There is much to admire in the bundle of Canadian policy, but housing and construction regulation remains a largely unmitigated disaster.
I note this only as a reminder that
- It’s safer to admire individual policies rather than national bundles. There isn’t a nation on earth that gets anywhere close to everything right.
- What you gain from an optimal policy is often just slack that softens the impact of getting something else completely wrong.
- Often you only really feel the true cost of bad policy when political tides undermine what was previously buttressing your entire system. Case in point: the NHS and Brexit.
What happens to the Canadian economy when the housing market is still strangling disposable income and an anti-immigrant political movement rises to power on the false but persuasive accusation that immigrants, and not bad housing policy, is to blame? Leveraging all my gifts of analysis and foresight, I predict bad things. Bad things will happen.
Economist Writing Every Day 