Canada General Discussion (2019-)

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I get that O'Toole has a problem with his base, but I also don't think we should make the error of overstating how big that problem is. The longer Trudeau is in power, the more jaded the general public will get with his leadership. The fatigue will be real, widespread, and have huge electoral ramifications. In the past, going up against a conservative firebrand would have been the Liberals' best chance at holding onto support: Whip up fear around the Conservative leader and call it a day. The more normalized O'Toole becomes, and perhaps even the more at odds he is with the kooks in his party, the more comfortable some Canadians will feel turning away from Trudeau and trying something new.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I get that O'Toole has a problem with his base, but I also don't think we should make the error of overstating how big that problem is. The longer Trudeau is in power, the more jaded the general public will get with his leadership. The fatigue will be real, widespread, and have huge electoral ramifications. In the past, going up against a conservative firebrand would have been the Liberals' best chance at holding onto support: Whip up fear around the Conservative leader and call it a day. The more normalized O'Toole becomes, and perhaps even the more at odds he is with the kooks in his party, the more comfortable some Canadians will feel turning away from Trudeau and trying something new.

The problem is that we don't know what is "normal" with Erin O'Toole, since shifting to the middle alienated the party base, and chances are he will be busy putting out fires on the right flank as long as he's leader. He hasn't found a way to convincingly respond to the social wedge issues that the right flank keep gifting to the Liberals on a silver plate.

IF the Liberals become as unpopular as the OLP under Kathleen Wynne, they might win regardless of their internal troubles, but we're a long way from there.

Are we really a long way from there? The affordability crisis is real, and there’s not much any government will ever be able to do with it, because out-of-reach real estate prices are a feature of the system, not a bug of the system. We are going to have a lot of pissed off people very soon. Add in a never-ending pandemic that Trudeau needs to keep deferring to the scientists on because it’s his brand, and people will be pissed. Trudeau is going to be backed into a corner on the pandemic in a way O’Toole will not be. O’Toole can be the alternative to out-of-touch Liberal elitism.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Agreed O'Toole is finished as leader.  Real danger is party moves further right.  But as someone who follows British politics closely, maybe choosing Poilievre or Lewis and then getting crushed in a general election will be what forces party to wake up and change. 

Agreed. The party moving further right is only a danger if it can successfully win an election that way. Which likely won't happen. The Conservatives need people like O'Toole and they need to move in that direction if they want to win. Luckily for leftists like me, the party seems to have no interest in doing anything like that at the moment.

I'm not actually sure it's so lucky. If the Conservatives always lose by default because they're nutjob conservatives, there will never be any pressure on the governing party to champion the big changes we need.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I hate our entire system.  The NDP will break soon and we'll get a no confidence vote, another election, and another liberal minority now with the added uncertainty of Chinese interference.  There's really nothing preventing Trudeau from running indefinitely.  No term limits or way to impeach.  67% of Canadians who voted did not back our PM in 2021. It's frustrating.

A significant proportion of that 67% would prefer Trudeau over Poilievre.

Both come from the wormy, smarmy, disingenuous, pretentious Ted Cruz tradition, so honestly we’re in bad shape either way. I’ll meaninglessly throw my vote to the NDP again, even though they insist on keeping a leader who should’ve got the boot two losses ago.

I remember when Jack Layton was running to be Prime Minister. In 2011, before he got sick, it really did seem like he could finally be our guy in the next cycle. That is not going to happen for Singh.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I hate our entire system.  The NDP will break soon and we'll get a no confidence vote, another election, and another liberal minority now with the added uncertainty of Chinese interference.  There's really nothing preventing Trudeau from running indefinitely.  No term limits or way to impeach.  67% of Canadians who voted did not back our PM in 2021. It's frustrating.

A significant proportion of that 67% would prefer Trudeau over Poilievre.

Both come from the wormy, smarmy, disingenuous, pretentious Ted Cruz tradition, so honestly we’re in bad shape either way. I’ll meaninglessly throw my vote to the NDP again, even though they insist on keeping a leader who should’ve got the boot two losses ago.

I remember when Jack Layton was running to be Prime Minister. In 2011, before he got sick, it really did seem like he could finally be our guy in the next cycle. That is not going to happen for Singh.

Jack Layton dying was a tragedy, he was one of the few I genuinely respected and liked.
He made his cane a symbol of strength.

It was also a tragedy because he honestly could have won. There was a real sense that the Liberal Party could die, at least for a bit. It was a nice feeling.

Regarding why he has been allowed to stay on… I can’t say. I guess he “saved the campaign” in 2019, but as far as I can remember, half the reason they were down so embarrassingly low was because his rollout as leader had been a huge flop. He was not in the House of Commons, he was making weird comments about extremists… he had the stink of failure on him before he even started. He’s pretty clearly a lightweight on the policy side and, like it or not, isn’t ever going to receive the votes of a pretty large number of Canadians simply because of his faith. It’s not “nice,” but you sort of have to win to play.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Ugh. Singh needs to go. He inspires no confidence outside hardcore Dippers and no one believes he could ever be a prime minister.

It’s a huge shame, because the combination of voter fatigue and the affordability crisis has made it so that the Liberals just aren’t going to win next time. With a different NDP leader, we could have been looking at a CPC–NDP race, kind of like what we saw during Doug Ford’s first provincial election. Instead, we’re almost certainly going to have a proto-fascist demagogue as the leader of our country, and there isn’t anything we can do.

The NDP has a responsibility to put forward a potential Prime Minister. I hate the game they are playing instead.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Canadian polls have been so static since the last election that I'm surprised the housing comment alone would have moved the polls that much. I'll defer to our Canadian posters on that but is there anything else that would have contributed to the big shift recently?

Poillievre took off his glasses, also.

Moving on from your question, I have to say that I agree with whoever said small-c conservative principles are acceptable to young people only around housing. The Liberals have lost all credibility, but they honestly could have lifted Poillievre's plans verbatim and supplemented them with their own progressive initiatives without receiving much flack. Best of both worlds.

It's like the deficit. If politicians really were serious about it, the solution is obviously to raise taxes and cut spending. But nobody ever seriously proposes both. Now, I'm not convinced that the deficit is a big deal, but you get what I'm saying about throwing the kitchen sink at a problem.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/international-student-cap-immigration-system-integrity-1.6948733

mmigration Minister Marc Miller says the concern around the skyrocketing number of international students entering Canada is not just about housing, but Canadians' confidence in the "integrity" of the immigration system itself.

Canada is on track to welcome around 900,000 international students this year, Miller said in an interview that aired Saturday on CBC's The House. That's more than at any point in Canada's history and roughly triple the number of students who entered the country a decade ago.

This is insane

It is a very large number, but international students come and go (or are expected to - unless they apply for permanant residence/citizenship.) So, what really matters is the flow and not the stock, that is, the net increase (or decrease) in international students from year to year.

I believe that has increased significantly in the last few years as well though.

It’s also worth noting that many of them are extremely wealthy, outcompete Canadians for real estate/rentals, and do not work while they are here, using money from the bank of Mom and Dad instead. (I am being radicalized by the housing crisis.)

[HagridOfTheDeep]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro1spVdQO9Q

TLDR: Canada has a plan for what happens if the US becomes a full-on authoritarian fascist state. I've never been more ashamed of my own nationality.

Right Wing populists are ahead in the polls in Canada too.

The Conservative Leader is someone who became prominent by backing the Trucker Protest

Poilievre was elected leader of the Conservative Party with 70% of their votes before the terrorist occupation of Ottawa. Poilievre has also taken two positions on his backing of these terrorists. To Conservative partisans he proudly states his support and even sometimes what he did to support them, to Canadians in general though he denies any involvement and the he essentially only supported them in principal but opposed any of the lawlessness.

PP was elected leader after the convoy/occupation (O'Toole was turfed more or less due to his opposition to it) but the rest stands. I may be sympathetic to the centre-right and want action on cost of living and housing, but I'll find it hard to support a party led by a guy who chose to hold a meet and greet with Diagolon Nazis when he could have attended a Stanley Cup parade at the same time in the same city, no matter how nice his wife says he is.

I will throw my vote away to the NDP.

It’s too bad they’re not talking more about cutting the red tape to get permits approved. This crisis will take the kitchen sink.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

There are huge swaths of single family homes in Toronto that can be converted to duplexes and small apartments (what urbanists call the "missing middle") that should be done long before touching the greenbelt. Only sociopaths want to live that far from the city anyway.

lmao

Build outward in the countryside

Like I said, sociopathic. We should be limiting sprawl as much as possible, especially in prime agricultural land.

(And just to be clear, I wasn't referring to people who live in rural areas or small towns, but people who live in exurbs and commute to cities.)

Also, I don't want to come off as being some NIMBY here, we should be building as much as possible within the cities to prevent sprawl.

I love hearing this.

What I often say about Vancouver is that we should raze Shaughnessy to the ground and build condos. People don’t like to hear that, of course. But there’s the solution.

Land assemblies along major roadways are already cropping up, but the areas are only zoned to allow for six storeys. I’m sorry, but Oak Street could certainly support some much taller buildings. We are going about things in the complete wrong way, but as normal people are forced out, I think this will keep happening. Rich people voting for Ken Sim was a big mistake.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

My grandma was dumb. Hardcore NDP loyalist who came up as a Conservative when taking every possible political spectrum quiz. You could get her to take any position you wanted depending on how you worded the question.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I’m sorry, but properly solving the housing crisis requires more than just deregulation. The way I see it, we need huge public investment too, which is an example of where “spend, spend, spend” is necessary. We ought to be spending on expanding training opportunities for skilled trades and construction jobs. We ought to be incentivizing larger, denser projects in cities (if I see another project of three-storey townhomes go up on major roads in Vancouver right next to SkyTrain stations, I’m going to lose it). We ought to be giving tax breaks on building supplies. We ought to be making it possible for every home that can have a laneway to build one.

Maybe it’s nuts, but solving this crisis should be a huge national project, and I still don’t see it. I know change can’t happen overnight, but tax the rich, spend, spend, spend… whatever it takes. This is a major crisis for every single young person who doesn’t want to live in Hicksville but doesn’t also have family wealth. There is zero optimism because we are working harder for so much less.

I believe the Conservatives will help supercharge the private sector in this direction—I do. But with Poillievre in charge, it’s the rich who are going to get richer and we’ll end up with more luxury condos than anything else.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

I’m sorry, but properly solving the housing crisis requires more than just deregulation. The way I see it, we need huge public investment too, which is an example of where “spend, spend, spend” is necessary. We ought to be spending on expanding training opportunities for skilled trades and construction jobs. We ought to be incentivizing larger, denser projects in cities (if I see another project of three-storey townhomes go up on major roads in Vancouver right next to SkyTrain stations, I’m going to lose it). We ought to be giving tax breaks on building supplies. We ought to be making it possible for every home that can have a laneway to build one.

Maybe it’s nuts, but solving this crisis should be a huge national project, and I still don’t see it. I know change can’t happen overnight, but tax the rich, spend, spend, spend… whatever it takes. This is a major crisis for every single young person who doesn’t want to live in Hicksville but doesn’t also have family wealth. There is zero optimism because we are working harder for so much less.

I believe the Conservatives will help supercharge the private sector in this direction—I do. But with Poillievre in charge, it’s the rich who are going to get richer and we’ll end up with more luxury condos than anything else.

Keep in mind there has already been a great degree of public investment in recent years that hasn't gone anywhere.

I partly agree with you about the first sentence that some degree of public investment is needed, but the kind of investment we need is very different from the investment the Liberals are proposing, which is an attempt to pick winners and losers on the market (the federal government has decided that prefabricated homes are the one-size-fits-all solution for everybody - based on what? Because it makes Trudeau feel good?). Not to mention the Liberals' fixation with giving out low-interest loans to build these things, which will either result in higher inflation and/or higher interest rates over time.

Generally, the market should decide the kind of housing we need, minus some specific categories of housing like social housing that are needed for disadvantaged groups -  those should be funded by the government. However, I agree with you that we should definitely use our tax dollars to create an incentive system to build housing, not one that favours one type of housing over another, but allows housing to be built in general (like waiving the GST on construction, which, to their credit, the Liberals have done). Other things you mentioned, such as building denser projects in cities, can largely be achieved by favourable zoning laws.

The problem with a national housing project with huge amounts of spending is, as laddicus finch said, we are not in a Great Depression where such a thing is warranted - at best, it would result in wasted resources that could have been used in other areas, or at worst, it would cause a giant debt crisis that would slow down the economy by forcing the central bank to raise interest rates.

The argument that 'conservative policies will benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else' doesn't really pan out based on the record of previous conservative governments - Canada's Gini coefficient remained stable and actually fell slightly during the Harper years. Of course, it can be argued Poilievre will govern differently from Harper and no one has tried to properly solve the housing crisis yet, so we don't yet know how the implementation of proposed solutions will affect economic inequality. But I think it is a slightly premature assumption to make.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1110013401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=1.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2006&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2015&referencePeriods=20060101%2C20150101

The market should decide the kind of housing we need? No way—you lost me. The invisible hand has been at work for the last 15 years and it’s what has turned housing into an investment rather than a basic human need. “The market” is perfectly happy with squeezing as much rent out of people as it can so one class stays down and the other buys more houses to rent out and strengthen the squeeze even more. You talk about “specific disadvantaged groups,” but at this rate we’ve got almost an entire generation that is a specific disadvantaged group. You can make $100,000 a year and still never be able to afford a home! I know there are people who are much worse off, but any notion of the Canadian dream is dead. That’s what the “market” has done, and surely you aren’t going to argue that that’s a good thing for our country. We must restore that dream.

What we have now is capitalists weaponizing pain. It appears like people in the market are expressing preferences by “choosing” one type of housing over another, but that’s not what’s happening. People are stuck between a rock and a hard place flocking only to whatever is cheap. It’s a race to the bottom because everything is so expensive. We don’t need tax breaks going to people upgrading their mansions or building $2-million condo units. I want my government targeting what’s best for young people and young families, because right now their power in the market is not strong enough to shift much of anything. By all means, let’s have the government pick the winners and losers if it means we start to make a dent in the problems we’re facing.

You say we are not in a depression so such a massive project is not warranted. What we are in is a silent depression where the up-and-coming generation barely has any wealth. We are witnessing a slow-motion transition back to serfdom here where people can have a job and survive but never get ahead. They work to serve only the expansion of their corporate owners and landlords. Of course that won’t register as a depression, but it’s still not good. Fighting this development by giving people better places to live is not an example of resources wasted; it’s a socialist program that would lift people up. You scare-monger about a debt crisis, but there is most definitely enough wealth in this nation to re-level the playing field. You talk as if government spending is always going to lead to higher inflation, but let’s be clear that it can also raise productivity and increase supply depending on how that spending is targeted. So again, I’m really not on board with a lot of what you’re saying.

The bottom line is this: More and more Canadians are feeling like the tilted playing field in housing is actually an intended feature of the system, not a bug. Because we’ve lived under Trudeau’s government for so long now, people blame him for this system and turn naturally to the Conservatives for answers. That’s fair, of course, but I think it’s quite clear that capitalism-run-amok is mostly to blame here. More of that is not what’s going to help.