Best of 2023: Maclean’s top cost of living stories
Mortgage crunches, student housing struggles, food insecurity stories and more tales from Canada’s affordability crisis
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In 2023, it became a lot more expensive to live in Canada. Rampant inflation caused grocery prices to surge, forcing more people than ever to rely on food banks to feed their families. An already-crippling housing crisis, meanwhile, got even worse when the Bank of Canada imposed a series of dramatic rate-hikes, creating a nation-wide mortgage crunch. Rent became so unaffordable that tenants went on strike, while those who couldn’t afford any housing formed tent cities in public spaces across Canada. At Maclean’s, we documented this cost-of-living crisis through deeply reported features, probing interviews and intimate first-person stories. Here, the top 10 reads.
10. We bought an old ambulance and turned it into a home
“Some people think it’s cool that we live in a van, but other people think, Like, you’re just homeless? They don’t understand that we have a home, and we go to bed in a happy marriage every night. We have a place to cook and have our friends over to sing karaoke. Our van is our safe haven. It’s really hard for me to imagine going back to paying rent. With all of our costs included, we spend at most $1,800 a month, including $400 to $800 for gas, $133 for RV insurance, $15 for laundry, $80 for phone bills and $20 for water. All that money that we would have spent on rent, we can either save it or spend it on whatever we want.”
—Raychel Reimer, as told to Jadine Ngan
9. I’m fighting food inflation with extreme couponing
“On a recent grocery trip, I picked up milk, cheese, bread, frozen potatoes, chicken broth and lots more. My total was $95. I cashed in $15 worth of coupons, price matched, and earned back $25 in PC Optimum points, plus $8 cashback on another app I use, bringing my total to only $21. I’m getting a typical grocery order for 50 per cent off now, and in the past five years, I’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars on groceries, and racked up millions of loyalty points.”
—Raiza Ocampo, as told to Emily Latimer
8. I couldn’t find affordable student housing, so I settled for a mouldy basement
“When I went to check out my new room and descended into the basement, I immediately noticed how grimy it was. I also detected a foul smell, like damp wood or a cottage shed in the middle of summer. There were five roommates in total, all sharing one and a half bathrooms; the washroom with a shower had terrible ventilation, and mould forming on the ceiling and walls. There was no living room—we had little more than a kitchen for a common area.”
—Eric Cimic, as told to Matthew Silver
7. Revenge of the Renter
“Hundreds of tenants, struggling to afford skyrocketing rents, are refusing to pay their landlords at all. They call it a rent strike. The landlords say it’s illegal. An inside look at the frontier of a growing class war.”
— Jason McBride
6. My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month
“In the spring of 2022, rates started to rise, and I started to worry about just how high they’d go by the time we renewed the mortgage for a new term in July 2023. I reached out to my mortgage lender—one of the big Canadian banks—to find out if we could break the mortgage early, to lock in the then-current rates for a longer period. They wanted $12,000 to break it early, which we just couldn’t afford.
So we waited and watched. By fall, rates had hit five per cent. That would mean $850 more per month—$3,250 a month, almost $40,000 a year, just to keep the roof over our head. And rates were still rising.”
—Michelle Harris, as told to Andrea Yu
5. We’re retirees who bought a granny flat to live near our daughter and save money
“Our initial plan was to sever the two acres of property that included our home and allow Caitlyn to build her own house on the remaining 48 acres, but after much correspondence with the Ministry of Transportation, we discovered that we couldn’t get a land severance. They suggested that we look into a garden suite or granny flat: a small home typically built in a backyard adjacent to the main home. At first, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea. I was under the impression—like a lot of people—that a granny flat is one step up from a trailer. But within a few weeks, we started seeing the upsides.”
—Cathy Rivoire, as told to Ann Marie Elpa
4. Why an Ontario city is now permitting homeless encampments and tiny homes in parks
“Canada’s homelessness crisis went from bad to worse during the pandemic years, as encampments popped up in municipalities across the country. In the past, these tent cities were forcibly removed by local law enforcement. (For example: the now infamous operation to remove encampments in various Toronto parks.) But this month the city of Hamilton approved a fresh approach—one that acknowledges encampments as an interim reality of the housing crisis and attempts to balance the needs of all community members.”
—Courtney Shea
3. Our mortgage payments went up to more than $3,300 a month
“Our goal is to save $20,000 before starting a family, to supplement my maternity leave and Curtis’s paternity leave. But because so much of our money goes toward our mortgage, we’ve only saved about $5,000. It’ll take another year of saving to get to our mark. We wanted to get married in 2024, but those plans have been pushed back indefinitely.
It feels like we did everything right—saved up for a down payment, pursued stable careers, purchased a home, did the renovations ourselves. And yet we can barely afford to start a family. Our lives completely revolve around our mortgage.”
—Lauren Gilbert, as told to Matthew Silver
2. I work in a B.C. food bank. We’re serving triple the number of people we used to.
“About six months ago, a young single father came to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank. He was working full time, but his rent had gone up 20 per cent and he just couldn’t make ends meet. Unable to adequately feed his children, and with no other choice, he came to us. He was distraught. Like many people, he felt the stinging stigma of accepting charity, of asking for something as basic as food.
This is not an isolated or extreme case. It’s entirely typical, in fact, of the 17,000 people we currently serve each month at the GVFB. Last year, we gave out eight million pounds of food. And we’re not the only organization with such staggering numbers.”
—David Long
1. The End of Homeownership
“In the early 2010s, you could get a small one-bedroom or a studio apartment for $300,000 or so. That was a significant downgrade from my parents’ generation, for whom an equivalent inflation-adjusted sum would have bought a single-family home nearly anywhere in the city. But it was a foothold on the property ladder, and I believed then that it would be possible for all of us to do the same, to make our homes in this city we loved. We would, somehow, follow the upward trajectory of previous generations, whose rising incomes allowed them to graduate to homeownership in due course.
Besides, the market had to correct eventually, right?”
—Michelle Cyca