for an above guideline rent increase in a rent controlled unit can be challenging.

If you earnestly plan to move into the condo and live there for at least one year you can give the tenant 90-day notice and have them move out and move in yourself. Then down the line if you were to move out you might be able to hang onto the property and rent it for market rates and use it to leverage into your next property. If my prediction that interest rates will come down in the coming years turns out to be correct, your property will likely see accelerated appreciation as rates get cut, as well as lower mortgage payments if you were to take on a variable rate mortgage.

In a few years you could refinance and lock in a fixed rate then take out some of the equity from the property to the point where it would can cash flow neutrally. You can then use that cash to put a down payment on the next property, rent out the old one, repeat. Even if you don’t want to refinance, I think a lot of would-be investors and first time buyers don’t quite understand the opportunity that this market presents with the ultra slow sales, pick of the litter (lots of supply), and a consensus view that rates will be coming down. The market is essentially giving potential buyers an easy lay-up to make their investment work in long term in exchange for short term pain. Obviously there are risks to this like anything, but barring anything crazy like another pandemic, I think we are very very close to a market bottom and I believe that people will look back on this time and say “I wish I had.”

Fourth, there is a somewhat concerning development. According to Urbanation new construction home sales have hit a 10 year low which does not bode well for the future supply of housing. One of the only ways that new housing supply gets built in the Greater Toronto Area is through new construction condos. However, there is a slow development happening in the purpose built rental space. Governments at all levels are beginning to put real money towards building this type of housing again, but it will take years for this to make a significant dent in the housing supply.

In the meanwhile the housing supply outlook is somewhat grim for the next decade or so. If the replacement cost of a condo continues to remain much higher than the current market value of a similar unit, investors and end users are unlikely to see the value in purchasing new construction which could cause a noticeable slowdown in new housing starts (construction) which will constrict housing supply even more. On the flip side, developers are providing an unprecedented amount of incentives, including rental guarantees for multiple years, zero development charges, and very extended deposit structures in order to try stimulate sales.

In conclusion, the housing market is showing signs of a slowing as rates stay high. Pricing remains elevated due to a lack of overall supply in the market, the rate of population growth in the GTA as well as the resiliency in employment and accommodating banks. The continuous influx of new people to Canada could potentially slow the decline of inflation compared to the US. Ultimately, people still need a place to live which should continue to stimulate a floor level of sales until the interest rate environment loosens a bit at which point home sales a prices will likely stabilize and begin a slow climb upwards. Although inflation is coming down, the bank will likely not make a decision on rates until the less volatile or “core” components return back to normal levels. Expect things to continue to move slowly like the freighter ship with a slow return to a normal inflation levels as very slow rate cuts in the new couple of years.

Talk soon,

Oliver Foote