Last week several Canadian cities released August home sales results and, to little surprise, buyers have greeted the Bank of Canada’s initial rate cuts with a collective shrug.

Sales remain subdued, inventory continues to rise, and prices are mostly flat to lower. At best, lower rates have provided limited stability, without sparking a recovery. Sales in Canada’s priciest region, Greater Vancouver, plunged 17 percent from a year ago and remain 26 percent below the decade norm for the month. Active listings shot up 37 percent year-over-year and are 21 percent above normal. Accordingly, benchmark prices slipped in the month and are down 0.9 percent year-over-year. The super-expensive detached homes market favours buyers—if only they could afford them. The only reason prices haven’t fallen faster is that sellers aren’t desperate and believe lower rates will eventually harden demand.

In the nation’s second-priciest region, Greater Toronto, sales rose modestly in August, but remained 5.3 percent below year-ago levels, after falling in five of the prior six months. Active listings jumped 46 percent year-over-year, sending benchmark prices down 4.6 percent, though they have steadied recently. Condo prices are even weaker due to a glut of small investor-owned units that few people wish to squeeze into. Driving west along the 401 highway in search of more affordable options, sales remain soft in the London/St. Thomas region (-6.0 percent year-over-year) while active listings have shot up 19 percent, creating an ample five-month supply and sending median prices down 3.2 percent year-over-year. Travelling further west, sales in Windsor remain well below normal, but have firmed in the past year, bringing growth in median prices to 1.9 percent year-over-year.

Outside B.C. and Ontario, the less expensive regions of the country have cooled a bit, possibly due to a decrease in international students. Calgary’s sales are down 20 percent from last year’s record high, but remain 17 percent above long-run norms. Sellers, though still calling the shots given the tight 2.1-month supply, have ceded some pricing power as inventories jumped 37 percent in the past year. Benchmark price gains have moderated to 6.3 percent year-over-year from double-digit gains earlier this year. Edmonton’s robust market has also piped down, with sales off 12 percent in the month though still up 16 percent in the past year, and benchmark prices are up 7.6 percent year-over-year.

The affordable pockets of the country should benefit more from further rate reductions. Meanwhile, the still-expensive regions are unlikely to make much headway until the central bank has chopped rates further (we see another 125 basis points by June 2025). With the five-year Canada rate at a 16-month low of 2.8 percent, a sub-four percent fixed mortgage rate could be in the offing.  However, barring an even larger drop, poor affordability will likely remain an issue in B.C. and Ontario. Given ample supply and soft prices, buyers are in no rush to jump into the market, while sellers (and notably investors) are likely to take advantage of any upturn in prices to add to supply. The recovery is coming, but it won’t be V-shaped. That’s good news for buyers and borrowers, as the central bank likely won’t need to worry about a resurgence in shelter costs fanning inflation.

This article was originally published at BMO.

It has become common for the fussier sort of journalist to complain about politicians, especially conservative politicians, who belittle the advice of academics and experts. But if law professor Ben Perrin’s latest book, Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial, is what passes for academic expertise these days, then those politicians should double-down on their disdain.

It is a difficult work to classify: too casual for scholarship, too dull for beach reading, it belongs to that peculiarly Canadian genre of subsidised, orthodox non-fiction. You know the type: a glowing endorsement from an admirable Canadian (in this case, Jody Wilson-Raybould); a Big Idea backed by anecdotal vignettes; and every few pages a sentence that begins “There is a saying that …” At the end of the book, Perrin provides the contact number for Canada suicide prevention services, which is thoughtful but unnecessary. The book is bad, but not that bad.

Perrin’s thesis is that Canada’s criminal justice system is inundated by criminals suffering from trauma—racial trauma, historical trauma, settler-colonial trauma, incarceration trauma, intergenerational trauma—and that unless we upend the entire system and remake it from top to bottom, it will continue to fail them and us. There’s no point in objecting that, although there is some obvious truth in the diagnosis, the prescription is delusive, because this isn’t intended to be a piece of thoughtful and balanced academic work (at least I hope it isn’t)—it’s a manifesto.

Perrin introduces his case through a series of personal stories drawn from dozens of interviews with putatively illustrative victims of the justice system. No doubt this is intended to make the argument more approachable. Unfortunately, his clumsy attempts to launder ideology through anecdotes end up sounding manipulative and feeling exploitative. By telling his subjects’ stories in their own voices, Perrin tries to give them agency^{1How much agency, of course, we don’t know, as the stories feel heavily edited.}, but by constantly minimising their culpability he takes it right back.

Consider “Lana,” who was the “victim” of engaging in a high speed police chase with her boyfriend and a friend of his they picked up beside the road, who just happened to be armed. When the police finally caught up with them and arrested her boyfriend less tenderly than she would have liked, Lana was indignant: “We complied to their demands of us getting out of the vehicle in a timely manner.” As though after leading a multi-car chase that endangered her passengers, the police, and the public, that’s the real concern.

Perrin takes up her story: “As a result of the incident, Lana developed severe PTSD, including vivid flashbacks,” he writes. “Before she was eager to try and work with the police to help the missing and murdered. But now, she says ‘I don’t want anything to do with the police.’ And all because she just stopped to give someone a ride.” Well, that’s not exactly “all” that happened now is it, counsellor. There was a little more to the story than that.