the low vacancy rate (i don't care about buying houses. i'm poor. complaints about difficulties entering the housing market or housing prices in general are completely irrelevant and of no interest to me. they are only of any minimal interest in the sense that cheap new houses would reduce pressure on the rental market, but people want to move from their parents' 4 bedroom houses to their own. they don't want starter houses and don't understand how equity works.) in canada is not due to immigration or supply. this is a false dichotomy.

the low vacancy rate is due to high immigration and low supply.

it would be nice to build more apartments, but the political system is stacked against it, which is why it's not happening. it isn't not happening due to an insufficient supply of labour; that has nothing to do with it. it's not happening because single-family property owners elect city council members that block it. rich people hate renters and don't want them in their wards. the absence of affordable apartment buildings is because rich property owners don't want affordable apartments, not because we don't have enough people to build them. rather, more immigration at the lower end of the market just places more stress on the market, and leads to higher rents, so rich property owners that survive by extracting rent will continue to dump more poor people on the market in order to maximize their rentier extraction, and then argue they can't build more housing because there's not enough labour. that's a myth. it's false. what is true is that the propertied class wants higher rents, so it supports high immigration levels and opposes the construction of new housing, to increase demand and restrict supply. there's no crisis of labour when it comes to building new condos, or building giant houses in the suburbs. the crisis of insufficient labour is only trotted out as a myth and a canard and an excuse to explain the absence of affordable housing. it's complete and utter bullshit - they're just trying to hike the rent by flooding the market, and then coming up with a bullshit excuse as to why they won't build more housing. yet, this is so entrenched that it's almost impossible to address, and there's essentially no hope of resolving the issue by building more housing.

so, it's a lot easier and more realistic to block immigration.

the basic point is that immigrants benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. that's the economics of it. all of the arguments in favour of immigration are good for rich people - it's true - but bad for poor people. the second part of the argument gets lost because the media doesn't care about what poor people want.

the ndp pretends to represent the poor but their policies consistently benefit the rich. it has never presented any kind of cogent reason as to why it supports immgration, it has only ever come up with canards and excuses and myths to explain why it opposes those who oppose immigration. well, the reason is that immigration benefits the rich. that's why they support it.

it makes sense for ndp voters to swing right on this issue and that shift isn't going to lift with rhetoric or reverse any time soon. this is about class interests.

the ndp needs to readdress the class interests around immigration and drop the bourgeois nonsense about "racism" and "diversity". those are just rhetorical excuses that the rich uses to attack the poor with. at a point of economic stress, historical ndp voters are seeing through these myths and rhetorical excuses and seeking policies aligned with their class interests and the ndp are failing to provide those policies. 

the results are not going to be in the interests of those voters in the long run, but it's at the least a valid expression of anger at policies that are not working for working class people.