The Housing Tax: How Canada's Affordability Crisis Is Extracting a Measurable Toll on Economic Productivity and Labour Mobility

New research from the Bank of Canada quantifies what many economists have suspected: that the country's housing affordability crisis is functioning as a structural drag on GDP, reducing labour mobility between cities by 23 percent, increasing wage demands in constrained markets by 18 percent, and contributing to a skills mismatch that is costing the economy an estimated CAD 35 billion annually.