Commentary
For years, federal ministers have offered Canadians a consoling explanation for why they cannot afford homes: housing has become unaffordable everywhere, a global phenomenon driven by pandemic disruptions, interest rates, and population growth spurred in large part by federal immigration targets.
The 2026 Demographia International Housing Affordability report, co-published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, has now been released and features 96 data points across eight countries. The numbers do not support that story.
Demographia measures affordability using the median multiple, the ratio of median house price to median household income. The benchmark is simple: a ratio of 3.0 or below is affordable. That is not an arbitrary standard. As recently as 1990, virtually every market now covered by the survey, including those in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, posted national ratios not far from 3.0. That was what housing markets looked like when land supply was competitive, and planning systems did not artificially restrict where cities could grow….