The reality of the middle class in a country like ours is that it is not easy to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in their savings. At the end of the month, if you’ve fulfilled all your obligations, unless you win the lottery, there’s not much left.
The most frugal will manage to put a few aside, a good habit, but many others will have trouble actually saving. This is even more true when you have children to feed, clothe, and educate.
In summary, the wealth of many middle-class families will be built around two things: the pension fund and property. If you pay for your property every month, you have to save on housing. If you pay for your property every month, you are also investing in an excellent investment that will increase in value.
For this reason, I have been obsessed in politics and media for more than twenty years that the proportion of Quebecers who own property is increasing as fast as possible. And that’s why I also believe that we have to create the conditions so that the rising generations have access to property as early as possible.
Depressing numbers
The latest census is really depressing. Exceptionally since World War II, access to property has declined over the past decade. The percentage of households that are homeowners has declined in both Quebec and Canada. Worse, that rate has fallen even more dramatically among young people aged 25-29, from 38% to 34%.
Four percent is huge with this type of data. We don’t buy houses like jewelry. These are long-term data that fluctuate very slowly and are generally always increasing in an ever-richer society. The natural inheritance of inheritance from one generation to the next contributes to this constant and healthy growth. The decline of the last decade is a real alarm.
Two facts make these data even more worrying. This decade saw exceptionally low interest rates, which should make home buying easier. Even the census conducted in 2021 only very partially takes into account the explosion in real estate values that we have seen during the pandemic.
The Quebec case
The saddest thing is that Quebec lags behind Canada in terms of home ownership rates. Of all Canadian provinces we are by far the tenant people. It’s been like this since we can find statistics. In other matters, we’ve made tremendous strides since the Quiet Revolution. We lagged behind by around ten percentage points on this variable.
This is a major factor in the long-term impoverishment of the middle class. Taxation, taxation, rules of the real estate market, all parties claiming to care about the economy should be obsessed with this decline.
