Talk like that worries Toronto Coun. Gord Perks, who chairs the city’s planning and housing committee: “What happens to the city of Toronto if nurses can’t live here? If people working in your local grocery store can’t afford to live here? If the people who work in your local packing plant can’t afford to live here? What does Toronto become? It’s not a pretty picture. It’s a terrible, terrible future.”

From July 1, 2020-2021, the most recent year for which detailed migration data is available, 203,115 people left Toronto while 92,175 people relocated there from within Canada. Nearly 80 per cent of those who left the city stayed in Ontario while 20 per cent left the province for another part of the country. “I don’t think any community can thrive without a strong middle class and that’s essentially who’s leaving,” said Moffatt [senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute and an assistant professor in the business, economics and public policy group at Western University]. “It’s a massive problem.”

It’s a problem not just for Toronto but for the municipalities that these urbanites are flooding into that lack the infrastructure to support their new residents. [Moffatt] uses his own hometown of London, Ont., as an example. City council adopted its official plan in 2016, which projected a population of 458,000 on Canada Day in the year 2035. As of last Canada Day, the population is 474,000. “In a matter of seven years, it’s already had 20 years of growth,” he said.

Everybody should be worried about Toronto becoming the next San Francisco, said Moffatt, referring to a city now dominated by rich tech people with homes worth an awful lot of money, high rates of homelessness, and where schools now provide housing for teachers because there’s nowhere they can afford to live.