Justin Trudeau’s Liberal reign didn’t just open Canada’s borders—it flung them wide, unleashing an immigration tsunami that drowned affordability and left the poor scrambling for scraps. From 2015 to 2025, his government welcomed over 4 million newcomers, jacking annual targets from 300,000 to a reckless 500,000 by 2022, only dialing back to 395,000 in 2025 after the damage was done. The result? A housing crisis on steroids, skyrocketing rents, and a betrayal of Canada’s most vulnerable—all while Mark Carney, Trudeau’s handpicked heir, struts in with a cabinet steeped in this chaos. Far from fixing it, Carney’s crew—Trudeau’s old guard—owns this disaster, and their fingerprints are all over the economic wreckage.
Let’s break it down, because the numbers don’t lie. Trudeau’s immigration surge slammed an already strained housing market. In 2022 alone, StatsCan clocked 432,000 new permanent residents—plus 550,000 temporary workers and students—while builders eked out just 220,000 new homes. That’s 4.7 people per new unit, a demand spike that sent prices soaring. Toronto home values jumped 70% from 2015 to 2023; Vancouver hit 60%. Economists peg the immigration-driven demand as a key culprit: each 100,000 newcomers need 40,000 homes, yet supply lagged at half that pace. By 2024, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation warned of a 3.5-million-unit shortfall—670,000 tied directly to Trudeau’s border binge, as Immigration Minister Marc Miller accidentally admitted before he was axed.
Rentals? A bloodbath. With ownership out of reach, newcomers flooded the rental market, driving vacancy rates to a razor-thin 1.5% in cities like Toronto by 2023. Average rents leapt 30% in five years—$2,500 for a one-bedroom in Vancouver, $2,200 in Toronto—while wage growth crawled at 2% annually. For landlords, it was a gold rush; for tenants, a chokehold. Posts on X in early 2025 raged: “Trudeau’s immigration flood turned rentals into a luxury good—$3K for a basement now,” one user vented. Another snapped, “Liberals built a landlord’s paradise while we fight for crumbs.” The math backs it: 1 million extra renters in a decade, chasing a stock that grew by just 200,000 units.
Now, the poor—screwed hardest. Affordable housing didn’t just stagnate; it vanished. Developers, chasing fat margins, built condos for wealthy immigrants and investors—70% of new Toronto units in 2023 were high-end—while low-income stock shrank. Public housing waitlists ballooned to 180,000 in Ontario alone, and shelters overflowed as rents ate 50% of minimum-wage incomes. The economic ripple? A 2024 Bank of Canada study found immigration juiced GDP by 2% annually but widened inequality—newcomers and the poor competed for the same dwindling cheap units, pushing rents up and availability down. The Liberals’ $10 billion Housing Accelerator Fund? A drop in the bucket, funding 50,000 units by 2025 while demand soared past 1 million.
Who orchestrated this chaos? Carney’s cabinet, that’s who. Dominic LeBlanc, now International Trade Minister, was Trudeau’s Intergovernmental Affairs Minister, smoothing provinces into swallowing the influx despite their crumbling infrastructure. Mélanie Joly, Carney’s Foreign Affairs Minister, sat in Trudeau’s cabinet as cities begged for housing relief—silent as a stone. Chrystia Freeland, now Transport Minister, was Trudeau’s Finance Minister, pumping out budgets that ignored supply while immigration targets climbed. And François-Philippe Champagne, Carney’s Finance Minister, was Innovation Minister, touting “growth” as rents choked the poor. These aren’t bystanders; they’re the engineers of a policy that turned Canada into a landlord’s playground.
Carney’s no innocent, either. As Trudeau’s economic guru in 2024, he cheered the immigration boom as “vital” for labor markets—never mind the housing carnage. Now PM since March 2025, he’s dodging the fallout, mumbling about “streamlining” while keeping the same crew. X users saw through it in March: “Carney’s got Trudeau’s immigration clowns—housing’s still a disaster,” one posted. Another fumed, “Same corrupt MPs, same open-border mess.” The economic truth? Immigration spiked GDP but cratered living standards—homeownership for under-35s fell from 50% in 2015 to 35% in 2025, and rent burdens hit record highs. The poor got poorer, the rich got condos.
The Liberals sued critics here, too. When provinces like Alberta pushed back on asylum claims clogging borders—40,000 in 2023 alone—Trudeau’s government, with Carney’s future team in tow, smeared them as “xenophobic” and tied them up in court. Now, with Trump’s trade threats looming, Carney’s pitching “stability”—but how stable is a country where the poor sleep in tents and newcomers bid up shoebox rentals? His cabinet’s not a reset; it’s a rerun of Trudeau’s immigration chaos, with an economic bill the vulnerable can’t pay.
This isn’t just policy gone wrong—it’s a calculated shafting of Canadians, from renters to the destitute, all while Carney and his Trudeau holdovers shrug.