Soaring house prices have made buying a home difficult for Canadians, a situation experts attribute to various factors including policies at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Carleton University business professor Ian Lee is a former Bank of Montreal mortgage manager and pays close attention to housing markets and policy. “The housing crisis is not artificial, it’s very real. And there’s a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand—there are far fewer houses being built than there is demand for houses, and this has been documented report after report,” Lee said in an interview. A Scotiabank report shows that Canada currently has the lowest number of housing units per 1,000 residents of any G7 country, at 424 homes. It would need 1.8 million more homes for Canada to reach the G7 average of 471 homes per 1,000 residents. From 2000 to 2020, Canadian house prices rose 168.4 percent, by far the highest …