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Canadians are Not Happy

Canaletto – Badminton House, collection of the Duke of Beaufort. Title: Badminton House, Gloucestershire. Date: 1749.

A recent global happiness survey conducted by the World Happiness Report has shown that Canadians now rank 15 on a country by country scale. This is a 5 place drop from Canada’s previous rank of 10.

On an absolute and relative level, the conclusion is simple: Canadians are not happy.

You might argue that Canadians are happier than people in Moldova or India, and you’re probably right. The thing is, people don’t measure satisfaction based on how bad things could be. They compare their standing against others around them. And against their own experiences.

The whole world has gone through lockdowns, Covid deaths and massive lifestyle changes. So if everything were equal, you’d expect the rankings to remain constant. Clearly, Canada is going through something other countries aren’t. The right will blame the left. Left the right. There’s so much subjectivity in these kinds of surveys that who’s to really know.

One thing is clear though. The countries with the happiest citizens are socialist paradises: Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland and Netherlands. These are countries that take care of their people. Indeed, 9 of the top 10 countries were European.

The anomaly was New Zealand – probably the most European country outside of the EU. Canada used to fit that description.

So what went wrong? The most objective answer I can provide is economic. A growing proportion of Canadians can’t afford one of the most basic of Maslow’s needs: Shelter.

Rents and home prices across Canadian regions with the most jobs are higher than almost anywhere else in the world, in relation to median incomes. Moreover, the unaffordability gap is widening. Every day, housing prices are rising faster than most individuals’ ability to save for a down payment.

It used to be that a nuclear family could live quite well off a single blue collar wage. Today, many Canadians are abandoning the idea of ever having kids – they have nowhere to put them.

I’m not saying these Canadians are living on the street. They’re living with parents and sharing apartments. But they’re doing so way longer than previous generations. With the light at the end of the tunnel shrinking, this dependency on the kindness of others to meet a basic physiological requirement is stressful, and unusual for most Canadians throughout modern history.

When basic physiological needs – like shelter – are not met, people are unable to pursue safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. They are unable to develop as humans, therefore limiting their capacity for happiness.

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Toronto Housing Bubble Shrinking Talent Pool

Photo by Zia Syed on Unsplash

I recently hired two people to join my team, which is domiciled in Toronto. Both of my new employees live miles and miles away from the GTA. One jetted to Montreal when the pandemic started, and honestly I don’t know if he’s coming back.

Who can blame them? These are well-paid individuals, but who can afford to live in Hog Town? Certainly not people in the early stages of their career.

And those that do live in the GTA require a premium to make it all work. Wage growth overall has fallen behind housing price increases, but those in demand can hold out for higher wages. Want a highly-skilled Toronto employee? Then better be prepared to pay Toronto wages! Of course, it doesn’t work that way for all. Low-skilled workers are sharing apartments and living with their parents, as Toronto is now a city that is only accessible to the wealthy.

It’s a sad state of affairs. But one to which employers must adapt.

Highly skilled people are moving further and further away from the Big Smoke, simply because – even with decent wages – they can’t afford to live in Toronto.

If Toronto is to remain a business hub, three things must happen: 1) housing stock must increase to dampen housing price appreciation, 2) demand from speculators and money launderers must be squashed, 3) regional transit must improve to allow suburban dwellers to quickly commute to the city, 4) companies must embrace remote working beyond the pandemic, 5) companies must decentralize head office work by setting up offices across a wider region and 6) companies must raise wages to attract talent that is leaving for cheaper cities.

Hiring skilled employees is a highly competitive marketplace. If a prospect has multiple options, they will go with the company that is more flexible and willing to let them work from a location that doesn’t put them in debt for several lifetimes or pays them a premium for coming into a Toronto office.

Many companies are dealing with this problem by shoving their heads in the sand. Executives don’t realize how big this issues is because they tend to hire more senior employees earning $150,000+ salaries who have been on the property ladder for 10+ years.

For middle-managers and supervisors in the trenches, the prospect of hiring a junior-level employee for $55,000 is laughable. Anyone willing and able to accept that salary either lives with their parents or lives 100 miles away. And when a business is able to hire someone at this level – knowing the housing situation at hand – that person will quickly seek to move up the ranks. That means far less loyalty from junior employees than what companies might have seen in the past.

Due to the housing bubble, the war on talent in Toronto has evolved dramatically over the past year or two. Businesses that ignore the problem will lose talent. Businesses that embrace the challenge will become attractive places to work.

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Real Estate

The Death of Toronto’s Middle Class

Photo by Cindy Tang on Unsplash

The middle class in Toronto is dying. Some would argue it is already dead.

With the average home price in Toronto flirting with $1 million, most Torontonians have zero hope of ever affording a home. Nope. Real estate is now the sandbox for the rich and their heirs.

A Millennial or Gen Z with a top 10% income and aggressive savings plan will never afford a home.

Over the past decade, the average annual price increase has been over $51,000. This will only worsen as prices rise at an exponential rate. Indeed, over the past 12 months, the price of an average home in Toronto rose by over $81,000. This means if you didn’t save more than $81,000 over the past 12 months your ability to buy a house hasn’t improved.

Even with an astronomical 50% savings rate, a couple would need to have a gross income of $220,000 ($110,000 each) just to keep up with rising house prices. And they’d have to save/earn considerably more to put a dent into their proportional down payment.

This is next to impossible for families in Toronto – the median family income in Toronto is $86,600, according to Statistics Canada.

Nobody but the ultra rich are able chase home prices, and this real estate reality is spreading throughout Canada. Frankly, this is disgusting and will have a huge impact to the quality of life and stability of Canadian society.

Toronto homeowners are now made up of three classes of people. 1) True middle-class and working class people who bought their house decades ago. 2) The moneyed class. 3) Foreign speculators and money launderers.

Eventually, legacy homeowners will die off or sell their homes to fund retirement and we’ll be left with a housing stock fully owned by the rich. Where will the average person live then? Who the fuck knows.

Working class and middle class people lucky enough to have bought a house decades ago likely have a lot of equity. You’re probably thinking they should just take out a second mortgage and give their kids a couple hundred grand towards a down payment. This is what many people do, but it’s not without massive downside. Effectively, it simply spreads the cost of home ownership across generations. Moreover, it puts people who are approaching retirement severely in debt. The initial intent is that the kids repay their parents, but that’s highly infeasible while they still owe the bank $800,000. Giving the money back to parents might take decades, by which point their parents are working themselves to death to repay their second mortgage and afford retirement. So not only is the middle class collapse hitting Millennials and Generation Z, it’s impacting Generation X and even younger Boomers, who can no longer retire (a component of the middle class dream).

None of this takes into consideration that this massive pile of mortgage debt is balancing on a knife’s edge of low interest rates and presumed real estate price appreciation. Canadians are so indebted that the slightest reversal of these two assumptions can collapse the Canadian economy.

This is everyone’s problem. The middle class – citizenry with a decent paycheque and a decent quality of life – is the glue that holds society together. If the most basic necessity (shelter) is unobtainable – or only obtainable by taking massive risk and to the detriment of every other part of dream – there will be no middle class.

Fairness, justice, economic prosperity, social stability all require a solid middle class (and vice versa). The further stratification of society into a rich minority and poor majority will only lead to a mass population with nothing to gain…and nothing to lose.

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