Canadian Dream: OMNI poll finds fewer immigrants believe home ownership is attainable
Posted Dec 15, 2025 07:05:19 AM.
Last Updated Dec 15, 2025 10:10:02 AM.
Julie Ann Melchor flips through a photo album in her living room, decked out in holiday decorations. On the Christmas tree, hanging like an ornament, a picture of her family by a lake – her two kids smiling and squinting in the sun – offers a peek into warmer days, in sharp contrast with the snow blanketing Red Deer County.
“We’ve been living a better life since we moved to Alberta,” she says. “The quality of life that we have here is not comparable to what we’ve had before.”
Her family relocated to Red Deer County in 2023, after a rough few years in the Greater Toronto Area, where they bought their first home in 2021.
“It was not easy,” she tells OMNI News, explaining that even with her job as a nurse and her husband making a good salary, they found it increasingly hard to get to the end of the month.
“My husband would work 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes six to seven days a week, just for us to keep up with our expenses and especially our mortgage. It was a real struggle.”
When their mortgage payments nearly doubled, they rented out their home, moved back in with her parents, and picked up extra work until they decided to pack up and find a house in Alberta.
“Why settle in a place that has very expensive homes?” she asks. “Why not just go somewhere that’s more affordable, [where you] can live a better life than working two, three, four jobs like we did before?”
Melchor is not alone. According to a recent Leger poll conducted exclusively for OMNI News, 44 per cent of newcomers have considered relocating to another city or province due to the cost of housing.
The survey found that while owning a home remains part of the Canadian dream for the vast majority of immigrants, 56 per cent believe that it is attainable – a larger share compared to 2024.
“The last couple of years, I had clients who moved to Alberta, who moved to different parts of Canada,” Gizele Mirasol, a Toronto real estate broker, tells OMNI. “Now it’s the opposite. We have a lot more inventory.”
Yet, half of the newcomers surveyed by the OMNI-Leger poll admit that they struggle month to month to pay their mortgage or rent, and 54 per cent say the cost of living in Canada is too high.
Most newcomers are happy they moved to Canada, despite shifting expectations
Alfred Lam, the Executive Director of the Centre for Immigrant and Community Services in Toronto, believes that most immigrants are well aware of the challenges they might face when they come to Canada, and that when it comes to housing affordability, they know that it is not something that is limited only to them.
“They are no strangers to facing difficulties in terms of affordability. But the reason why they still feel that [moving to Canada] is a right decision, I think, has a lot to do with their hope for the future.”
The OMNI-Leger poll shows that over 80 per cent of immigrants are satisfied with their decision to move to Canada.
For many, the Canadian dream still means a better standard of living, greater career opportunities, and personal safety.
However, the percentage of those who expect their new life in Canada to come with financial stability has gone down compared to last year, while the number of immigrants who believe owning a home is linked to the Canadian dream has more than doubled since 2023.
Six in 10 immigrants say the Canadian Dream is further out of reach
Jayson Jeng has lived in Toronto for about 10 years, and he jokes that if he could deliver a message to his younger self, he would “absolutely tell him to buy a house sooner.”
“Canada has seen a massive increase in housing prices over the past decade,” he tells OMNI after touring a house that just came on the market. “Over 10 years, it’s probably doubled.”
Still, as he continues to look for a place to call home, he doesn’t feel like he let his Canadian dream slip away.
“Now I have three boys, a bigger family, a good job,” he says. “I already made my dream come true.”
The OMNI-Leger poll found that the number of immigrants who believe that the Canadian dream seems further out of reach has been slowly increasing over the past three years, up to 61 per cent in 2025.
But back at the Centre for Immigrant and Community Services, Lam stresses that as more and more newcomers choose to leave, a bit of optimism is crucial to helping them build their life here.
“Of all of our struggles, I think a lot of people still consider Canada as having a positive road ahead,” he adds. “That sense of optimism is what is driving the immigrants’ desire to stay and really try to establish a new life.”
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The poll was completed between Oct. 2 and Oct. 15, 2025, among 1,510 respondents who were all born outside Canada, using Leger’s online panel. The polling industry’s professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
This story is part of a series from OMNI News with data released throughout the month.
