If there’s one thing Canadians can reliably expect from our housing market as we approach the spring, it’s plenty of drama.
No matter which group the market ends up favouring – those in search of a home or those looking to offload one – the high costs and high stakes of Canadian real estate are guaranteed to stir up the kind of suspense typical of a bingeworthy TV show. By its very nature, our market-based housing system is adversarial. It pits buyers against sellers and renters against landlords in a battle for fairness and fortune. That our system produces winners and losers has become a perverse but accepted norm in our society; it’s just the way it works.
By virtually any other measure, however, it doesn’t work very well at all.
