I often have this discussion with friends and colleagues. I can mention some points here.

The real difference between the two choices is one word: Equity.

With renting, some of the responsibilities of maintaining a house and being locked in to a mortgage would not be your concern, however, each dollar that you spend in rent disappears into someone else's pocket.

With ownership, you have to pay the interest on the mortgage loan, insurance, property taxes, costs to the maintenance, hot water tank rental (just to name a few) and etc. But beside those expenses, and the interest portion of your mortgage, you are building equity in the property, in that the portion of the mortgage payment you make that go towards decreasing the total loan amount is your own and belongs to you.

So I often tell people that a rent v buy comparison is really a comparison of 2 sets of numbers.

1) Does the monthly expense of owning a property (not including the mortgage payment that goes to the principle of the loan) match the rental costs? If all of the property taxes, insurance, maintenance costs, heating, water, electricity and the interest portion of the mortgage and etc in their total, amount to the same or less than the rental costs, then buying would save you more money.

2) Mortgage rate compared to your housing market price increase/decrease rate, and also compared to your possible other investment return rates. Buying a property ties away a lot of money that otherwise you can invest and get a return. If interest rates are low and your local housing market is predicted to rise in prices, and you don't have the option to invest your money in order to get a return that is as high as the housing market price increases, then you should buy. Similarly, if interest rates are high (not the case right now) and you have a lot of funds laying around and you are a savvy investor who can get higher returns investing in stocks/securities and etc than what the housing market growth offers, then rent.

I do not know anything about the property market in NL so I really don't know if you can expect price increases in the future or price decreases. But I do think with COVID, with Britain exiting the EU, and with what has happened in terms of American immigration policies in the last 4 years, more and more immigrants are looking at Canada as their top choice in terms of living, and immigrants are the large force in driving Western real estate prices upwards.