The Toronto Sun is American-owned media posing as Canadian.
Are the facts wrong?
Did 4% population growth into an existing housing shortage not contribute to a further housing shortage?
CBC the last debate they went after Singh for wanting to drop peoples retirement savings, phrased in that exact way. I’m not sure they are impartial.
I mean, you just said it yourself. “An existing housing shortage.”
So it’s a multifaceted issues that can’t be blamed on just the Liberals or immigrants.
Sure, its supply and demand.
Obviously its a combination of poor zoning, mass immigration, extending amortizations, the federal government buying half of all mortgage bonds, slow permitting, skyrocketing development fees.
The federal government controls 3 of those. The others aren’t as big an issue like zoning density or aren’t really sustainable like development fees given the laffer curve without the mass immigration.
This just goes to show that the market isn’t effective for providing people with housing and non-market solutions are needed.
Builders aren’t going to drive the cost of homes down, they are selling them at high prices and making a bigger profit doing so.
Why is it easier for you to question immigration levels than to question the private construction of housing?
If our food supplies weren’t keeping up with population so Loblaws made more money would you be bootlicking Loblaws or calling for the government to invest in food production?
Canada has more empty homes than unhoused people. Yes they’re not in the same places, but isn’t that another data point that the market sucks at providing housing where it’s needed?
If our food supplies weren’t keeping up with population so Loblaws made more money would you be bootlicking Loblaws or calling for the government to invest in food production?
I don’t find municipals blameless, its just their individual incentives, and some have rezoned like BC. But from a macro level it is clearly mass immigration leading to the rapid rise in prices, and thats the federal government who signs that.
Canada needs a bigger population to compete on the world stage and to defend our vast nation.
If builders or other industries can’t keep up, they need to step up or be supplemented or subverted. Canada’s population density is effectively zero. With greater military and economic threats, trying to diminish our population isn’t the way to go.
Wage suppression propaganda. Meanwhile people can’t afford kids.
Yes, they are. Because they’re limited in their context.
Corporate ownership of housing, regulatory changes made by the Harper government, amd the state turning away from developing public housing 40 years ago created the housing crisis.
Corporate ownership would still make renting cheaper given supply and demand. Rents doubled under Trudeau, and those houses aren’t sitting empty.
Public housing isn’t going to work when everything is zoned for single family homes, there’s no shortage of capital to build, its land values that are expensive. They could force municipals to rezone those areas which would help, however that just sidesteps the real issue, which is sprawled zoning coupled with mass immigration.
The sun is reactionary propaganda intended to mislead you for the profit of people not even in this country. If they write something that makes you upset, that probably means they are manipulating you. There are real publications across the political spectrum that will discuss the nuance and realities of these issues, but this isn’t it.
I’ve been reading and researching for years, before it was even an election issue. They aren’t wrong.
I mean, per the Liberals themselves, they misjudged the timing of the surge of immigration. It’s not the gotcha the Sun is pretending it is.
Mark Carney said he did it to avoid a recession. A technical recession that is, per capita GDP still fell, as homelessness and the doctor shortage increased.
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I’d have linked another news if they had this story.
Its traitorous to ignore the ballooning food bank usage, people living in rest stops, and people forced to sign million dollar mortgages with full recourse loans we have in Canada. Yet people still seem eager to vote for Sean Fraser and Mark Miller.
All to depress Canadians salaries, and avoid a technical recession in favor of a per capita recession.
The housing crisis started over 30 years ago. The entirety of government gets to own this one.
Eby is doing good work finally at least. Alberta too, many cities and provinces are helping by blanket rezoning, as the Liberals seemingly go in reverse by juicing demand via mortgage bond purchase and extending amortizations to banks.
I’m fairly pro immigration, but it shouldn’t be used mainly as a source of cheap labour to drive down corporate costs and extract money from Canada. Immigrants need time to acclimate to Canadian society, and having too high an immigration rate risks losing our values of tolerance, and equality.
And while I do kinda agree with the headline, the timing is certainly rather suspicious coming from Conservative owned media. Also, I don’t think Conservative policy on the matter would be that substantially different, as they’re equally pro-corporate.
suspicious coming from Conservative owned media
Postmedia, of which the Toronto Sun is a subsidiary, is majority owned by Chatham Asset Management. The founder of CAM is a well known GOP supporter. Postmedia group articles should be considered, at best, pro-American interest propaganda…if not outright election interference.
We have Stephen Harper to thank for opening the loopholes that allowed Postmedia group to be wholly owned by American VCs.The Total Fertility Rate(TFR) of Canada hit a historic low of 1.33 national average in 2022.
Here’s a Kurzgasagt video on why TFR below 2.1 is actually really bad. There needs to be more support for immigrants, and don’t fool yourself that Canada, or even most “1st world countries”, will be fine without immigrants. In 30 years Canada, without a regular injection of people, would be top heavy on the age demographic graph. 100 years and the US wouldn’t have to try hard to annex us, there’d be almost no one left young enough to actually put up an effective resistance.
I live in Scotland, the TFR here is even lower, with a lower base population, and more people buy the Tory and Reform propaganda about armies of illegal Muslims outbreeding law abiding white folk.
I hate to agree, even tangentially, with the Elongated Muskrat…as a whole, humans do need to figure out how to at least maintain our current population. A great way to do that is for people in high population countries to move to lower population countries. Are there going to be problematic people? Sure, I guess. There’s already people who are problematic born in Canada, or the UK.I know this is a bit of a rant, sorry for unloading. Built up frustration with people willingly sticking their face in the leopard’s mouth…
You’re welcome to vote PPC, who is the only party outside of the conservatives promising to dramatically cut immigration.
It was done as you say to lower wages and to entrench asset values, which according to BoC publications wages naturally rise after QE to restore the inequality created. In the 70s we blamed unions, now we just do mass immigration.
I’ll most likely be voting for a party who promises to implement PR. FPTP is a one way ticket to the American political landscape, and it has to be ended above most other issues.
Ask Germany with 20% AFD in their parliament how PR works. How many more elections until they form Government do you think?
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but in the US, the AFD equivalent is literally running the county. I’ll take deadlock over that noise any day.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed but AFD came in second overall in the last election. Again, I ask you, how many more elections until they form Government in your opinion?
They’re sitting at 20%, so never. Best they can hope for is a coalition government with the other right wing party, and at least they won’t be running the show. And even if that happens, I don’t see how that’s any worse than a merger of right wing and far right parties, which if anything is more insidious.
Thank you for at least understanding at an elementary level that PR does not prevent Far right extremism like you once claimed.
Take care.
Using Germany as an example to argue against PR is disingenuous on many levels. It shows a lack of understanding of how things work, what things are meant for, and also a blatant disregard of Germany’s history.
- You’re essentially asking for an electoral system to keep extremists at bay, when no such system exists because it is simply impossible for any system to do that. Trying to use an electoral system for such a purpose is operating at the wrong level if you want to keep extreme views in check.
- Germany has a unique history with far-left ideologies, how it got dismantled, and how the East and West reunified. If you look at the current state of old East Germany, you’ll see that the prosperity of the West did not flow into the East; their living conditions are bad, amenities lacklustre, there’s not enough jobs around and they don’t pay well, and the Western population can easily buy up their lands and properties just due to how much disparity there is in terms of wealth. And if you look at the electoral map and results of the last election, you’ll see that both far-left and far-right parties have a strong hold on old East Germany. This is the failure of the German government at truly unifying both sides of the old Germany. And if anything, I’d even argue that it’s a successful example of PR at work, as far as being a system goes.
- Keeping or adopting any kind of Winner-Takes-All system will simply further divide us and keep voters feeling disenfranchised, believing that voting brings no effective change, all for no good reason.
An electoral system is not political. It’s the framework of which you exercise democracy.
Trying to make frameworks, which are meant to surface all voices, suppress certain ones is, frankly, barking up the wrong tree.
The person you’re replying to has reeeeaaally bad takes, and have shown little understanding or willingness to learn. They’re a troll. If they weren’t pissing off basically everyone they interact with I’d say they were possibly a foreign (or domestic far-right) actor. I think the reality is that they’re ignorant and proud of it.
I initially thought I’d give them the benefit of the doubt cause I’ve seen them around, and they sometimes say things that look like they can think and hold some kind of conversation. But from the reply they’ve given me, it looks like it was not needed. I was basically Ben-Shapiro-ed there.
Yeah, samesies. Which is why I mentioned it. Try and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but that only goes so far.
You’re essentially asking for an electoral system to keep extremists at bay, when no such system exists because it is simply impossible for any system to do that. Trying to use an electoral system for such a purpose is operating at the wrong level if you want to keep extreme views in check.
Not what I am asking for, it is what is being argued. “PR will prevent us from US politics” was the original argument. Feel free to look at other countries with PR and use them as examples. Far right is on the rise regardless of the political system being used and Germany is a perfect example since they have gone from Nazi to never again to back again in less than 100 years and PR did shit all about it.
Germany has a unique history with far-left ideologies, how it got dismantled, and how the East and West reunified. If you look at the current state of old East Germany, you’ll see that the prosperity of the West did not flow into the East; their living conditions are bad, amenities lacklustre, there’s not enough jobs around and they don’t pay well, and the Western population can easily buy up their lands and properties just due to how much disparity there is in terms of wealth. And if you look at the electoral map and results of the last election, you’ll see that both far-left and far-right parties have a strong hold on old East Germany. This is the failure of the German government at truly unifying both sides of the old Germany. And if anything, I’d even argue that it’s a successful example of PR at work, as far as being a system goes.
All countries have unique histories, and Germany isn’t special.
PR is argued as the golden bullet to avoid “American style politics”. It isn’t. That is my point.
Keeping or adopting any kind of Winner-Takes-All system will simply further divide us and keep voters feeling disenfranchised, believing that voting brings no effective change, all for no good reason.
I am not arguing for winner take all systems. I am arguing against PR being this amazing thing that solves the problem. It doesn’t and I gave an example. Feel free to look at every other country that uses PR and examine the results of recent elections. The right is seeing a Global rise and PR as a voting system isn’t stopping it.
An electoral system is not political. It’s the framework of which you exercise democracy.
Trying to make frameworks, which are meant to surface all voices, suppress certain ones is, frankly, barking up the wrong tree.
I don’t need all of this fluff, but since I responded to everything you said without you once answering the question I posed to someone else:
How many more elections until they form Government do you think? (The AFD in Germany)
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It didn’t really help Europe. I think the pendulum swing left and right over time is from loose money and cheap debt. When rates rise people vote right, then they vote left for unfunded spending, and the cycle continues. But that’s just my estimation of what’s going on.
Are you sure? The top 5 countries rated on their democracy index are consistently PR systems.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?tab=table
then they vote left for unfunded spending
Explain how the Doug Ford victory falls under this with his $400M spent on rushing the beer in grocery stores policy instead of waiting 6 months and getting it for free, or the proposed $800B highway tunnel under the 417 (which would likely be over 1T). I suppose I just don’t see the left being the party of unfunded spending, because I don’t think he’s going to make the profits from this just by selling Ontario Place.
Well that’s true, I guess its through a US lens, who can’t run those state deficits.
But they bleed over to us, and we tend to follow the same path they do.
I agree, we have that problem in more ways than one.
Ah, the Fraser Institute - gargling the balls of the rich, right-wingers since…always.
So they support importing cheap labor and rising asset prices for the rich?
I find serious flaws with this.
It’s for a different country, but consider from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/australia-rent-crisis-not-international-students-fault-study/105076290
“Our data did not directly explain why international students didn’t cause the rental crisis, however … when we looked at the broader literature we actually knew international students had different housing needs compared with locals,” Professor Mu said.
“Some of them were in student accommodation, some of them would choose shared bedrooms, so obviously their housing needs were somewhat different from the local people.”Meanwhile, the original article says,
From 2021 to 2024, the study reported, Canada’s population increased by an average of 859,473 people per year while only 254,670 new housing units were started annually.
But this makes the false assumption that those who came had identical housing needs as local citizens, when we know international students (for example) did not.
Also, aside from this token callout,
driven almost entirely by immigration
there’s no breakdown in the article on how much of that increase is actually from immigration as opposed to citizens moving back home because of covid - let alone a breakdown of new PRs vs international students vs temporary workers vs refugees vs etc…
Perhaps the study actually does contain this information. I wanted to double check there but couldn’t find the study linked in the article, so I wasn’t able to do this. Basically it’s a very poor article that conflates different things, I’d go as far as to speculate that they came up with the conclusion that they wanted first and then tried to find support in the data while disregarding or outright ignoring contrary indicators…
I wasn’t aware the government was building homes.
Its about their removal of immigration caps. They also allowed foreign students to work in Canada 40 hours a week to lower wage pressure after QE.
You think having poor students would be a better idea?
No, we should have rich students who can afford to live here without food bank usage. Which is what the government stipulated as well, before they began to borrow money to cheat the system.
Damn it really sucks that every inch of Canada is covered in affordable housing already
