Empire-Advance

    Population growth and immigration numbers are in the news again.

    In 2023, 2,656 people left Manitoba, 25,591 people moved into Manitoba, 11,994 people died and 17,146 babies were born. The Province of Manitoba wants to bring in another 12,000 foreign worker immigrants in 2025. Companies are begging for more workers to fill waiting jobs in many sectors. Universities and Colleges are protesting cuts in foreign student numbers imposed by the federal government. Educational institutions have been charging much higher fees for foreign students than Canadians. There’s a lot of forces at play here.
  The federal cutback on foreign students is coming as many places in Canada simply can’t find housing for the extra students or workers. An internet search on January 13, 2025 showed eleven real estate listings for Neepawa, 52 for Virden, eleven in Rivers and 103 for Brandon. Some of those listings are empty lots so they are likely a year away from a liveable house. It appears that in rural Manitoba a serviced lot for a single family home runs around $45-60,000.
  The upcoming Liberal leadership race and the likely soon to follow Canadian election will be fought on many issues but two of the big ones will be immigration and housing. How many newcomers does Canada need or more importantly, how many newcomers can be housed?
  In some smaller towns, there has always been the question as to why not convert unused retail space into housing. There is a general rule, enforced, I believe, by the province that only the back half of retail main floor space can be used for housing. In Neepawa, new apartments have to have one and a half parking spots per residence. That seems restrictive.
  Some rural towns have strict regulations against modular homes and almost no provision for so-called “Tiny Homes”. That’s a bit ironic as there are, in most small towns, some very small one bedroom houses that have been there for many decades. Back in the day, people built what they could afford as opposed to building the most you can finance nowadays.
  Now this is an interesting point. If you add up all the homes in Canada and all the families or people that need homes, we likely have way more than one home per family. How so? Just count up the number of times where people own two or three homes and I don’t mean rental properties. If you figure in all the cottages and summer homes, there are way more homes in Canada than we “need”. If we lived in a communist country, and that wouldn’t be a good thing, there would be more than enough houses as one family would only theoretically be “allowed” to own one home.
  There’s another little secret and that is Manitoba Housing. It has, at times, been a gong show where there are empty MH units in rural towns. Some have been sold off, some aren’t rented and some have been let go to ruin. I guess that shows up the bad side of government owned housing.
  The Conservative Party of Canada, or at least their leader Pierre Poilievre, claims to have a lot of solutions to housing. It looks like they could be in power in a few months so it will be interesting to see how they handle housing and immigrations.
  One thing, when towns started to get a larger number of foreign workers, there were a few people who objected that the newcomers were “taking our kids jobs.” It didn’t take long to debunk that idea by simply asking, “Oh, where are your kids now?” The answer was often a city far away. Newcomers didn’t take “kids’ jobs”, the kids left a long time ago and many wouldn’t take the kinds of jobs newcomers would do anyway.
  The next few months will be interesting times.
 Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the writer’s personal views and are not to be taken as being the view of the newspaper staff.