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By Sasha Izard
Feb 8, 2026


The following are excerpts from February 1981 Times Colonist articles:

“While many factors have contributed to the unprecedented housing crisis in B.C.’s urban centres, the provincial government must accept the lion’s share of the blame. In case the minister needs reminding, the problem didn’t just suddenly arise. It’s been building up for years. Let me list a few things that led up to the current housing crisis.”

“Escalation of the housing crisis was inevitable, but the provincial government did nothing to stop it. Some steps would have been relatively easy. The government is sitting on thousands of acres of property in the Highlands, for instance, property which could have been serviced years ago and put on the market at reasonable prices.”

“During those five years, the pressure on the housing market will continue and probably get worse. Either the government takes drastic measures to come to grips with the problem, or things will get worse. A massive infusion of money into the housing market is needed. Government must offer financial incentives to developers, enticing them into building rental accommodation.”

“Durking said the demolition freeze will cause nothing but distress for Victoria’s economy. “If we have to wait a year to demolish a building nobody will be able to afford the rent any more,” he said.
Because Victoria has very little vacant land zoned for apartment buildings, developers have to concentrate on demolishing existing buildings and replacing them with complexes of higher density, Durking said. Stopping that process he warned will completely dry up apartment construction, cause further unemployment in the construction industry and scare investors away.
Durking said demolition applications should be considered on their individual merits and urged a housing corporation be established to do away with red tape, which has been hampering developers.
He said there is no real housing crisis in Victoria and the debate that led up to the demolition freeze has been marked by theatrics.
Ald. Bill McElroy replied that the crisis does exist. The last survey done by the Central Mortgage and Housing corporation had revealed that of 20,000 housing units in Victoria only 12 were listed as vacant. Peter Kerr, who described himself as a “residential housing investor said he is frightened by the implications of the freeze.””

“Victoria’s controversial apartment demolition freeze will destroy investor confidence, create unempoyment and deepen the rental housing crisis, several developers warned Monday.”

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Housing Crises: A Manifestation of Crisis Corporatism

In 2010, Michael Vonn wrote an article for the George Straight about a job posting for a BC Government Executive position:

“Here’s exactly what it says under the “Characteristics/Behaviours” section of the role profile: “Executives anticipate, and are prepared to institute change quickly. At times, to capitalize on the best opportunity, executives create a crisis to force change.”

Micheal Vonn: B.C. government job posting exposes crisis of democracy | Georgia Straight Vancouver’s source for arts, culture, and events

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The so-called housing crisis, which is actually just a lack of affordability driven by the market and a government absolutely beholden to it, bears all the hallmarks of crisis capitalism. Create a crisis, or even a fake crisis if necessary, to advance the corporate agenda over the public interest.

At the same time make sure to drown out any dissenting voices in the humdrum and buzz around the crisis narrative, or suppress opposition with flak, and make sure not too much thinking gets in the way of a useful narrative based around reflexive raw emotional language.

Why reinvent the wheel? If something worked for industry decades earlier, why not have it resurface again during another generation?

Clippings from the Times Colonist in 1981 (At the top of this article) reveal how a narrative of a “housing crisis” was used over 4 decades ago to drive a narrative favourable to industry. We can thank ourselves that the forested Highlands weren’t developed, as they had been pushing for at the time. The parallels of redevelopment leading to gentrification and what are seeing now are stark.

However, at some point all that faded into distant memory. Actually it left most people’s memory, and the new generation had yet to be inoculated against the previous use of a housing crisis narrative, with a considerable dose theatrics attached to it.

The government however, decades later would be firing up policies that would ensure few of the new generation would be able to afford a home to raise a family in, so for them, there would be an affordability crisis, but not for the same reasons that the government was pushing its narrative.

It wasn’t so much a lack of supply, as intentionally overheating demand through massive immigration quotas, that supply could never reasonably catch up to, leading to a musical chairs situation when it comes to housing, the financialization/commodification of the housing market, the focus on market housing (the incentive for which from developers is primarily for the upper levels of the market), and a war on single family homes that served the interests of developer profit margins, and not that of Canadians with or wishing to start families. In addition to the lack of general affordability these factors have fostered, the costs to the urban ecology and the urban forest have been catastrophic.

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In the leadup to the 2010 Olympics, the BC NDP while in opposition, began its crisis rhetoric around housing, complaining that the Campbell Government had squandered billions on the Olympics that could have been used to create desperately needed housing instead. In 2011, the UDI a lobby for corporate development and real estate interests, donated directly to the BC NDP, as it did again in 2017 as the BC NDP was returning to power.

In 2012 the Globe and Mail, which focuses on pushing the agenda of big business, started pumping the the goal of making Canada’s population almost triple itself by the end of the Century to 100 million, a surefire way to create a housing affordability crisis. This was bolstered by The Century Initiative, a lobby founded around that time, which the Globe and other media outlets would soon be pumping.

Why Canada needs a flood of immigrants – The Globe and Mail (2012)

The leadership of the Century Initiative had close connections to Global Government Consulting Firm McKinsey & Company, Black Rock an international Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), The Federal Liberal Party, and the Business Council of Canada, which represents the interests of mega corporations, including multi-national ones.

McKinsey would come under fire in Canada a decade later. Its recent CEO and co-founder of the Century Initiative Dominic Barton was recalled from his position of Canada’s Ambassador to China. His wife Geraldine Buckingham was BlackRock’s Chair and Head of Asia Pacific and a member of the firm’s Global Executive Committee

BlackRock – Wikipedia

McKinsey’s power over Canada’s immigration system, became so difficult to ignore (although it was ignored for many years) that even a CBC article would refer to it as a “Shadow Government”:

The value of one consulting firm’s federal contracts has skyrocketed under the Trudeau government | CBC News

McKinsey contracts top $100M under Justin Trudeau | CBC Radio

Federal government flouted rules when awarding McKinsey contracts: AG report | CBC News

At the same time as the CMHC was a paying member of the UDI development/real estate lobby (something they ended in 2023), the Federal Government involving the CMHC and a federal behavioural nudge agency, looked into the logistics through a process costing $300 million to the taxpayer, of what it would take to increase the housing supply by removing barriers to it. It is difficult to see this push as anything other than setting a foundation for a massive and costly public deception campaign to manipulate the public into massively increasing housing supply:

“Innovative and Disruptive Thinking”: Impact Canada, a Federal Government Nudge Unit tied to the Prime Minister’s Office, was engaged in a several hundred million dollar program seeking ways to remove barriers to housing supply. – CRD Watch Homepage

In 2024, banks were openly calculating that the massive immigration rates under the Trudeau were having the effect of actually lowering productivity.

Raising the Bar, Not Just Lowering the Number: Canada’s Immigration Policy Confronts Critical Choices | Post

With even the banks shifting tune, the effects of the Trudeau government having at one point seen the average price of housing in Canada near doubling during its tenure (See graph in Appendix at the end of the article, led to the government finally having to admit to itself that the massive influx of immigration overstimulating housing demand was no longer politically tenable.

Not much time prior to the peak of the average housing costs under his tenure (in 2022 when Canada reached a record amount of immigration), Trudeau managed to beat around the bush about the massive increase in average housing costs in Canada when interviewed by Evan Solomon; with the Prime Minister, instead clinging to a lack of supply and too much red tape being the issue, despite that supply could never keep up with the demand being driven by his sky-high immigration targets.

Trudeau on deficit concerns, his 2021 regrets, and what he thinks will define 2022

While Trudeau was stalling on taking required measures, in 2022, the Bank of Canada stepped in, rapidly increasing interest rates, (albeit not to the levels of the 1980s) reducing the ability to purchase housing on credit, something that had the effect of driving the prices down somewhat from peak level, but still not far from the all time high.

The inner circles of the Trudeau government must have realized by this point that they needed to take some action on demand. In order to cool down the demand somewhat, the Trudeau government on Jan 1, 2023 the Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act, aka the so-called Foreign Buyers Ban, which was a misnomer. The Act was full of loopholes, allowing foreign investment into real estate.

See: Offshore on shore? Prime ecological land on the shore of Oak Bay, up for sale for over 50 million dollars – reveals giant Elephant in the Room loophole in the so-called “Foreign Buyers Ban”. – CRD Watch Homepage

The housing prices continued their slight downward trend, but not an overwhelming one.

In 2024, the Trudeau government took another step to curb demand, decreasing student visas. Prices continued downward somewhat, but again not by a particularly significant amount.

Canada to stabilize growth and decrease number of new international student permits issued to approximately 360,000 for 2024 – Canada.ca

In 2025, Trudeau resigned before finishing his last term, having effectively been pushed out by his own party. Before doing so, he significantly dropped the rate of new permanent residents, followed by his successor Mark Carney making the decision toward the end of 2025 to reduce those rates significantly, with the annual amounts of permanent residents now decreasing.

Not surprisingly, having cooled the musical chairs scenario that the Trudeau government had created by artificially stimulating/spiking housing demand, the market is beginning to return to lower levels in 2026.

TD Economics – Is the Dial-Back of Immigration Having the Intended Impact in Canada?

Several years earlier in 2022, I had written a letter published in the Times Colonist, and a variant was published in the Saanich News. Here is an excerpt:

“Democracy comes from the bottom up, not from the top down.

What is being referred to as the “housing crisis” is manufactured by the government. There would be no reason for it, if they weren’t doing everything they can to cram greater amounts of people into smaller and smaller spaces, at higher and higher square-metre costs. The math isn’t complicated and the developers know it.