The Rental Overflow
More evidence that big city failures harm all of Canada
I have many complaints about Statcan. In particular, their rental market data is horrible, limited to a once per year rental market report. That report mostly discusses average rents, including folks who have lived in their place for many years (often with rent control) and don’t pay rents reflective of what’s available today.
I’ve been using rentals.ca for “asking rents”, but helpfully, Statcan has released their own version for metros across Canada back to 2019. Comparing both sources for Halifax, you can see they’ve both gone up a lot. But it looks like Statcan might be picking up the start of a decline (it’s also smoother, likely due to a largely sample size, which is helpful).
The new data also makes it much easier to analyze rents (at least back too 2019) across the country. And that allows me to come back to a major theme of the Canada’s rental problem, the overflow from the GTA (and GVA). As I wrote in January:
My preferred cause of Nova Scotia’s population surge is an overflow from Toronto, or rather the GTA, or rather basically all of Southern Ontario.
We can now see this much more clearly - and it’s not just Nova Scotia!
In fact, a very good predictor of how much rents increased between 2019 and 2025 was your rent in 2019. Cheaper cities in Atlantic Canada and Quebec saw the largest increase in rents, while the already-pricey Vancouver and Toronto regions saw the lowest increase in rents. The prairies avoided worse of the increases. The bubble size reflects population size, so you can see how important it is that Toronto and Vancouver figure out their problems.
Given that the news out of Toronto last week was a refusal to allow even 6 units in the city proper - the rest of country needs to prepare for more outflows from priced out Ontarians.