As the housing affordability crisis continues to impact Canadians across the country, a majority of immigrants feels they are being unfairly blamed, as they themselves see the dream of home ownership slip further out of reach.

A poll commissioned exclusively for OMNI by Leger found that nearly seven in 10 new Canadians think politicians are using immigration as a “red herring” to distract from other factors contributing to the lack of affordable housing, such as government policies and economic conditions.

The federal government is planning on bringing the share of temporary residents to 5 per cent of Canada’s total population, down from 6.5 percent.

According to a housing expert, however, “relatively high immigration numbers” don’t necessarily mean newcomers are responsible for high shelter costs.

“One big issue, as we know, is that some areas just have a higher percentage of population of new immigrants than they used to, and as a result they get used as a scapegoat for the housing crisis,” says Prentiss Dantzler, the Director of the Housing Justice Lab at the University of Toronto. “People forget that this housing crisis is not new. We’ve been dealing with this for a long time.”

“There’s a lot of blame to go around, but a lot of time people are focusing on other individuals and not focusing on the housing system itself,” he told OMNI News.

Dantzler points out that a lot of the housing stock is not even being bought up by individuals, but by private equity firms or other companies, and that the number of condos on the market means the system “is not serving a diverse portfolio of families.”

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