$40 million lottery ticket sold in B.C., same month as record prize win
British Columbia's provincial flag flies in Ottawa, Friday July 3, 2020. (Adrian Wyld / The Canadian Press)
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CTV News
19 minutes ago
- CTV News
Toronto housing among least affordable on this global index. Here's what experts say needs to change
A new global index suggests Toronto is among the world's worst cities when it comes to housing affordability — as experts blame decades of policy missteps, development delays, and overwhelming population demand for the problem. The 2025 Global Cities Index from Oxford Economics finds that as a result of Toronto's expensive real estate market, residents 'spend more of their income on housing than residents of nearly every other city in the world.' While the federal government recently promised to eliminate the GST on first-time home purchases under $1 million, critics argue that restrictive housing policies, costly development charges and sluggish approvals have created a market that's out of reach for most buyers. The average price of a home in the Toronto area did decline four per cent year-over-year in May but still stood at more than $1.1 million, according to the latest data from the Toronto Region Real Estate Board. 'Over the past 20 years Toronto's population has grown by 35 per cent but affordable housing hasn't kept up. The result? Life is getting too expensive for families,' Mayor Olivia Chow said during a press conference on Friday. 'Young people are giving up on the dream of home ownership.' The City of Toronto has a program where it will defer development fees for some projects so long as at least 20 per cent of its units are affordable. However, demand for the program has far exceeded the city's ability to fund it and as a result Chow says that there are projects totalling 300,000 new units from about 70 different developers that are 'shovel ready' and just 'sitting there in the pipeline' waiting for funding from other levels of government. In Toronto alone, development fees can add more than $100,000 to the cost of a new home and in some areas in the GTA development fees can easily double that, says Frank Clayton, Senior Research Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University. Prime Minister Mark Carney has previously promised to help municipalities reduce those fees by 50 per cent through additional payments that could be distributed by the provinces though he has not provided a timeline for those investments. 'If a municipality takes $200,000 up front, developers got to increase their prices such that $200,000 is reflected ultimately in the price of the house,' Clayton said. 'Builders won't build, unless they can cover their costs.' Toronto housing A real estate sign is displayed on the front lawn of a house in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, May 11, 2017. Clayton identifies three key culprits behind Toronto's crisis: high fees, restrictive planning rules, and relentless demand — the latter driven in part by immigration. Last year alone, nearly 300,000 newcomers arrived in the region, fuelling further housing pressure. 'You need sites. You need sites that are zoned, and you need sites that are serviced,' Clayton said. 'The planning system is very unresponsive to changes in demand.' 'We have to act now' New home sales in the GTA hit a seventh consecutive month of record all-time lows in April, owing in part to a significant reduction in housing starts. Dave Wilkes, president and CEO of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), says time is running out to fix the system. 'We are seeing real market consequences. 80,000 people leave the GTA,' Wilkes said. 'The longer we wait, the longer that it's going to take to balance supply and demand.' Wilkes is calling for urgent action on housing taxes — especially the harmonized sales tax (HST) formula, which hasn't been revised since 1991. 'Making that change on HST today is the most immediate thing we could do,' Wilkes said. 'It would bring costs down by a dramatic 13 per cent for the first million dollars of a purchase.' He also warned that the federal government's plan to remove GST only for homes under $1 million misses the mark in high-cost cities like Toronto, where the average sale price sits well above that. 'Under a million is just not a product type that is available in the GTA,' he emphasized. Row of houses in Toronto Children ride bikes by a row of houses in Toronto on Tuesday July 12, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston What is the market is lacking? Jason Mercer, Chief Information Officer for the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, says affordability has technically improved — but warns that too little new construction could reverse that trend. 'Two years ago, a lot of households simply wouldn't have qualified,' Mercer said. 'Today, I would argue that a lot of those households could qualify, because prices have edged lower and interest rates have come down.' Still, Mercer says demand will eventually rebound, and if the city can't match it with supply, prices will climb again. 'We haven't done a good job keeping up with housing supply to meet that population growth,' he said. 'From a public policy perspective, we want to look at ways that we see sort of a sustained pipeline of new housing coming online.' A turning point with urgency Clayton says the roots of the crisis stretch back to the early-2000s when Ontario shifted its land-use focus towards environmental protection, including the establishment of the Greenbelt. He argues the policy limited where housing could be built, and gave too much power to growth management plans that discouraged the types of homes most people want — townhouses and detached units. 'We have to have a competitive supply of land,' Clayton said. 'Because if there's competition, then prices don't go up very much.' Despite efforts from all levels of government to address the issue — including a recent Ontario bill aimed at speeding up construction — most experts agree that housing affordability won't be meaningfully restored unless there's a broad and urgent shift in policy, from zoning and fees to taxes and timelines. 'The time for discussion has concluded. We really need the time for action,' Wilkes said.
CTV News
19 minutes ago
- CTV News
A father living in Canada faces indefinite separation from his son with Trump's travel ban
Noor, 19, lives in Michigan with his grandparents. His refugee claim was severed from his parents in 2019. He was deemed inadmissible because he was born in the U.S. After years of living in Canadian immigration limbo, a father fears that U.S. President Donald Trump's new travel ban will separate his oldest child from him. Mohammad Alshuwaiter is a Yemeni refugee living in Ottawa, but his son, Noor, lives in Dearborn, Michigan with his grandparents. Yemen is one of the 12 countries included in Trump's executive order banning its citizens from entering the U.S. The others are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. The U.S. president has accused the countries of insufficient vetting of travel documents, high visa overstay rates, and in some cases, of being state sponsors of terrorism. When it takes effect on June 9, immigration lawyers say there could be thousands of foreign nationals like Alshuwaiter in Canada who will be prevented from entering the United States. 'People who are not yet citizens of Canada will be affected deeply and be caught up in the sweeping breadth of this proclamation,' says Ottawa immigration lawyer Warren Creates. He says permanent residents from banned countries should expect to have their freedom curtailed at the border. 'Some who've already had their backgrounds vetted by our national security services, by outlaw enforcement and think that they're safe and in the past have been able to freely travel to the United States -- that will no longer be true,' Creates said. Such warnings are adding to the weight on Alshuwaiter's shoulders. The 49-year-old international law and human rights researcher says Trump's new policy will add a 'layer of suffering' to what he has experienced so far in the Canadian immigration system. Trump travel ban Trump's travel ban could prevent Alshuwaiter, a Yemeni National from crossing into the U.S. to visit his son. He last saw his 19-year-old son in March and worries that it could be years before he can embrace his son again. '(Noor) is studying abroad. How can I support him? I am broken-hearted,' said Alshuwaiter in an emotional interview with CTV News. Alshuwaiter's immigration challenges began under the first Trump administration. After he was awarded a U.S. Fullbright scholarship to study law at American University in Washington, D.C., Alshuwaiter moved his wife and two kids to the U.S. They arrived just three months before civil war broke out in Yemen. Because his wife was related to Yemen's deposed president Ali Abdullah Saleh, the couple, concerned about their safety, applied for asylum in the U.S. They were rejected in 2018, a year after Trump issued his first travel ban on countries with predominantly Muslim populations. That's when the family decided to claim refugee status in Canada. The threat of family separation has hung over the family since they began the process to get permanent residence status. In May 2019, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada ruled that Noor, who was 13-years-old at the time, could not be part of his parent's asylum claim because he was born in the U.S. and was therefore 'neither a conventional refugee, nor a person in need of protection.' After being categorized as a failed refugee applicant, the possibility of deportation loomed over Noor. But Alshuwaiter was hopeful all would work out once their permanent residence application was approved. Alshuwaiter's immigration lawyer Jacqueline Bonisteel says in immigration cases in which a minor is born in another country, the child is usually granted PR status, once the parents' applications are approved. It's a process that usually takes about three years, but Alshuwaiter's PR application has dragged on for more than twice that length of time. Despite multiple requests for updates, Bonisteel says immigration authorities have refused to provide information as to what is causing the delays. Meanwhile Alshuwaiter could see the growing frustration in his eldest son as he entered high school. 'I'm happy to sacrifice my career to give my kids a better life - but when I'm screwed - my kids' (lives) are screwed too.' Trump travel ban Yemen is one of the 12 countries included in Trump's executive order banning its citizens from entering the U.S. As an American kid without status living in Canada, Noor couldn't do basic things that teenagers take for granted. He couldn't get a social insurance number, so he could not open a bank account. He couldn't get a job or get a driver's license. 'It made me feel different. More different than my parents. They didn't have (PR) status, but I was even less than that.' said Noor in a FaceTime interview from Detroit. Noor said he also wanted to start applying for college programs, but because he was born in the U.S., he would have to pay international student fees, which his parents could not afford. After Noor told his father that he 'felt like nothing,' Alshuwaiter and his wife made the decision to send Noor to Michigan to live with his grandparents in 2023 and to continue his schooling. Enrolled in a college construction engineering program, Noor would take a break from his studies every few months to return to Ottawa. His journey across the border by Greyhound bus would always involve being pulled aside for additional questioning. But after explaining to Canadian border officials his family's immigration status and showing them his American passport, Noor says he would usually be waived through. But those visits ended abruptly last month. In May, a CBSA agent decided to enforce the 2019 immigration ruling which labeled Noor a failed refugee applicant. He was denied entry into Canada and flagged for deportation should he return. He was only a half hour away from where his parents and younger brother were waiting for him in Windsor, Ont. Meanwhile his father is suing Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada in Federal Court to force the government to disclose the reasons for delay and to issue a decision on granting him permanent residence. It has been seven years since he first applied, and so far, no court date has been set. Even if Alshuwaiter gets permanent residence status, it won't be enough to get around Trump's new travel ban. For that, he needs to be a Canadian citizen. Until then, the Alshuwaiter family remain in a state of limbo, forced to separate by the immigration policies of two countries they had hoped to call home.
CTV News
an hour ago
- CTV News
What to expect from upcoming G7 Summit in Canada?
Watch Senator Peter Bohem speaks about PM Carney's priorities for the upcoming G7 Summit and the impact Trump's presence will have.
