By many global mea­sures we are a blessed bas­tion of priv­i­lege, peace, freedom—and big roomy houses

Macleans

We are Canada. At 144 years we are nei­ther young nor old, as nations go. And nations do come and do go, it bears remem­ber­ing. You don’t have to be very old to appre­ci­ate that the world map that occu­pied a cor­ner of your child­hood class­room is a relic of another age; that bor­ders once drawn in blood aren’t indeli­ble at all, they are just lines to be moved, or bent or erased by pop­u­lar will. Yet, here we are, still in this together, and doing rather well.

Like any wor­thy anniver­sary, it is deserv­ing of cel­e­bra­tion but also of the appre­ci­a­tion that future years together aren’t guar­an­teed, they must be earned, and mutu­ally agreed upon. Back when Canada was a mere pup of 115 years, Ralph Klein, then the brash young mayor of a brash young Cal­gary, called Canada, “per­haps the only coun­try in the world held together by curios­ity.” He asked if such a con­fed­er­a­tion of inter­ests and regions can endure. “[N]o one is quite pre­pared to give up on her yet,” he said, “as if we all have some lin­ger­ing desire to see how this ongo­ing exer­cise in nation-building ends.”

And why not? No. 143 was not the eas­i­est of years, but it was largely free of any soul-sucking exis­ten­tial debate on Canada’s future. There was a fed­eral elec­tion, and no one died in the process. Eco­nomic uncer­tainty lingers, but we emerged stronger than the year before, and health­ier in most every sense than a long list of wealthy, devel­oped nations. And, yes, let’s not lose sight of that inar­guable fact: we are rich.

Read on. Our Canada Day gift to you is a gen­tle reminder that by many global mea­sures we are a blessed bas­tion of priv­i­lege, peace, freedom—and big roomy houses.

REAL ESTATE: We have the roomi­est homes on earth

You’d never know it from watch­ing MTV Cribs, a pro­gram where rap­per 50 Cent once showed off his 50,000-sq.-foot Con­necti­cut man­sion (18 bed­rooms, 25 bath­rooms, an ele­va­tor, two bil­liard rooms), but the aver­age Cana­dian fam­ily actu­ally has their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts beat when it comes to liv­ing large. A recent sur­vey by the Organ­i­sa­tion for Eco­nomic Co-operation and Devel­op­ment (OECD) found the aver­age Cana­dian home boasts 2.5 rooms per per­son, more than the 2.3 room aver­age in the U.S., and the high­est among the 34 OECD mem­ber coun­tries, where the aver­age was just 1.6 rooms.

Canada’s reign­ing sta­tus as a coun­try of big, roomy houses is a direct result of our hot real estate mar­ket, which escaped the global eco­nomic down­turn rel­a­tively unscathed. While the U.S. has yet to recover from the sub­prime mort­gage cri­sis and the sub­se­quent reces­sion, Cana­di­ans have con­tin­ued to take advan­tage of rock-bottom inter­est rates to buy big­ger and bet­ter prop­er­ties, forc­ing prices ever higher. That includes first-time home­buy­ers who aban­doned cramped rental suites for more spa­cious con­dos, and exist­ing home­own­ers who jumped at the oppor­tu­nity to sell into a hot mar­ket and move into their dream homes. More impres­sive is that Cana­di­ans have man­aged all this while work­ing an aver­age of just 1,699 hours a year. That’s well below what the aver­age Amer­i­can works (1,768 hours) and the OECD aver­age (1,739 hours).

The country’s infat­u­a­tion with home own­er­ship has been a boon for real estate agents, lawyers, house “fluffers” and con­trac­tors of all stripes. Mean­while, retail­ers like Rona and Cana­dian Tire are rid­ing a result­ing wave of DIY home improve­ment efforts. (It’s no coin­ci­dence that when Ottawa sought to prop up the econ­omy in 2009, it intro­duced a pop­u­lar tax credit of up to $1,350 for Cana­di­ans who spent money on home ren­o­va­tions.) Canada has even man­aged to accom­plish a rare feat in the world of tele­vi­sion after HGTV Canada launched the pro­gram Prop­erty Vir­gins in 2006, only to have the series expanded to the U.S. mar­ket the fol­low­ing sea­son (Cana­dian view­ers were also treated to their own ver­sion of MTV Cribs around the same time).

But before we get too cocky, it’s worth recall­ing that we got here largely by bor­row­ing a lot of money. Cana­dian house­hold debt lev­els now sit at 146.9 per cent of income. That’s sig­nif­i­cantly higher than the 130 per cent reached in the U.S. prior to the crash (it has since fallen to 113 per cent). With Cana­dian home­own­ers increas­ingly stretched thin, some econ­o­mists are wor­ried about the country’s abil­ity to with­stand another eco­nomic shock. On the other hand, cash-strapped Cana­di­ans will always have the option of rent­ing out an extra room to make ends meet.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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