Vance blames immigrants for Canada’s “terrible” quality of living

In a series of Twitter posts on Friday, US Vice President JD Vance reposted a graph tracking the change in GDP per person of the US, UK, and Canada.

While there are a truckload of problems with this specific statistic, It would be surprising if Vance even understood it past more GDP = rich people. Vance used it to claim that Canada has a worse standard of living than both the US and the UK.

He also added that Canada’s politics “focus obsessively on the United States,” and he assured Canadians that “your stagnating living standards have nothing to do with Donald Trump or whatever bogeyman the CBC tells you to blame.” Just ignore the trade war, okay?

While it’s true that quality of life has taken a downturn amongst all Western countries over the last five years, has Canada really fared worse than everyone else?

When compared to the US, it doesn’t seem so bad. Canada’s life expectancy is three years higher, and the gun homicide rate is less than a quarter of America’s. Canada came 14^th on the 2025 Global Peace Index ranking, and the US finished 132^nd.

Canada ranks higher than the US in work-life balance, quality of healthcare, public school performance, freedom, debt ratio, air quality, and just about every other quality of life metric we look at.

Of course, Canada doesn’t excel in every metric. Canada ranks low for cost of living, and does poorly in Numbeo’s model (though the US does very well, leaving experts highly doubtful of the model’s accuracy). For example, Numbeo ranked Canada right next to Lebanon in terms of safety (yes, seriously).

There is also a significant amount of evidence pointing away from immigration being the root of Canada’s problems. Canada’s housing crisis does not come from too many people or too few properties; it’s due to a lack of restrictions on developers and the mass purchase of rental housing to use for independent capitalist ventures.

In 2018, the Ontario government created a loophole for developers building new projects that allowed them to avoid pesky rent control laws. Now in 2025, Doug Ford is finishing what he started and pushing to abolish rent control entirely.

Hard to blame immigrants for rental prices when your government lets corporations raise your rent by 100 per cent each year.

It’s estimated that one in five properties in Canada are owned by investment companies, looking to squeeze Canadians for as much as they can. There are also approximately 250,000 rental properties being used for short-term vacation rentals on Airbnb or other apps.

The problem doesn’t lie with the people; it sits high above and is entirely due to greed.