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The article thankfully mentions what I believe is the main issue. Housing is a commodity now not a need to be filled.
Housing is now considered an investment. And investments are expected to go up in value. Since the majority of our population have adopted this stance, any policy that may lower the cost of housing gets torpedoed because a large amount of the population either owns property or thinks they will own property soon. People don’t vote against their own interests.
This problem is compounded by the fact that people with land have more power, they can borrow against their assets to acquire more capital. People with more capital can lobby the government more effectively.
Of course my stance is that these people can get by with LESS money so that the people with almost NO money can survive. Convincing them of this though may prove to be nearly impossible and without their cooperation it’s going to be a real uphill battle.
All this to say that until we NEED to get the cost of living under control. Immigration is necessary to keep our economy growing at the rate we’d like it to grow but it also is exasperating the cost of living crisis. It’s complicated.
Laurier/McKensie, then raised again by Trudeau, but went poorly. Absorbing US states as provinces is by far quickest path to far exceed this.
The case for jesus fucking christ this planet is overpopulated so what does our government do when faced with zero population increase? a fucking carbon tax and 2 million immigrants in 3 years. That is not fucking environmentally sustainable, or housing sustainable, it a cash grab of lower wages, of peoples money, and of peoples housing budgets. fucking clowns running this show for the wealthy, and you people buy this crap
“you people”
Morons, in particular.
We’ve neglected our infrastructure for decades. Both the physical stuff like housing, transit, community centers, and sewers; but also the human side, like doctors, nurses, and skilled trades.
Once we get ourselves to the point where everyone has a doc, people can get around easily, and schools have enough space/teachers, we’ll be ready to invite a significant number of people in.
The article discusses this issue specifically and provides a pretty balanced perspective on it. I don’t personally blame immigration for the issues we see today and there is a compelling argument that immigration could help us out of these problems, but it really does require adequate government investment in the sectors that need labour (like healthcare)
The problem is that our governments are shit planners. They’ve allocated funds poorly, failed to train enough healthcare workers, failed to expand transit, financialized housing, and basically just paid attention to the next election cycle.
The article kinda mentions that, but doesn’t go into it. Recently, politicians used immigration as a stopgap to cover for our terrible productivity and aging demographics (don’t forget post secondary funding!).
Do you trust the current crop of politicians to suddenly find competence and be able to pull off a smooth doubling of our population when they screwed up the 30% increase of the past free decades?
I don’t.
I wish Carney had straight-up promised that governments would build affordable housing instead of relying on private enterprise doing it.
Hard pass.
Maybe one day, not for another decade or more.
I’ll allow you to move from think to know. No need to step lightly in the face of rational truth.
Wow, extremely not a good time to bring up that particular bullshit. I had to double-check that the date on it wasn’t April 1.
It’s an interesting proposition but the current areas everyone wants to settle to can’t sustain it anymore. Government needs to start spreading their dollars, and by association people, to other parts of the country which the room for growth. I don’t it will happen.
