Nuanced. - 232. Why Does Living in Canada Feel So Unaffordable?

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Chief Aaron Pete breaks down why life in Canada still feels unaffordable even as inflation cools. This episode explores housing shortages, rent, mortgage pressure, grocery prices, corporate concentration, immigration, global shocks, and the deeper trust problem behind the cost of living crisis.Send us Fan MailSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Canada has become a country where doing the right thing financially somehow still feels like losing. You work, you budget, you cut back, you skip the extras, you try to be responsible. And then you go buy groceries and discover that a bag of basics now feels like a minor financial event. Your rent looks insane. Your mortgage renewal feels threatening. And even a coffee has started carrying itself like a luxury purchase. And that's the tension at the center of this whole conversation. Because Canadians keep being told inflation has cooled, that things are stabilizing, that relief is coming.

But ordinary people look at their bills and think, that may be true on paper, but it is not true in my life. So today, we're going to be talking about the cost of living crisis in Canada, what it is, what caused it, and why so many people feel like, they're working harder just to stay in the same place. Because the lazy conversation is to blame one thing. Greed. Justin Trudeau. Global supply change. Immigration, money printing, housing. You can pick your villain. Pick your slogan. Pick your explanation. The flatters your politics. But that is not how this works. The truth is much more frustrating than that. the crisis is not being driven by one force, it is being driven by several all at once. Political decisions that matter, weak leadership matters, deficits and monetary policy matter,

housing shortages matter, global shocks matter, and corporate behavior matters too, especially in concentrated markets where a crisis can become an opportunity. That is what makes this so. difficult to untangle. Everybody wants one cause. The real answer is a pile-up. So today, we're going to break that pile-up down properly. We're going to talk about what inflation actually is, because it's one of those words everyone uses and very few people define well. We're going to talk about how it works, where it comes from and how it's calculated. And why even when inflation comes down, prices usually don't.

We're going to talk about housing because this is not just a cost of living story for a lot of Canadians. It's a shelter crisis with everything else piled on top. We're going to talk about groceries and food chain and about why grocery stores, especially companies like Loblaws, became a symbol of public anger, with many Canadians feeling like they were being squeezed by corporations in a moment when families had no room left to absorb more pain. We're going to talk about debasement of currency, or more precisely, the erosion of purchasing power, because one of the deepest frustrations in the country right now is not just that things cost more, but people feel like their money is weaker, their paycheck is weaker, and their future is less stable.

And then we're going to talk and zoom out a little bit and talk about global affairs, because the price of your coffee, your beef, your produce, your fuel, all of it is connected to a much bigger world. So this episode is about more than prices. It's about a modern country starts to feel unaffordable to its own people. It's about the gap between official economic language and everyday life.

And it's about trying to approach this with some maturity. So no hot takes, no cartoon villains, no pretending one side has all the answers. Because if we're going to talk, honestly, about why life in

Canada got so expensive, we need to be adult enough to admit that this crisis has multiple authors. None of them are innocent. So let's start at the beginning. What is inflation? Let's start with the word that gets thrown around constantly, usually with the confidence of a man at a barbecue explaining interest rates after two beers. Inflation. Inflation is the rate at which prices rise over time. That's the basic idea. When inflation goes up, your money buys less than it used to. $100 still says $100 on it, which is lovely, very reassuring visually,

but it does not do the same amount of work it used to. That's the real issue. Inflation is not just about prices going up. It's about purchasing power coming down, and that matters, because if prices rise faster than your wages, your life gets smaller. You feel it in subtle ways at first. You hesitate a little longer at the grocery store. You put off a place in something that's broken.

You stop going out as much. Then eventually you realize you are not really making choices anymore. You are triaging life decisions. Now, where does inflation come from? This is where people tend to become very ideological very quickly. One side says it's greedy corporations. And my interview with Emily Lowen, that was the focus. Another says it's government spending.

And I put a lot of the roots of some of our issues at that. Another say it's money printing. Another say it's supply chains. Another say it's immigration. And the irritating answer, once again, is it can be several of those things at once. inflation can happen because demand rises faster than supply. It can happen because governments spend heavily while central banks keep money cheap. It can happen because supply chains break.

Wars disrupt energy and food as we're seeing. Droughts, wipe out crops. Labor gets tighter. Or housing shortages drive shelter costs, higher. Sometimes inflation is a sign of an overheating economy. Sometimes it is a result of scarcity. and disruption. Often it's both. That is the part of why people find it so confusing. Inflation sounds like one thing, but in reality it can have multiple engines. Now how is inflation

actually calculated? In Canada, it is mainly measured through what's called the Consumer Price Index. Statistics Canada tracks the price of fixed basket of goods and services that represent what Canadian households typically buy. Things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, and recreation. Then it measures how the costs of that basket changes over time. And this is important. CPI or the Consumer Price Index is an average, which means your personal experience may be worse than what the headline suggests. If you're a homeowner renewing a mortgage, a renter in a tight market or a parent buying food every week, your real-world inflation may be far higher than the official number. Now, let's look at the past few years because this is where people start to

understand why they still feel squeezed, even though they're hearing that inflation is coming down. Canada's annual average inflation rate was 3.4% in 2021. It was 6.8% in 2022, 3.9% in 20203, 2.4% in 2024, and in 2025 was 2.1%. And that sounds on paper like improvement. But here's the part that people in charge often glide past with the grace of a man backing away from a car he just scratched. Lower inflation does not mean lower prices. It just means prices are rising more slowly, and that's a huge difference. If inflation was brutal for several years and then at seven, down, the damage doesn't disappear, the higher price level stays. And yes, inflation is cumulative. Even after inflation cooled, prices in 2025 were still significantly higher than they

were five years earlier. Food rose even faster. So if a household was spending $100 on groceries five years ago, that same basket now costs $127. And that is where inflation stop sounding like an economics lecture and starts sounding like your kitchen table. Inflation becomes real when it hits the basics. A dozen eggs that averaged $3.82 in 2021 now sits at about $4.74. A loaf of bread that was about $2.84 is now about $3.59. None of that sounds dramatic in isolation, but stack dozens of increases like that across rent, gas, coffee, insurance, and groceries. and suddenly ordinary life feels tight.

That is why people say, I thought inflation was getting better, so why does everything still feel expensive? Because it did get better in rate terms, but the price level had already moved upward, and it stayed there. So when people hear inflation is down, what they often think is, oh, good,

things are going back to normal. But that is not what happened. What happened is that prices, jumped, stayed high, and are now rising more slowly from a much higher place. In other words, things are not getting cheaper, they are just getting more expensive, more politely. That is why this matters so much psychologically. People hear inflation is down. What they think is, oh good, things are going back to a place that I understand, a place that I've been before. That's not where they actually are. A grocery bill that used to be manageable suddenly becomes strategic.

A rent increase that once felt annoying now feels life-altering. A mortgage renewal stops feeling like paperwork and starts feeling like an ambush. Even little things, coffee, lunch, household basics begin to carry an absurd amount of financial weight. So when we talk about inflation, We are not just talking about an abstract economic metric. We are talking about the slow erosion of confidence, confidence that your paycheck means something, confidence that planning ahead will help, confidence that if you work hard and stay disciplined, life will become more stable rather than less. And that is why this selection, this section, matters so much.

because before we talk about housing, groceries, coffee, bread, eggs, currency debasement, we need to understand the basic mechanism underneath it all. Inflation is what happens when the cost of life rises faster than people can comfortably absorb. And in Canada, that didn't just happen for a month or two. It's stacked. So next, we need to talk about the place where that pressure has hit the hardest. Housing.

Housing. The main pressure point. If inflation is the mechanism, housing is the pressure point. Because for a lot of Canadians, this is not just a cost of living crisis. It is a shelter cost crisis with everything else piled on top.

Statistics Canada says that on an annual average basis. In 2025, shelter prices rose 3%. Rent rose 5%. and mortgage interest costs rose 5.3%. That was slower than 2024, but slower does not mean affordable. It means Canadians are still getting squeezed just at a slightly less of violent pace. And shelter is not some minor category buried in inflation chart. It is one of the biggest costs in people's lives.

So when rent keeps rising and mortgage payments stay elevated, it changes everything. A person can absorb a slightly more expensive coffee. They cannot absorb housing swallowing half of their income. Statistics Canada's own reporting on inflation in 2025 makes clear that rent and mortgage interest costs remained major drivers of household pressure, even as headline inflation eased. The first thing to understand is that Canada has a supply problem. CMHC or the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation, says that to restore affordability by 2035, Canada would need to build roughly 430,000 to

480,000 housing starts per year. And when CMHC says restore affordability, they are not talking about some fantasy where housing becomes cheap overnight. They are talking about bringing affordability back to roughly pre-pandemic levels by 2035. That is the benchmark. Even that requires an an extraordinary increase in supply. Now compare that with reality. CMHC says Canada recorded 259,000 housing starts in 2025. That is actually a strong number historically. CMHC called it the fifth highest annual total on record, but it is still nowhere near the pace needed to close the affordability gap. So the problem is not that Canada isn't building nothing. The problem is that Canada is building less than what the country's own housing agency says it requires. And even when government

cities or developers say they are building, that does not mean relief arrives quickly. Housing has a lag. There is a delay between a project being conceived, approved, permitted, started, and actually being completed. CMHC has explicitly noted that starts are different from permits and completions and that those lags matter when assessing whether supply is really arriving. In practical terms, that means even when governments announce reforms or projects, ordinary people do not feel the impact next month. They often feel it years later. That is especially true for larger apartments and multi-unit developments which are slower

and more complex to deliver than a single detached home. So when people say, why don't we just build more housing? The answer is absolutely yes we should, but housing delivery is slow, approvals are slow, infrastructure is slow, financing is slow, and the backlog is already enormous. Then there is the interest rate piece. A lot of people assume lower interest rates would solve the housing crisis. And that's not really true. Lower rates might reduce mortgage pain for some households, but they do not solve a structural shortage of homes.

At the same time, higher rates absolutely did hurt people. Statistics Canada says mortgage interest costs rose 20.1% in 2024 and then another 5.3% in 2025. So even as inflation did cool overall, homeowners renewing mortgages were still getting hit by the delayed aftershocks of the inflation fight. Renters were not spared either. Statistics Canada says rent rose 8.2% in 2024 and another 5% in 2025 on an annual average basis. And while some asking rent softened in some parts, the absolute level remained brutally high in places where affordability is already weakest. In the third quarter of 2025, Statistics Canada reported that the average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment was about 3,1192.000. in Vancouver. So yes, you may get a headline saying rents eased slightly in some markets,

but down from absurd is not the same thing as affordable. And there is another layer to this that matters a lot, especially for young people. Statistics Canada has pointed out that newer renters often face substantially higher rents than longstanding tenants. That means there is a widening gap between people who are already inside the system and those trying to get in. If you have been in the same place for a while, especially in a rent-controlled environment, you may still be under pressure, but not nearly as much as someone trying to sign a lease today. That is not just a market problem. It is a mobility problem, a fairness problem, and for younger Canadians, a future problem.

Now let's talk about population growth, because this is where the conversation often gets really dumb, really quick. you do not need to become a crude or anti-immigration to acknowledge basic math. If housing supply is already lagging and population grows rapidly, that adds pressure to rents, vacancy rates, and prices. Statistics Canada says Canada's recent historic population growth has driven largely by a sharp rise in non-permanent residence. In fact, Stats Can reports that the number of non-permanent residents rose from 1.4 million in the first quarter of 2022 to over 3 million in the first quarter of 2025. The same statistics Canada analysis says that housing demand through new household formation became increasingly linked to international migration and that the

exceptional population growth contributed to affordability concerns. And that population growth does not affect every part of the housing market equally. Statistics Canada says non-permanent residents are especially concentrated in rental markets. It's May 2025. Housing use analysts found that non-permanent residents occupied far fewer owned units than either immigrants or Canadian-born residents, but far more rental units per 1,000 people. In plain English, when Canada rapidly increases 10,000, temporary residents, students, workers, and others, a lot of pressure shows up first and hardest

in the rental market. And rentals are exactly where younger, lower income, and newly arrived Canadians are often more exposed. That is why it is not accurate to say population growth caused the crisis itself. But it is also not serious to pretend it had nothing to do with it. What happened is that Canada already had a housing shortage, then demand a salary, faster than the system could respond. And immigration policy is part of that story. Over the last several years, Canada raised permanent resident targets significantly. The federal government's 2023 to 2025 immigration levels plan set targets of 465,000 permanent residents for 20203,

485,000 for 2024, and 500,000 for 2025. Then, as pressure on housing and infrastructure became harder to ignore, Ottawa reversed course. The later 2025-to-2020 immigration levels plan reduced the permanent resident target to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 265, and 365,000 in 27, while also introducing targets related to temporary residents. The federal government said explicitly that these changes were intended in parts to ease pressure on housing and services, and we can

see some evidence of that pressure easing when population growth slows. Statistics Canada's rent reporting for late 2025 noted that rent declines in parts of British Columbia coincided with a fall in the number of non-permanent residents in the province during the first half of 2025. That does not prove population was the only variable, but it is a strong evidence marker that it, that demands matter. And that what demands eases, rent pressures can ease with it. So when people ask why housing feels impossible, the answer is not one thing. It is that Canada did not build enough homes. It is that approvals, financing, and delivery take too long. It is the country needs far more starts than it currently

produces. It is that mortgage costs surged during the inflation fight. It is that rent kept rising even after headline inflation cooled, and it is that population growth intensified pressure in a market that was already undersupplied. That is why housing is the heart of the story, because once shelter gets out of control, everything else gets harder.

Savings gets harder. Raising kids gets harder. Taking risks becomes more difficult. Starting over gets harder. The cost of living crisis stops being about inconvenience and starts being about whether people, ordinary people, can still imagine a future in the places they live. And the evidence from CMHC and Statistics Canada points in the same direction. This is not a passing irritation. It is a structural affordability problem. So next,

we need to move from the cost of shelter to other places Canadians feel the story every single week. groceries. Grocery stores, food chains, and why food feels so expensive. If housing is the biggest monthly pressure, groceries are the most frequent reminder that something has gone horribly wrong. Because rents hits once a month. Groceries hit every few days. Groceries are where people feel the cost of living crisis in real time. You can delay buying furniture. You can cancel a trip. You cannot opt out of food. And this is why grocery inflation triggered such a visceral reaction in Canada. Statistics Canada says prices for food purchased from stores rose 3.5% in 2025, up from 2.2% in 2024. So even after headline inflation cooled, Canadians were still walking into the grocery

store and watching the basics get more expensive. And according to Canada's food price report, 2026, food prices are now 27% higher than they were five years ago. And that is where the public anger starts to make a lot of sense. Loblaws became the symbol of that anger and the boycott gave that frustration a focal point. In 2024, there was a boycott organized by Emily Johnson, a mental health and addictions worker from Milton, Ontario, alongside others in the Reddit community. What made it resonate was not just anger at one company, but a broader feeling that Canadians were being squeezed in a grocery system that no longer felt competitive. Now, to be clear, Canada's grocery sector is not a monopoly in the strict sense. A monopoly would mean one firm effectively controls the market, and that is not

what exists here. What Canada has is something more subtle, in its own way, more frustrating. A highly concentrated market. What economists are would call, more accurately, an oligopy. The Competition Bureau has said that most Canadians buy groceries from stores owned by a handful of large chains, and that Canada needs more grocery competition. And that distinction matters because the concern is not that one company owns everything. The concern is that a relatively small number of giant firms dominate so much of the grocery landscape that many Canadians do not feel they have a meaningful alternative. Even the discount option is often part of the same small cluster of corporate families.

So the frustration is not simply this company is big. It is the market feels too concentrated and ordinary people do not believe they have much leverage. That is why the boycott landed, not because people thought big companies were automatically evil, not because loblaws alone caused all the food inflation, and not because Canada literally has a grocery monopoly. It landed because many Canadians felt trapped in a market dominated by a few powerful players, while food prices kept rising and trust kept falling. And in Western Canada, this frustration was not only about loblas. It was also about save-on foods and Safeway, because those are the banners a lot of people in BC and Alberta actually shopping.

So when Western Canadians talk about feeling squeezed, they are often talking about the stores they know intimately, save-on, Safeway, Superstore, no frills, and asking the same question over and over. Why does feeding a family feel so expensive now? Now this is where the conversation needs a lot of maturity, because the strongest version of the argument is not grocers or the sole villain. That is too simple. Food prices do not begin at the checkout scanner. They move through a chain. First is the production, seeds, feed, fertilizer, energy, land equipment, labor. Then there's the processing, slaughterhouses, mills, packaging, refrigeration, manufacturing. Then you have transportation and logistics, trucking,

shipping, containers, fuel, warehousing, distribution. Then, retail, store, labor, rent, spoilage, utilities, refrigeration, theft, and margins. By the time food, save-on-food, Safeway, Sobees, or Walmart, it has already absorbed pressure from weather, fuel, labor, transportation, and financing. Statistics Canada gives us concrete examples of that. In 2025, Canadians paid 20.3% more for coffee than the year before, and Statistics Canada linked the jump to adverse weather in coffee growing regions and tariff-related pressures. Statistics Canada also said fresh or frozen beef prices rose 13.5% in 2025, driven in part by historically low cattle inventories in North America. So some of what Canadian

Canadian saw on the shelf was clearly tied to genuine supply shocks and commodity pressures, not just retailers making up numbers in a boardroom. And you can see the cumulative effect in ordinary household items. Statistics Canada's Food Price Data Hub shows that milk, two liters, averaged $5.40 in January 26. That may not sound dramatic in isolation, but that is the point. grocery inflation often works through a series of steady increases across everyday items until the total bill feels completely different than it did just a few years ago. Pair that with coffee jumping 20.3% in 2025 and beef fries and 13.5% in the same year and you start to understand why grocery shopping began to feel less like an errand and more like a

financial event. This is also why the politics of growth. because food is where Canadians started to suspect that every explanation was partly true at once. Yes, supply chains mattered. Yes, weather mattered. Yes, energy and transportation mattered. Labor costs matter. Global commodity pressures matter. And yes, many people also believed that large chains in concentrated market had enough pricing power to protect themselves better. than the average family could protect itself. And that last point is key. The serious claim is not that grocers illegally caused all the food inflation.

The more careful claim is that a concentrated market gives dominant firms more room, more insulation, and less competitive pressure than consumers would face in a more open market. So when prices rise sharply and trust is already low, people start to wonder whether the burden is being shared fairly across the board. And that is why groceries became more than just a budgeting issue. They became a trust issue. Trust that the price is fair. Trust that competition is real.

Trust that large chains are not using inflation as camouflage. Trust that when governments say things are improving, people will actually feel it in IL7. And when that trust breaks, anger follows. That is why groceries became a moral issue, a political issue, and a symbol of whether the system still works for ordinary people. So next we need to talk about the concept sitting underneath that feeling, the sense that even when your paycheck is the same number on paper, it feels weaker in real life.

Now we get into one of the phrases people use a lot in this conversation, currency debasement. And to be fair, it is one of those phrases that can either mean something serious or something stupid, depending on who uses it. Historically, debasement meant literally reducing the precious metal content of coins. In a modern fiat system like Canada's, people usually mean something less theatrical but still very real. Your money buys less than it used to. The Bank of Canada puts it plainly. When prices rise, money cannot buy as much as before.

That loss of purchasing power hurts living standards. That is the part worth taking seriously. Because when people say, my dollar feels weaker, they are not imagining things. Statistics Canada says prices in 2025 were still 19.9% higher than five years ago. So even though inflation cooled, the damage to purchasing power did not disappear. The price level had already moved up. That is why the same paycheck can feel less. capable, even if the number printed out hasn't changed. And this is where the debate splits into

two. One side says this is all because government spent too much and central banks created too much money. The other side says this is an oversimplification because inflation search can also come about because of supply shocks, energy disruptions, broken supply chains, and global turmoil. The honest answer is that both sides are touching part of the elephant. The Bank of Canada's own work says inflation can be driven by both demand, pressures, and supply shocks, which is exactly why this period was so confusing and so politically combustible. Now, to be precise, it is fair to say the Bank of Canada used extraordinary measures during the pandemic. It cut rates aggressively and used quantitative easing at times, buying Government of Canada bonds to push down longer term borrowing

when the policy rate was already near its lower bound. The bank itself says QE or quantitative easing was meant to make borrowing cheaper for households and businesses and support recovery. That is not some conspiracy theory. That is the official explanation. But here's the nuance. Acknowledging those policies existed is not the same as saying they see. They see. single-handedly caused every price increase. Canadians later experienced. The Bank of Canada's own retrospective on its pandemic action say those measures helped stabilize markets and support recovery.

At the same time, later inflation was shaped by a mix of forces, including strong demand, supply disruptions, and food and energy shocks. That is why serious people should resist the temptation to turn money printing into a complete theory of everything. It was part of the story. a big part of the story, but not the whole story. Still, from the point of view of an ordinary household, the lived effect is not complicated.

If wages do not go up, purchasing power falls, if savings earn less than inflation, saving lose real value. If you are on a fixed income, the squeeze is worse. The Bank of Canada says high-level inflation weakens purchasing power, hurts savers, and creates more uncertainty for households and businesses. In that sense, inflation behaves a bit more like a hidden tax. It may not arrive as the line item from the government, but it is quietly taking from you. And that is why this topic resonates

so deeply. People are not just angry that things are costing more. They are angry because they feel they did and were told what to do in a good way. Work, save, budget, plan, and the value of those efforts feels less secure than it used to. The number on the paycheck is still there. The problem is that paycheck can no longer command the authority it once did. That is what people usually mean at a human level when they talk about debasement of currency. Not that Canada turned into Weimar, Germany, not that every price increase is the fault of the central bank, but that the relationship between work, money, and everyday life feels weaker than it used to.

And once people start feeling that, they do not just lose purchasing power. They start to lose trust. So next we need to zoom out even further because some of what Canadians are talking about are taking a place globally. It is about the wider world, global affairs, and how that impacts the costs at home.

global affairs why the world shows up in your cart now we need to zoom out because some of what Canadians are paying for is not just about Ottawa or the Bank of Canada or lawblahs or safe on foods or safely it is about the wider world and one of the most important things to understand about the cost of living crisis is that in a global economy local prices are often the final stop on a much longer story A drought in Brazil can affect the cost of coffee in British Columbia. A cattle shortage in North America can affect the price of beef in Alberta and Ontario. A spike in fertilizers can affect prices almost anywhere in regards to farming.

And a war in the Middle East can show up in Canadian gas prices, shipping costs, and grocery bills. That is not ideology. That's just supply chains. Statistics Canada gives us some of the clearest evidence of this. In 2025, Canadians paid 20.3% more for coffee than the year before, and Statistics Canada said the increase was tied to adverse weather conditions in a growing region, as well as higher prices tied to American tariffs on producing countries. In the same 2025 annual review, Statistics Canada also said fresh or frozen beef prices rose 13.5% and linked that to historically low cattle inventories. North America. So when Canadians feel like morning coffee or a package of beef suddenly became much more expensive, some of that story really does begin far outside of Canada. Coffee is the

perfect example of how that works. You are not just paying for beans, you were paying for rainfall patterns, crop yields, labor, shipping, insurance, exchange rates, tariffs, roasting, packaging, and transportation. Statistics Canada's point is important because it grounds the argument in evidence. Weather shocks in coffee growing regions had a direct effect on what Canadians paid. That is what makes a global affairs relevant to the cost of living. It is not abstract foreign policy. It is breakfast.

Beef tells a similar story. When Statistics Canada says beef prices were pushed up by history. historically low cattle inventories in North America, that is a reminder that supply matters. If herd sizes are down, prices rise. If feed costs rise, prices rise. If transport and processing costs rise, prices rise. Again, the point is not that retailers have no control. The point is that the pressure is clearly coming from upstream conditions in the continental and global food system. Then there is fertilizer, which matters more than people realize. Fertilizer is one of those hidden inputs that touches a huge share of the food system.

If fertilizer prices go up, that affects crop production costs, feed costs, and eventually grocery prices. The World Bank said in October 2025, Commodity Markets Outlook, that its fertilizer price index jumped by almost 14% in Q3 of 2025 alone, was 28% higher, than a year earlier and reflected strong demand, trade restrictions, and production shortfalls. It also said fertilizer prices were projected to remain elevated, in part because of raised input costs, trade restrictions and sanctions affecting producers. So in geopolitics or trade disruptions hit fertilizer, that shock does not stay in a commodity report. It eventually works its way into the food. and when we get to energy, which is where global conflict starts to feel especially immediate, the Bank of Canada said on March 18, 2026, that the war in Iran had added a new layer of uncertainty

and that it was already causing oil prices to move sharply higher, which would push up inflation in Canada in the short term. That is a central bank saying in plain language that a foreign war can feed directly into domestic inflation. And if the conflict seriously disrupts the Strait of Hormuz, the consequences get even bigger. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that in 2024, about 20% of global LNG trade moved through the Strait of Hormuz, and described it as a critical route for oil and petroleum products as well. So this is not some niche shipping lane. It is one of the most important energy choke points in the world. If conflict involving Iran disrupts that passage, the effect do not stay in the Persian Gulf.

They show up in energy prices, transportation costs, and industrial inputs across the global economy. And that matters for Canadians for a simple reason. Food does not teleport. Goods do not teleport. Fuel powers, transportation, energy affects production and higher shipping or energy costs. ripple outward. If oil jumps, transportation gets more expensive. If transportation gets more expensive, distribution gets more expensive. If fertilizer and fuel get more expensive, farming gets more expensive. And eventually, groceries get more expensive. That is why global affairs

is not some detached side topic. It is built into the cost of daily life. Wars matter. Tariffs matter. shipping routes matter commodity markets matter weather shocks matter and strategic choke points like the strait of Hormuzes matter there's also an important humility built into this because some of the pain Canadians feel really is domestic housing policy is domestic competition policy is domestic Immigration policy is domestic But some of it really is global too I'm not trying to discount that And those two things collided in the same economy at the same time

That is the mature way to understand this period Not everything is Justin Trudeau's fault Not everything is greedy grocers And not everything is money printing Not everything is just global It is all connected. The world got more fragile. Supply chains got more exposed.

Climate shocks got more visible. Trade got more volatile. Conflict started hitting commodities faster and harder. And Canadians paid for that fragility in the most ordinary way possible, through gas, groceries, and household basics. So when people say the cost of living crisis feels bigger than politics, they're correct. Because in many ways, it is. There's also a story about what happens when a country like Canada,

deeply integrated into global trade, exposed to commodity markets, and already struggling with its own housing and productivity problems, gets hit by a wave after wave of external disruption. And once you see that, the next question becomes harder and a little more interesting. If this crisis has so many causes at once, domestic, global, structural, political, then what should actually be done about it? Competing explanation. Who blames what? Now let's get into the politics of this, because once people agree life has become more expensive,

the next fight is always over, who gets blamed? And at the federal level, the parties are not just offering different solutions, they are offering different stories. The federal conservatives tell the cleanest story of government failure. Pierre Pollyev has explicitly blamed the Liberals for inflating housing and food costs, and in the same speech argued that housing costs have doubled because liberals inflated demand with out-of-control immigration and money-printing and blocked home building with bureaucracy. That tells you almost everything about the conservative frame. And they're telling the crisis is fundamentally political. Too much spending, too much bad policy, too much bureaucracy, too much demand pressure, too many taxes, and too little growth.

What they tend not to center on is corporate concentration as a primary cause. They are much more likely to blame government than Gowan Weston. The federal liberals, now led by Mark Carney, tell a story that starts with structural shortages and external pressures. Budget 2025 says Canada faces a steep housing supply gap, and Carney has said his government is relentlessly focused on bringing down housing costs. That is the liberal frame. The problem is a shortage of homes, bottlenecks and construction, and global disruption the government has to manage through by by building more, cutting selected taxes and lowering costs where it can. But this is where the critique gets harder for them.

The federal liberals have effectively held power since November 4, 2015, first under Justin Trudeau and now under Mark Carney. And while housing starts did rise in raw terms from 195,000 in 2015 to about 259,000 in 2025, CMHC now says Canada needs roughly 430,000 to 480,000 starts per year to restore affordability to 2019 levels. So the honest criticism is not that the Liberals built nothing, and is that after roughly a decade in power, they did not build nearly enough, and affordability still deteriorated badly under their watch. What they tend not to center on is the role in worsening those through policy choices on demand, spending, and immigration levels. The NDP, and now Avey Lewis in particular, tell the most explicit story about concentrated corporate power. Avi Lewis has been quoted saying, butter for $10, that's not inflation, that's profiteering.

And his campaign argues that three grocery giants, Loblaws, Sobe's and Metro, control, food system. He goes further than the other parties by calling for a public nonprofit option for groceries that tells you what the NDP lane is. Corporate concentration, profiteering, weak consumer protections, and essential goods being left to markets that are failing ordinary people. What they tend not to center on is monetary policy, money creation or immigration, and demand pressures as major drivers of affordability crisis. And here's the frustrating part. All three are pointing at real pieces of the problem. The conservatives are not

wrong that deficits, taxes, regulation, energy, policy, and demand pressure can worsen affordability. The liberals are not wrong that housing under supply and the global shocks are real. And the NDP is not wrong that corporate concentration and pricing power can make a bad situation worse. Each is describing part of the elephant. The problem is that each party tends to emphasize the part of the story that flatters its own worldview and downplays the part that complicates it. That is why the nuanced position is stronger. Some of both are true. Corporation concentration can worsen price power.

Monetary and fiscal expansion can erode purchasing power. Housing under supply is real. Global shocks are real. Weak. Productivity is real. Demand pressure is real. pretending one explanation, does all the work is how unsurious people and an unsurious country talk, because this crisis was not caused by one force, was caused by several forces colliding all at once.

Too little housing, too much delay, too much concentration in some sectors, too much easy money for too long, too much political unwillingness to tell the truth about tradeoffs. and too little maturity in how we talk about cause and responsibility. So yes, Pierre Polyev has a point when he blames bad policy. Yes, Mark Carney has a point when he talks about the housing supply gap. And yes, Avi Lewis has a point when he says profiteering and concentrated corporate power are part of the story. But none of them on their own are telling you the full story. And once you admit that, you stop performing ideology and start dealing with,

with reality. Because the real question is not which party gets to declare victory in this argument. The real question is whether Canada is mature enough to confront a crisis that has multiple authors, multiple pressures and no painless solution. What should be done? So after all of that, inflation, housing, groceries, weaker purchasing power, global shocks, the obvious question is what should actually be done about all of this? Because this is where a lot of political conversations fall apart. One side says just tax the rich, as we heard from Emily Lowen in the BC Green Party. Another says just cut spending.

Another says just build more homes, as we hear a lot from the Conservative Party of Canada. Another says just lower interest rates. Another says just reduce immigration. Another says just break up the grocers, as I'm sure Avi Lewis would say. And once again, the irritating answer is no single lever fixes this pile up. The crisis has multiple causes, so it needs multiple responses. The first and biggest one is still housing supply. CMHC says Canada would need about 480,000 housing starts per year until 2035 to restore affordability to pre-pandemic levels.

But CMHC says Canada has about 259,000. That means the gap is not rhetorical. It is measurable. Canada is building a lot, but not enough to repair affordability. So the first task is obvious. Build more housing faster. And building more housing is not just about announcing targets. It means reducing approval bottlenecks that trap projects in endless permitting infrastructure delays,

financing uncertainty, and municipal inertia. It means making it easier fast. and more financially viable to build rentals, apartments, and missing middle housing. The OECD said in its 2025 Canada survey that Canada should increase housing supply, allow higher density, reduce regulatory barriers, and strengthen rental and social housing supports. Second, Canada needs to take productivity more seriously. One reason the cost of living crisis feels so brutal is that incomes have not kept pace well enough with what life now costs. The OECD's 2025 survey says, Canada faces weak productivity

growth and that structural reform is needed to strengthen long-term living standards. If a country produces more per worker, it has more room for rising wages and stronger living standards. If productivity stalls, then higher prices hit harder and linger longer. So improving domestic productivity is not some technocratic side issue. It is central to whether Canadians can actually get ahead. Third, Canada needs more competition, especially in food and retail where possible. The Competition Bureau has said Canada needs more grocery competition. That does not mean competition will magically stop droughts in Brazil or cattle shortages in North America. But it does mean consumers should have more real alternatives in a market that is highly constant.

Protecting competition in food and retail matters because when households are already under pressure, they should not also feel trapped in markets dominated by a handful of giant players. Fourth, governments need to stop acting as though headline inflation falling means affordability has been restored. It's nonsense. Statistics Canada says prices in 2025 were 19.9% higher. almost 20% than five years ago. And Canada's food price report says food prices are 27% higher over those five years. So even when inflation slows, households are still living inside a much higher price level.

Policymakers need to stop pretending affordability is solved because the CPI is lower than it was in 2022. Lower inflation is better than higher inflation, sure, but it's not the same. as relief. Fifth, Canada needs a more honest conversation about demand and capacity, including immigration and temporary resident policy. That does not mean crude scapegoating. It means acknowledging arithmetic. If population grows faster than housing, infrastructure, and services can respond, of course affordability will get worse. Statistics Canada says the recent surge in population growth was driven heavily by growth in non-permanent residents. And Ottawa has since moved to reduce both permanent resident targets

and temporary resident pressures in response to concerns about housing and services. A serious country aligns growth with capacity. It does not pretend demand and supply are completely unrelated. Sixth, Canada needs to take monetary credibility seriously. The Bank of Canada cannot fix zoning growth. grocery competition or global commodity shocks, but it does have a role in protecting purchasing power. The bank says its inflation target exists to keep inflation low, stable, and predictable because that helps households and business plan. Stable monetary matters because people need to know that their paycheck, their savings, and their planning are not being quietly hollowed out.

and above all, policy needs to focus on essentials. Housing, food, energy, transportation, because this is where the crisis is actually being lived. Canada has to stop governing affordability like it is a messaging problem. This is not about finding a better slogan or explaining how this year's inflation is better, It is not about picking a villain.

It is not about pretending one interest group has the whole answer. It is, in my opinion, about whether the country can still do hard, boring, structural things. Approve faster housing. Build infrastructure. On time. Increase supply where needed. Protect competition. Raise productivity.

Match growth to capacity. and tell the truth about the trade-offs of all of this. Because that is really what this crisis has exposed. Not just the prices went up, but the Canada's ability to respond to obvious pressure points, housing, groceries, infrastructure, productivity, has looked slow, fragmented, and often unsurious. And that is what makes people feel crazy.

Because most Canadians do not expect life to be easy. A lot of people work really hard. but they do expect the basics to be possible. A home. Food. A future that feels reachable. A paycheck that means something. And when those basics start slipping out of reach,

the question stops being, why is everything so expensive? The question becomes, what kind of country are we building if ordinary people start to not believe it's affordable to live there. Conclusion. The cost of living crisis is not just about prices. It's about trust as well.

Canadians were first reassured that pandemic era inflation pressures would moderate. And they were told much of it was global. Then they were told inflation was easing. And all the while, people kept looking at rent, groceries, mortgages and coffee, thinking, that may be true on paper, but it is not true at my kitchen table. The data explained why that feeling never went away, because Statistics Canada confirmed in 2025 that 20% higher prices over a five-year span. And Canada's food price report says 27% higher for food prices over a five-year span.

And the truth is, wages have not delivered the kind of relief people we're hoping for. Average hourly wages were up 3.9% over a year in February 26. And average weekly earnings were up 2% year over year in 2026. That is not nothing, but it is nowhere near enough to make people feel like ordinary life has become easy again after years of higher shelter, food and debt costs. Then governments make the picture feel even more disconnected. In BC, budget 2026 expands the PST base. to include professional services such as accounting, bookkeeping, engineering, and commercial real estate fees. Federally, the consumer carbon tax was removed effective April 1st, 2025, but the industrial carbon tax remains in place,

and the federal benchmark schedule still rises by $15 per ton per year up to 2030. Even when those policies are defended on their own terms, ordinary people look at the cumulative effective and think, you still do not seem to understand what daily life costs. And that is the closing moral. A society can survive high prices more easily than it can survive the feeling that nobody in charge really understands what ordinary life costs anymore. That is the deeper danger here, in my view. It is not just that groceries are expensive or rent is absurd or mortgages feel like a punishment.

It is that the political class, The media class and the so-called expert class increasingly sound like they are describing a country from a great distance. They speak in averages, they speak in forecasts, they speak in carefully managed phrases, and ordinary people keep doing the math at the checkout line, at the gas pump, and at the kitchen table. A real plan has to be put forward, not a slogan, not a press release, a plan people can understand.

A plan that says, how we will build more housing, how we will protect competition, how we will bring down pressures on essentials, how we will match growth to capacity, how we will make work savings and planning mean something again because in the end the cost of living crisis is not just a test of economics. It is a test of whether this country still knows how to tell the truth about ordinary life. and if the people in charge cannot do that Canadians will stop trusting not just their explanations

but their legitimacy see.