Part of the problem is the excluded middle in housing. Everyone flips between single family homes, and 30, 40, 50 story high rises.
But you don’t need a 50 story building to significantly increase housing, at least not in any city in Canada that I’ve ever seen. Replacing a few single family homes with a low-rise (5 to 10 stories, maybe 4-10 units per floor) would produce a significant increase in the housing density and number of available units, without the dystopian “Giant wall of anonymous towers” feel you get from some places like Hong Kong.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t think so because we were mid-pandemic and Trudeau was handling it well enough. Certainly better than people thought the CPC would handle it. Plus the economic situation has changed quite a bit recently. Inflation is so high right now, and people (like me) are losing hope. I am normally a very positive outlook kind of person, and I just don’t see any possible bright future for me anymore except to give it all up, “retire”, and become a musician. I’ll be broke but at least I’ll doing something fun.
And this is the classic mistake everyone keeps making. The Prime Minister of Canada has very little actual influence over inflation. We’re just not that powerful. We’re getting burned by the same forces that are burning everyone in the world right now*.
If the world economy is still this trashed in three years, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than PP maybe becoming a bad PM.
*There are things the PM could do to radically affect some of our problems, if he had the support in Parliament, but most of them would cause other problems. Like, we could nationalize all foreign owned and corporate owned housing in Canada, and sell them off for pennies on the dollar to individual Canadian Citizens to use as their primary residences, but in doing so, we’d probably crash the new home building industry, as who would invest in new properties if they thought the government might turn around and expropriate them?
I certainly agree - personally. However, it’s not for me to tell other people how to live. Canada is a free country and pluralism is a value I hold in extremely high esteem.
If people want to live in Orillia and commute to Toronto, fine. They should pay the cost for that though, which means gasoline taxes and, if need be, tolling overused highways. Make people pay for the externalities. That’s just good policy. But unaffordable housing is not socially tenable.
As much as people bitch and whine about apartment and condo buildings, it’s very hard in Canadian cities to build ANY sort of multi-family dwellings. People who already own their homes will NIMBY anything - they bitch about townhomes, duplexes, those smaller apartment buildings that are only four or five storeys high, and city councils are extremely prone to backing up the NIMBYers because they are disproportionately made up of homeowners and real estate owners.
This is quite literally not the 1000th most concerning conflict of interest in political circles in this country. A lot of politicians - including Pierre Poilevre - are real estate investors and landlords and they’ve let housing costs get ridiculously out of control and have made a ton of money from it, and people don’t seem to care about that, for what reason I cannot fathom.
Personally I think crypto and NFTs are fucking ridiculous and in their current state are all obviously Ponzi schemes, but their “investors” will all learn that the hard way. The housing crisis is really hurting people in this country and it has the potential to genuinely fracture the social contract, and we have politicians, a lot of them, who are getting rich off it. Isn’t that a really, really serious problem?
I agree but it doesn’t matter whether it is a fact, it matters how people feel. And people are feeling hopeless, and they’re going to blame the guy in charge.
You won’t get any disagreement from me. I wish I had a solution. It is gross and crosses party lines. The whole system is a joke where we get to elect our oppressors. Yay. I’m still going to vote because some oppressors are ever so slightly not as bad as a different slate of oppressors, but it is awfully depressing.
Note, a friend of mine lost his wife of 22 years to cancer yesterday. So I’m not feeling particularly positive yesterday or today. It might be best to temporarily ignore me.
This is presumably why the tallies of memberships sold haven’t balanced. The Poulievre camp appears to be conning party supporters to buy double the memberships, double the fun!
I’m super-confused. How does this benefit PP? The fees for new memberships go to the party and not the candidate, do they not? And anyone who fell for this is less likely to continue supporting PP, not more.
Poulivre has been putting it out there that his campaign has sold large numbers of memberships, which he then uses to indicate that he has massive support from the rank and file of the party.
Except when you add up all the numbers that the different leadership campaigns have claimed to have sold, it’s more than the party has recorded.
Something hinky is going on, and the fact that Poilievre’s campaign is running scare e-mails to get more people to buy memberships though his system helps to explain why the numbers aren’t adding up.
It may be true none of the candidates believe each other’s numbers. It may be true there is a history of inflating them. It may be true that it does not actually matter since there are many ridings and the number of memberships is more about bragging rights. And it may be true some people supporting Poilievre were so concerned about FOMO that this dodgy email caused them to act twice.
This article makes a good point, though. Poilievre blames the government for things people find inconvenient and the government sometimes can look too defensive in the way they deflect blame. The Grits should not take the public nor a strong opponent for granted.
