Bloomberg recently reported that Canada admitted 321,065 permanent residents last year. This is up 12% from 2017, where the country admitted 286,479. Last year was also the largest cohort since 1913 (the year before World War I), where the country admitted just over 400,000 people.

Here is a chart from Bloomberg (it is interactive if you click through):

Of course, Canada was a much smaller country back in 1913 (about 7.6 million people), and so on a percentage basis we are much lower than where we were at the beginning of the 20th century. We'd have to admit close to 2 million permanent residents a year to get to a similar rate.

And that is not what is in the books. Here are the projected admissions for 2019 to 2021. All of the below stats are from the 2018 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration.

I couldn't find a geographic breakdown for last year, but in 2017, about 40% of admitted permanent residents (or 111,925 total) ended up in Ontario and about 72% ended up in Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta (the top 3 provinces for this year). If we add in BC, it brings this figure up to 86%.

Here are also the top 10 countries of origin:

If you'd like to download a PDF of the full report, you can do that here.

This morning, I am looking at the following chart of average home prices in the Greater Toronto Area:

It’s from this Globe and Mail article.

These are staggering numbers. The average price of a detached home in the suburbs (905 area code) increased 21% year-over-year. In the city (416 area code), the increase was 19.6% YOY. These numbers are almost unbelievable.

The article focuses on low supply (decrease in listings) and high demand. And that is certainly a big part of what’s going on here in this city, as well as in many others.

But of course, the backdrop to all of this is our low / zero / negative interest rate environment.

Larry Summers has a great post on his blog (which I discovered this morning via Fred Wilson) that talks about this “remarkable financial moment.” In some instances, real interest rates are actually negative! (You should read his post.)

There are always people threatening that interests rates just have to go up. But Larry, as well as others, continue to argue that natural real interest rates are likely to remain close to zero going forward.

Fred mentions Albert Wenger on his blog this morning and I have written about him before as well, here. In his book World After Capital, Albert argues that capital is no longer the scarce resource of our time. Instead, it has become attention.

If you believe all of this to be true, then perhaps the numbers at the top of this post aren’t so unbelievable after all.