The front-runner for Canada’s Conservative Party leadership, Pierre Poilievre, has made a hobbyhorse out of sounding off about the country’s soaring housing crisis. For a decade, rents and home prices across the country have shot into the stratosphere, siphoning off ever more money from the working class into the pockets of banks and landlords.

Channeling anger at the market’s obscenities, Poilievre blames the Bank of Canada for inflating asset values and “big city gatekeepers” for blocking the building of new housing. Homeownership, he rails in a recent campaign video, “used to be a right. And it should be again.”

Poilievre may not have any serious policy proposals for actually fixing the crisis, but his jeremiads represent an important example of how housing is often discussed. Of all Poilievre’s messaging, the idea that homeownership should be a right — an inalienable entitlement extended to everyone, at least theoretically — resonates deeply with voters. After all, over the course of the twentieth century, homeownership has become central to the North American ideal of a decent, middle-class living.