Winnipeg is worse off than those places. a) Vancouver is a world class city bound my mountains on one side and an ocean on the other. Not only is there demand from China, Hong Kong, etc..., There's a physical limit on what you can build to satisfy the demand. Vancouver has also always had more expensive housing than anywhere in Canada and has always had some of the lowest wages in Canada. That's a city almost entirely unaffected by the local economy. b) Nobody from Calgary is moving to Winnipeg unless they were originally from here and lost their job. That doesn't happen. Manitoba's economy is still orders of magnitude smaller than Calgary even with oil at $50/barrel. Their economy might be contracting, but that still leaves it far better off than Manitoba's regardless of meaningless growth rates the Free Press likes to trot out. c) Manitoba's real estate values have moved inversely in lock step with interest rates. There haven't been any more houses sold in the last ten years than the previous ten - it's always somewhere around 12,000. And there are no barriers to building here; There's no greenbelt and there are no physical limitations. So there isn't anything that would limit supply in the long run. And since it's been merely speculation that's driven values (speculation that has now proven mostly incorrect), housing values will settle back into where they should, which is in line with local incomes.

Another surprising thing is that the people who are most stretched are the ones in the middle. The $250-280K homes. They're the most heavily leveraged. So the market will start there. More surprisingly is that very few people in the upper echelons of the market have insured mortgages because they were able to cash out equity into their new purchase. They're the ones who have nothing to worry about. Those values will move too because that's just how markets work, but most of them have very little risk and won't be in a hurry to dispose if things ever went far south.