I wish it were as simple as giving a quick answer, but there's not one factor. We can trace back some of the challenges to decisions made in maybe the late eighties and certainly the early nineties to cut government-funded affordable housing programs. The need for low-income families is different, although happening in parallel, to the challenges we've seen more recently in the market.
You have 30 years of a failure to invest, and I should say that both Liberal and Conservative governments are guilty of this mistake, which we started to correct in 2017 with the national housing strategy. We need to continue to use that strategy to invest in affordable housing for low-income families. We also need to increase the ambition of some of those programs to build more affordable homes, to build more co-operative homes and to build more housing supply outside of the market.
Within the market, there are a number of factors present right now. Some of them are driven by changes to the rate of interest, which have made it more difficult for people to afford the home they already have or to get into the market in the first place. Others are driven by the fact that within the market, when interest rates were very low, in some communities across Canada—including mine—a buying frenzy took place. In my community, it was disproportionately by people coming from Ontario during the pandemic, who bought up a lot of the properties on the market. This has reduced the vacancy rate in some communities, which puts pressure on, frankly, both the rental market and the home ownership market. Of course, when you layer on top of that this increase in the rate of interest, it exacerbates the nature of the challenge for people who missed the opportunity to get into the market at the time and who are now facing it.
Certain communities have seen dramatic increases in population from different sources. Again, in my community it was mostly through people coming from Ontario. There are communities with a significant influx of temporary residents, like international students, for example, in college and university towns. This has had local impacts.
There's not one factor. When you see the confluence of these various factors happening simultaneously—some that were built up over decades and some that are more recent developments—you see that it's created a perfect storm that has increased the cost of renting or buying a home. That is having a very real impact on people and we need to address it.