Yup. The Republican plan in the US, just about ten years late.
It works, except that the ideological inbreeding results in candidates that are completely batshit, having had no exposure to anyone outside their social bubble. They think they’re reasonable, until they’re babbling online about Jewish space lasers starting wildfires.
The prime minister is meeting with his youth advisory board this week to hear its most 'pressing concerns,' with the aim of informing future policy decisions.
Housing would be nice, but how about electoral reform?
Or, you know, fucking actually do something instead of endless committees, boards, surveys and studies. You know what you need to to:
Build housing directly (like, employ people, buy land and buy equipment, don’t subcontract)
Tightly regulate the market
Tax the rich to pay for it …but you won’t do it because it would cost your donor class money.
I’m sick of this. This government didn’t need a study when they bought a pipeline for Alberta, and they didn’t need a study to buy fridges for Galen Weston. They only need studies when they don’t want to do something.
Want a model of what to do? Look at Doug Ford. That corrupt mobster-wannabee just straight up sold government land for pennies on the dollar and netted his daughter’s wedding guests billions. Did he have a committee or a study? Nope, just git’r’done.
Holy shit, you’re the goverment. You can print money. You can even claim all sorts of Keynesian multipliers as to why it’s worth doing. Just fucking do it.
Yeah, much as I agree that there’s a good reason for this, it’s really not the best optics to do this right now, and I really do wonder if the reason it’s even being floated is a) to get people to engage on a frivolous issue instead of real ones, and/or b) for the media to generate rage-clicks.
The problem is, for a neoliberal government, wealth extraction is the point. They’ll look at the system and see it working as intended.
On the flip side, massive build-outs of affordable housing is all downside: it doesn’t make rich people the maximum amount of money, it requires wealth distribution downwards and there’s little to no incentive to get private sector participation.
I don’t think people realize how much government has changed since ~1979 and ~1995, or how we have had two to three whole generations of politicians and civil servants who have gone their whole careers believing that government shovelling money at the private sector is the only way to do things.
Here’s a little thought experiment:
name me one institution implemented entirely with public funds since 1995. You can even go as far back as 1980, if you want. I’m an Ontarian, so something like GO Transit, the AGO, TVO, the Ontario Science Centre, Ontario Place, etc. The number is probably around zero.
Now, list all the entities sold off since then. The list is long, and contains some things you probably didn’t realize, like Potash Corp, Air Canada, CN, Petro Canada and more. Think about how much money we’d have, how many services we’d still have, how much we’d be able to do about, eg, climate change if we had even a few of these.
It’s a real gut-punch to realize we sold our future to billionaries for pennies on the dollar, and now those same billionaires are squeezing us for more.
It would be relatively straightforward to block Monopoly getting played should the bubble burst–legislatively speaking–but it would require governments to intervene against it’s donor class.
Hawaii’s post-disaster response is a good template: the government has threatened to buy land to prevent investors and speculators from doing the same. In Canada, this would be like a bizarro-world version of Doug Ford’s Greenbelt giveaway: where the government buys more land, and more houses, to block speculators.
I can’t see it happening, because our leaders are either feckless cowards (on the left) or complete corporate toadies (on the right), but I can dream.
A crash isn’t a bad thing if you can build a firewall against profiteering. Governments could buy property, instead of allowing the wealthy to, and governments could force the rich to take a haircut and/or tax the hell out them and then spend our way out of recession.
It won’t happen, but it isn’t impossible or even improbable.
Housing Minister Sean Fraser says the federal government should have never got out of the housing business even as high-income professionals are struggling to find affordable housing....
No, really? Liberals talking up progressive policy options?
Either we’ve been time-warped back to the 1970s, or things are much, much worse than they’re letting on, or they’re going to call an election.
Regardless, call me when they commit funding–not when they “refer it to a committee” or “have a Royal Commission to study the issue”–and actually take action, or else I’ll consider this the “Electoral Reform” promise all over again.
Because we’ve learned that there’s 49% of humanity out there that we haven’t sold unrealistic physical and psycho-social trends to. Women are tapped out, but there’s a whole new market in men!
The average asking rent in Canada reached another record high of $2,078 in July. Rents increased 8.9% annually, the fastest pace of growth of the past three months. The 1.8% increase in average asking rents over June represented the fastest month-over-month growth of the past eight months.
Look, I love St. Catharines–hometown proud, yo!–but if you said to me “You can live in St. Catharines, or live in Montreal for the same price”, well, vive le Quebec!
To be fair, the reason they’re using it for retirement is because every other method (defined-benefit pensions, defined-contribution pensions, bonds, mutual funds, RRSPs) have been systematically broken by the wealthy.
The dotcom bust, and the lesser extend the 2008 crisis, wiped out a lot of Boomer and elder-Xer equity. Real estate was the next thing that “weath advisors” pushed after they ran the other options into the ground.
If people could retire with dignity and security, we probably could have headed off some of the early stages of the real estate speculation boom. Of course, that would have required rich people to make less money, or face some kind of consequence. As it stands, the economy suits them just fine, even if it fails everyone else.
There is a logic to this. Private developers will not make multi-year, large capital investments in something if they think that its value is guaranteed to decrease. That should be obvious.
Government can make large, multi-year capital investments, too. They just don’t want to, because we’re two generations of civil servants and politicians that consider publicly-provided services to be heretical.
You’ll note that anything that doesn’t involve giving money to the private sector is not done, and what little fully public institutions we still have left are a) from an earlier era, and b) so intrinsic to the cash flow of a functioning government that not even the most boot-licking Thatcherite can make a case for selling them off.
If the governments aren’t willing to do it themselves, they can just make it easier for corporations that are willing to provide non-market housing to get the property rights and loans needed to actually get this done.
As above, there is no appetite in government to do this as it would erode the ability of the wealthy to make money, and even if they did, developers would just build something expensive to maximize value.
The entire philosophy of how government delivers services would need to change, reversing course on a quarter-century of neoliberal policy.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says the uptake of a new savings account for first-time homebuyers is exceeding expectation, though she acknowledged the limits of what it can do to address affordability.
I’m supposed to save money–that I can’t save because rents are through the fucking roof–in an account that will probably lose money thanks to inflation.
Yeah, just say it: “We’re avoiding dealing with the problem but want to a) look like we’re doing something, and b) put the blame on the people trying to save for a home, instead of the investor class’ rampant speculation”.
Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. has forecast that the country needs 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than the country is currently on track to build.
So, and hear me out here, why the hell doesn’t the CMHC build public housing like they used to? You know, like before the late 1990s when every level of government just abdicated responsibility for anyone who wasn’t already rich.
It won’t last. Various “armpit” towns throughout Ontario are now unaffordable. North Bay, Timming, Peterborough, Thunder Bay: all of them were cheap, and fell to investor speculation-based increases.
I’d encourage other provinces to preemptively smack down speculation hard, now, before the problem metastasizes. Don’t wait until GTA or GVA property investors have played Monopoly in your small town; do it now, even if it offends a few established property owners.
Your price might go down, but that’s because you have the least amount of leverage. Same applies to customers, and to any smaller entity in the supply chain.
I’d also note the LCL, Empire and Metro didn’t hesitate to push on supplier increases, but also didn’t hesitate to raise resale at the same time. Most of them are seeing increased margins and they’re all seeing higher profit, which, if we had a fair tax structure, wouldn’t happen.
I work in distribution. Other than select contract negotiations at very high volumes, I can’t think of the last time I saw a price decrease go through, though I will say our fuel surcharge at least isn’t going up. So the rate of increase is slowing, but resale prices, by and large, are not going down. At best, this is the “new normal”
Social-conservative groups plan to take over Alberta school boards (rabble.ca)
Trudeau seeking advice from youth on 'pressing concerns' to inform future policy (www.ctvnews.ca)
The prime minister is meeting with his youth advisory board this week to hear its most 'pressing concerns,' with the aim of informing future policy decisions.
The 50 Most Valuable Companies in the World in 2023 (unilem.org)
source: visualcapitalist.com
Former Toronto mayors urge city staff to reconsider renaming Dundas Street (toronto.citynews.ca)
Three former Toronto mayors are expressing their opposition to changing the name of one of the city’s most well-known streets.
Canada likely sitting on the largest housing bubble of all time: Strategist - BNN Bloomberg (www.bnnbloomberg.ca)
Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort (thehub.ca)
The federal government must prioritize speed over micromanagement
Housing minister says federal government should have stayed in housing game (www.ctvnews.ca)
Housing Minister Sean Fraser says the federal government should have never got out of the housing business even as high-income professionals are struggling to find affordable housing....
The Strange Allure of Extreme Alpha Male Influencers (www.vice.com)
Rentals.ca August 2023 Rent Report (i.imgur.com)
The average asking rent in Canada reached another record high of $2,078 in July. Rents increased 8.9% annually, the fastest pace of growth of the past three months. The 1.8% increase in average asking rents over June represented the fastest month-over-month growth of the past eight months.
Canada wants to make homes affordable without crushing prices (www.bnnbloomberg.ca)
In a country with some of the world’s most expensive real estate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government wants housing to become more affordable.
Freeland touts home savings account, notes limits to addressing housing crisis (www.castanet.net)
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says the uptake of a new savings account for first-time homebuyers is exceeding expectation, though she acknowledged the limits of what it can do to address affordability.
Why it might be several years before homes are more affordable in Canada (www.bnnbloomberg.ca)
It may be several years yet before home prices fall back into an affordable range for the average Canadian, according to Oxford Economics.
This Vancouver home made $18K a month from short-term rentals. Are regulations working? | Globalnews.ca (globalnews.ca)
Housing might not be Trudeau's sole responsibility, but it's his problem | CBC News (www.cbc.ca)
Trans woman says ex keeps her testicles in fridge, demands their return (www.newsweek.com)
Canada’s inflation rate is plummeting, so why are grocery prices still so expensive? (www.ctvnews.ca)
TLDR; climate change, Russia, supply chain not recovered, labor shortages; more price increases expected :/