Thank you, Mr. Chair.
To follow up on the points that Ms. Niles raised, we would like to add the following. Our union represents international students and migrant workers across Canada. So we're seriously concerned by the fact that too many people say, on the one hand, that there's a causal link between international students and temporary foreign workers arriving in Canada, and, on the other, that this puts upward pressure on housing prices. This is a baseless argument that could destabilize our national consensus on immigration.
The members of our communities, who are already more likely to be marginalized and who are victims of the housing crisis, are being told that they're the cause of that crisis.
Migrants are not pushing rents up. Landlords are choosing to increase rents. Government is allowing investors to gamble with housing and to push prices up. There is no peer-reviewed evidence showing a causal link between immigration and the housing crisis, but there is evidence showing that predatory, deep-pocketed investors rely on weak tenant protections and a virtually unregulated real estate market to inflate prices and to profit from them.
Thank you very much.