Like most G7 countries in the early 2000s, Canada heard the gunshot signaling the real estate investment race and took off sprinting. But when the global economy was flattened by the 2008–9 recession — and housing growth in Britain, France, and the United States finally stagnated — we pushed on.

In G7 real estate price graphs, the “Canada” line seems committed to flying off the paper entirely: home costs have more than doubled since 1997, while most leveled off in other countries after 2009. In 2019, annual growth in real estate transaction revenues was over 80 percent higher than all other Canadian industries. Canada’s housing bubble has thrown us into one of the worst housing crises in our history. It’s a complex story of monetary policy, speculation, austerity, short housing supply, and local zoning. And it’s a textbook example of the private housing market’s inability to meet society’s housing needs.

The late 1980s recession resulted in a fall in interest rates immediately after. The resulting low-cost mortgages made homeownership more possible for middle-class earners. This period, as analyst Michal Rozworski writes, was “characterized by relative affordability. This was the time when the financialization of housing — its transformation into a major investment asset — was just taking off.” In the wake of the recession, home prices remained low, and many regular Canadians started scooping them up.