Academics, bureaucrats, and politicians won’t solve this
Canada has a housing problem. This problem has been building for a long time because for a very long time every level of Canadian government, municipal, provincial, and federal, have been passing laws that make it difficult to build anything in Canada. Even if our current Prime Moron had not ramped up immigration we would eventually have had to deal with the cancerous fiefdoms we call government in Canada.
The problem came to a head much sooner than anyone expected because Canadians elected the least intelligent man in the country to run the government. Justin Trudeau poured fuel on the simmering fire by ramping up immigration to ridiculous levels.
In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,400 immigrants. And that was really high for the time. As Statistics Canada noted, it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years.” The figure easily ranked then-prime minister Stephen Harper as the most pro-immigration conservative leader on the entire planet.
A mere nine years later, 260,000 is a drop in the bucket. At current rates, that would account for just 52 days’ worth of immigration.
The housing crisis is not a difficult problem to understand. It is simple supply and demand. Demand was growing with population even before Fidel’s bastard took power. Supply could not keep up with the growing demand because of the increasing supply of senseless government regulations. Anyone outside of government who bothered to look could see this coming a mile away. Why this was allowed to happen is what we really need to understand.
The problem was caused by government but the average Canadian is not blameless. We allowed it to happen. The average Canadian is simply apathetic and unintelligent. We sat idly while each year governments made it more difficult to build anything. At no time did we stop to think that a country that was already taking 250,000 immigrants per year should not prevent new construction. Then when the problem became acute we accepted the most ridiculous explanations like blaming it on foreign investors.
Any impacts of the ban were short-lived, according to Brendon Ogmundson, the chief economist for the B.C. Real Estate Association. “The foreign buyer ban was more political than economic policy or housing policy,” he said.
Canadians accepted that a national housing crisis was caused by foreign investors owning 2% of the real estate in a couple of very select high price markets. In typical Canadian fashion, when we discovered that Vancouver real estate investors were not the cause of housing shortages in Kitchener or Edmonton, we continued to blame the Vancouver investors.
“Canada’s ban was full of holes,” said Andy Yan, director of the City Program, a continuing education program focusing on urban planning and development at Simon Fraser University. “I would tell people it was more like cheesecloth than duct tape.”
According to that Vancouver academic the problem will either be solved by doing more of what never would have worked in the first place or for the government to own everything.
Singapore’s housing is 80 per cent public, compared to Canada’s, which sits closer to six per cent.
Really why can’t we do the same thing as Singapore a city state perched on a tropical island? Why would the solution in a cold, sparsely populated, geographical varied, enormous country not be the same as the Singapore? That, friends, brings us to the second reason this all happened. Canadian politicians are not very smart and the only people they listen to are academics who are even less disconnected from reality than the politicians are. This Calgary academic thinks the solution is to tear down the entire city center and start over.
“When I think about something really radical, an option has to be: do we tear down most of it and start again? To me, that has to be on the table as an extreme option.”
Due to completely different govern malfeasance and stupidity Calgary office vacancy rates are quite high. University academics view this economic calamity as a great opportunity to do it all over. There is only one problem with their vision. Where is the money going to come from?
All the office towers in Calgary’s downtown core were built with private money. Who is going to pay to tear them down and replace them with the envisioned idyllic neighborhoods? Money is never a consideration for academics because they get their money from government. All of their grand ideas start with the assumption that governments have an endless supply of money. That is why politicians love to turn to academics for advice. Their advice is always that the government must spend more money.
If government spending actually solved problems Canada would be the most problem free country in history. In Canada money does not solve problems but it does create problems. Canadian Governments have already spent a lot of money causing this problem. This problem and many others will not be solved by money. It will only be solved when Canadians finally pull their collective heads out of their collective buts and put a leash on government.
