High house prices prompt two in five new immigrants to consider moving: poll – National

A new poll finds that high home prices are causing nearly 40 percent of the country’s new immigrants to consider moving to another province, or even to another province altogether.

Respondents to the Angus Reid Institute poll most often said that if they were to leave the province where they currently live, they would move to Alberta.

“In Toronto and Vancouver the long-term risk is [of a mass exodus of new immigrants] would be one of losing the workforce needed to keep city centers running,” the pollster wrote in an accompanying note to the poll. Global News obtained an advance copy of the poll, which will be released Wednesday.

For the purposes of this study, a “new immigrant” is a person who has been in Canada for 10 years or less.

“As more immigrants pursue the Canadian dream from abroad, many who arrived in recent years have discovered it is less of a dream and more of a nightmare,” the pollster wrote.

But it’s not just new immigrants who are ready to move to find a better deal on housing. The survey found that 28 percent of all Canadians are seriously considering leaving their province because of high housing costs.

Of those who say they are considering moving from their current province, 15 percent said they would move to the U.S., while 28 percent said they would move to a country other than the U.S.

The survey found that 45 percent of people considering a change of address would move to another location in Canada. Of those, 18 percent said they would consider moving to Alberta, 10 percent said they would move to Atlantic Canada, 6 percent to British Columbia, 4 percent to Ontario, and 2 percent said Saskatchewan or Quebec would be better places.

The Angus Reid Institute online survey was self-administered and completed June 14-20. The pollster said 4,204 adults responded and that the demographics of the survey reflected those of Canada’s adult population. Due to the survey’s methodology, a margin of error cannot be calculated.

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