For the person supposedly looking after Canada’s finances, Chrystia Freeland sounds more like the anxious manager of a payday loan outfit, relentlessly touting deals to the truly desperate.
Trying to extricate themselves from beneath the utter mess they’ve made of the housing market, the governing Liberals are now promoting 30-year mortgages for younger Canadians, promising this makes such loans much more affordable.
Yeah sure, your monthly payment will drop a tad, but just wait until that first annual statement arrives, showing exactly what you owe after 12 months of serious shelling out.
Nope, that bottom-line number staring you bleakly in the face isn’t some annoying typo. And yes, it has indeed barely budged since happily signing your John Henry – with an excited flourish perhaps – on that mortgage document pushed across the desk by the nice lady at the bank.
That’s because, during this extra five years tacked onto the traditional quarter-century mortgage, most first-time homebuyers are paying almost nothing off the cost of their house or condo. It’s almost all interest. You’ll hardly own the front step, for heaven’s sake, even after that first fistful of years.
Sadly, given the paucity of money management taught in schools, no doubt many younger folk think Finance Minister Freeland is doing them a favour by promoting this expansion of home-loan time periods.
No, she’s not. She’s trying to save her own political skin, because, thanks to her government’s stupidity, starter home prices are now well beyond reach for most young Canadians.
Her boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, engaged in similar shenanigans recently by announcing halal mortgages would go mainstream, pretending this was some nebulous racial fairness measure. In reality, it was simply another desperate attempt to get out from under the issue that promises to obliterate the Grits come the next election.
That’s why, in an attempt to save their political skin, any measure suggesting a modicum of relief from a lack of affordable housing gets the Liberal green light. The resulting financial or emotional cost is immaterial: it’s purely about survival.
Trudeau and company have only themselves to blame for this predicament.
First, the prime minister admitted he doesn’t think about monetary policy, even though it was the Bank of Canada’s initial rush to drive mortgage rates to ridiculous lows that kicked off this affordability crisis.
Of course, would-be homeowners then piled in, grabbing as large a house as they thought affordable, only to get sideswiped when those same bankers jacked up rates with a vengeance to curb the very inflation they’d encouraged with their own loose monetary policy. (No wonder Trudeau doesn’t want to bother with such stuff.)
So, with house prices now out of sight, the Liberals thought this a perfect time to open the floodgates and invite 1,271,872 newcomers into Canada in a single year.
Never before had we seen so many people flood in as in 2023 – courtesy of regular immigration, temporary guest workers, overseas students and Ukrainian refugees. Did anyone in government ever consider where these folk would all live? Probably not, would be the likeliest answer.
Hey presto, Canada found itself with a housing crisis on its hands.
So now, in typical Liberal fashion, the government is riding to its own rescue. Or at least it constantly brags about doing so in a flurry of press releases, the latest one concerning this 30-year mortgage boondoggle.
That it puts young Canadians on the hook for massive amounts of interest payments, as they start out on their own, doesn’t bother politicians such as Freeland one jot.
All that matters is the next election. What a dreadful message that sends.