If Housing Is Not His Responsibility What Is His Job?

Young boy: “Dad, it hurts when I do that.”

Dad: “Then stop doing that.”

Choose a random dinner party or barbecue this summer. Friends get together. People get to talking. After they get past healthcare stories and kids, the conversation will drift to the cost of housing for either themselves, their kids or their friends. Inevitably it becomes a game of Hold My Beer.

One person will talk about a single-storey home in North Vancouver bought for $325K that now costs $3.1 M. Another chimes in with the escalation in rents in Calgary getting upward of $3K a month. Our own contribution is usually about the detached home we built for $335K in 1993 in midtown Toronto. We sold it for $440K in 1999. Recently it sold again for $2.1 million.  

Heads shake. Shoulder shrug. It’s on everyone’s mind in Canada. Has been for years. What to do? If you’re a Boomer, cash out your legacy home for a massive profit, then scramble to find another abode where prices have yet to catch up to the city. Can anyone say New Brunswick?

Or, if you’re young, put every available dollar into a downpayment on a former Boomer legacy home and pray interest rates stop their climb. Or else tap into the bank of Mom & Dad for an advance that gets you a shoe box in the sky. 

If that fails, live in a van with your family in a WalMart parking lot in Squamish, B.C. Oops, sorry… that isn’t allowed anymore. Or get sent to jail where three squares and a roof over your head is guaranteed. 

The solutions to reduce this craziness seem simple enough. People have talked about it for a decade. But the government that represents Canadians— that ran in 2015 on “affordable housing for Canadians.”— seems to be doing the exact opposite of what would reduce the crisis.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have opened the immigrant spigot wide. Instead of encouraging more units to be built, they’ve allowed the costs of those units—utilities, taxes, services, public transportation— to soar, reducing developers’ incentives to build. The results are not pretty: “@MikePMoffatt Here's not a great sign - housing starts are down significantly from last year. Remember: CMHC said we need to build 5.8M homes in 9 years. Over 600K a year. We didn't even hit 250,000 last year; this year is trending lower.”

And when new housing infringes on a Greenbelt, in Ontario Boomers howl like crazy that sacred spaces are off limits to development of more housing units. As if it were still 1970.

There’s more. Instead of keeping interest rates affordable PMJT has acted like a crack addict about how you should borrow all you can at 2.5 percent then try to hold on for dear life at six percent. He certainly did, committing $85B in future spending (sending Canada’s debt from $25B to $40 B.)

His solution is “15-minute cities”, jamming everyone into 40-storey high-rises in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver. And expect quality of life not to suffer. Finally, because he’s an errand boy for thew CCP, he allows Canadian real estate to be a laundromat for dirty foreign money, driving up costs exponentially.

The Liberals’ answer to these complaints is to tell citizens they’re engaged in a quasi-religious climate crusade to save the planet. (A crusade that the two most-populist nations on earth are ignoring.) There’s no time to worry about Canadians housing when the WEF orders its disciples in the Trudeau cabinet to prioritize depopulation and a global currency. So shut up. 

Despite the blatant inauthenticity of this pitch to average Canadians the Liberals’ fan-boy base in the 416/ 613/604 does shut up. So does the mainstream media now being paid off to spout the party line about the evil Pierre Poilievre (note the identical headlines in four separate outlets.)

The unbridled immigration is currently orchestrated by Trudeau’s groomsman Marc Miller who’s touring the nation to explain why it’s in everyone’s best interests if the Liberals get the population up to 40 million ASAP. Miller the PMJT crony seems to have no clue what happens west of Toronto. Or why he should be in charge of a housing crisis after making a hash of  Minister of Crown Indigenous Relations. The Westmount resident represents the hip Montreal riding of Nun’s Island (Île des Soeurs). No immigrant is going to settle on his street.

If you get in his grill about affordability (few Canadian reporters will dare) or how the already-stretched healthcare system and infrastructure gap will support adding the population of Metro Toronto within five years the bought media will call you a racist or bigot or anti-science or one of the other pat Liberal ad hominems. 

Like his pal the prime minister Miller makes sure not to wade into any barbecues where friends see housing as a disaster stoked by his government. It’s exclusively party hacks and selfies with the donors sent to a compliant media who use Ukrainian flag emojis to signify their priorities. 

We will deal with the accumulated healthcare debt created by the Liberals dereliction of duty in a future column. Suffice to say that home-poor Canadians are also being pushed out of the clinics and hospitals by a tidal wave of new arrivals. 

Again the same clever people who are mesmerized by the immigration hustle are the same people who are fully bought into the healthcare collapse. But as anyone familiar with hypnosis knows, smart people make the easiest subjects to brainwash. 

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx