In BC and Ontario, more than one-fifth of owners also have at least one investment property; in Nova Scotia, it’s nearly one-third. The decades-long decline of rental stock in Canada has created a housing market dependent on privately owned condos and suites to house renters, which has in turn created government reliance on small-time landlords amid a national housing shortage. In the Yukon, the territorial government is offering cash rebates to landlords as a kind of apology for limiting annual rent increases. In this system, the security of renters is secondary to the financial interests of owners. But listening to the laments of the Airbnb class, it’s clear there’s an identity crisis playing out among property owners who do not understand—or refuse to accept—that their assets confer upon them a status that makes Canadians squirm: rich.
Canada has always been a country of middle-class ideals: a 2023 survey by Angus Reid found that 43 percent of Canadians identify with the label, while just 1 percent are comfortable describing themselves as upper class. According to 2019 data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a member of the middle class earns between 75 and 200 percent of the median household income after tax; in Canada, this would be an income of $32,621 and $86,990 per year to be in the middle-income class. But wages have stagnated for decades, while households have taken on more debt; a middle-class income doesn’t mean what it once did. (Even Mona Fortier, during her brief tenure as Canada’s first and last minister of middle-class prosperity, couldn’t offer a clear definition of the term.)
Housing, in particular, has muddied the waters: in Canada’s most expensive cities, even people earning incomes in the top 10 percent may not be able to afford to buy so much as a condo—not exactly the “starter home” of generations past. In 1976, it took around five years for a young adult working full time to save for a down payment; it now takes seventeen years, according to a report from Generation Squeeze. Meanwhile, many pensioners who have defined themselves by their lifetime of modest incomes have found themselves in possession of a fortune—by dint of buying decades ago and staying put. Many have leveraged that value to multiply their assets: one in ten Canadians now owns at least one investment property.
The problem is not that the owners of multi-million-dollar homes, or those like the landed gentry of the Regency period who are deriving their income from investment properties, still believe that they are humble members of the middle class. It’s how this warped self-image is wielded, in ways that impact everyone—notably, the one in three Canadians who rent. This is most obvious in the inclination of owners to rent on Airbnb rather than long term; in North Vancouver, one Airbnb host complained to North Shore News that “people don’t want to deal with [long-term] tenants” who are less profitable and harder to evict. But it’s also evident in the way that homeowners frequently oppose new developments that encroach on their neighbourhoods, fighting—often successfully—against change and exacerbating unaffordability and insufficient housing supply in the process. This opposition frames apartment dwellers not as prospective neighbours but as interlopers; when BC’s NDP government introduced new legislation to end restrictive zoning in communities with more than 5,000 people on November 1, Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer described it as the latest escalation in a “war on single-family neighbourhoods.”
thewalrus.ca
