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I don't think this is true. Housing will always be a politically important issue, and it should be. There are so many tensions pulling different ways. Old people want to keep value and pass it to their kids, young people want affordable housing (unless they are getting the inheritance!), what type of housing and how much is something people complain about all the time. Whether it is a neighbor complaining about a single house being built too tall or a community complaining about low-rent housing. 30 years ago half the complaints I was dealing with in a local authority in the Midlands in England were about housing one way or another.
It's impossible to satisfy all the competing demands at once, which means politics. Housing is not a good like any other because you can't pick it up and move it with you. It is tied to a locale and to a community. HOA's as much as people hate them form for a reason. Where we live, how much it costs and who gets to live next to us, is probably one of the fundamental bedrocks of politics, from HOA's to redlining and segregation, affordable housing NIMBY/YIMBY.
So I would say it can be both that Canada is a normal society, that housing is a politically important issue and that getting the balance of competing interests wrong can have a huge knock on effect onto society.
It's even more obvious if you move a step down from housing to land-ownership. Who owns the land has been a political question since Ur and Leviticus.
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I think it's fair to say that things become political issues when they are broken.
In Sweden, in 1990, I doubt crime was a political issue. Now it is.
There have been times when housing wasn't on anyone's political radar. Now it's one of the most important issues is many countries. That's because housing is broken now.
1991 was actually the first time when Sweden elected a right-wing populist party to the Riksdag, and at least according to Wikipedia, they "wanted to invest heavily in the fight against drug abuse and street violence, and impose severe penalties for what it called related "gangster activity." It wanted to implement harder punishments for violent crime, and life imprisonment for the most dangerous criminals", so there must have been something there.
That wasn't really why they were elected though, since it wasn't much if a salient issue. The overriding political issue was the extremely severe financial crisis and the financial mismanagement by the social democrats, not anything else.
They were elected as combination of being a protest party, general (rightwing) economic populism and anti-immigration.
That said, there were definitely problems with crime and the great Nordic biker war started in '94.
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