Is Canada becoming unlivable?

There used to be a certain smugness to being Canadian. Not in a bad way, just quiet, polite confidence. We had universal healthcare. We were ranked among the happiest countries in the world. We were not in the US. That last point alone felt like enough. For a long time, Canada was the responsible older sibling of North America: stable, affordable, and deeply proud of it.

That reputation is starting to crack.

Ask anyone under forty how they are doing financially and prepare yourself for the sigh that follows. The job market is sluggish, rent is astronomical, groceries feel like luxury purchase, and homeownership (once a reasonable life goal) has quietly become a fantasy for an entire generation. The Canadian dream has moved somewhere much harder to reach.

The housing situation alone tells a damning story. In Halifax, a city that was once celebrated as an affordable alternative to Toronto and Vancouver, rents have climbed 70% over the past decade. The average two-bedroom now runs over $1,800 a month, and a 2025 CMHC report found that rents jump 29% when a unit turns over to a new tenant. The result? People are afraid to move. They cling to their current apartment like a life raft, because the moment they leave, they might not be able to afford to come back. Halifax residents and housing advocates have started using a phrase that would have sounded absurd ten years ago: the city is becoming “unlivable.”

Halifax is not an outlier. In cities like Toronto and Vancouver, the situation is worse. A single-bedroom apartment in some neighbourhoods requires an income that most Canadians simply don’t earn. While wages have technically risen, they have not kept pace with the cost of, well, existing. According to Statistics Canada, the share of Canadians facing financial difficulties jumped from 18.6% in 2021 to 32.8% in 2024. Nearly one in three people struggling to keep up, in a country that used to sell itself on stability.

Then there is the healthcare system, which has been quietly unravelling for years. Approximately 6.5 million Canadians currently don’t have a family doctor. More than three million are on waitlists for care. The free healthcare that made Canadians feel so smugly fortunate is technically still free, but it’s just increasingly unavailable.

The OSAP cuts hit post-secondary students hard too, pulling the rug out from under people who were already stretching to afford tuition, rent, and ramen simultaneously. Education was supposed to be the path out. Now it’s part of the financial trap.

So, what are people doing? Leaving. In 2024, more people emigrated from Canada than in any year since the 1960s; over 106,000 people, a 3% increase from the year before. The brain drain is real and accelerating. Young professionals, recent graduates, and even newcomers who arrived seeking opportunity are now reconsidering.

None of this means Canada is a bad country. It is not. The bones are still good, but there is a widening gap between the Canada we were raised to believe in and the Canada that exists right now, and that gap is being felt most sharply by the people who can least afford to absorb it.

The smugness is fading, and in its place is something more uncomfortable: the creeping suspicion that the country we bragged about might need to do some serious work to earn that pride back.