48 hours after the election there is now open talk of seperatism of Alberta. Because of a minority of albertans.
In an age where where there is precedence to hold sham referendums. Invade your neighbors with shadow armies under the guise of regional separatists. And ultimately annex territory.
The window for Canadian Crimean crisis is still very much open
A significant portion of the voters for conservative – I’d hope most – voted not conservative not because of fear and resentment, but because they believe in conservative fiscal policy.
Nope, you’re 100% wrong. They voted conservative because the sign said conservative. That’s it. That is literally all the reason. About 85% of the people I know voted conservative and when I ask them, it’s fuck the liberals I’m voting conservative. That’s literally all they think.
we got in this morass because the neoliberal state and its accompanying economy financialized every damn thing
The problem is monetary policy, not deregulation. Deregulation of zoning and housing policy would actually prevent monetary policy from creating such a large housing bubble.
Our Bank of Canada targets a 2% inflation, which means prices need to continuously rise as technology actively reduces goods prices, and we then exclude investments and housing appreciation entirely, and we do hedonic adjustments to discount goods inflation. Then there’s likely an element of shrinkflation, as company find tricks to cheapen products or degrade services, which lead to no inflation in the CPI but higher profits and then lower prices.
So the money supply needs to grow via low interest rates, in order to provide a windfall to boomers to encourage them sell their real estate holdings, to create new bank loans, to increase the money supply, which turns into aggregate demand, in order to create inflation in the CPI.
But we can’t build enough houses due to reverse neo-liberalism, so housing acts as liquidity sponges for cheap debt, and people hold them as investments in perpetuity since they think prices are always going to go up. Also as interest rates fall inflation falls, as interest expense is included in the CPI while housing appreciation is not, its a feedback loop due to its poorly constructed nature. The Bank of Canada now also buys half of all mortgage bonds to attempt to reverse this, so they’re actually printing money in order to cause deflation funnily enough, again due to the absurd way the CPI is constructed.
All this would be solved if the left leaders would actually fix affordability. This is the only real reason I see so many voting right. Nobody can afford shit and they blame the left.
The Crown corp and modular homes seems like a pretty great way of adding a lot of affordable homes. I just hope the government lasts long enough for it to actually kick off. It’s not perfect and it doesn’t solve capitalism, but it will help if executed well.
If I were to bet, I’d say we’ll see the effects just in time for an election, and cpc will take over and take the credit.
The cost of homes is mostly land value, which is like 80%-90% in large cities. Because of sprawled zoning, bureaucracy, and greenbelt. Second biggest cost is taxes.
Houses are expensive even in bumfuck no where and the point of modular buildings and wartime measures is that it drops a large amount of the bureaucracy without compromising on quality like deregulating would.
I agree zoning and sprawl are problems though, there isn’t as much the feds can do about it as it’s more a provincial and municipal concern. The planned high speed rail (a Trudeau thing not a carney thing tbf) along the toronto-montreal corridor should help somewhat reduce the sprawl. As someone who lives an hour east of Toronto, I do wish it was planned to extend to me.
if the left leaders would actually fix affordability
I’m sorry; it’s the sole responsibility of the left? Is their “we’ll raise the tide a little and float all the boats” not as glamorous as the right’s “first we’ll cut taxes, bankrupt medical and transit, and then let someone else take it from there” plan?
Problem is it’s not the left’s fault. The world is blaming the leaders but it’s happening globally. The real problem is a few have all the wealth.
Capitalism, infinite greed and growth and the resulting wealth inequality. Unaffordablity is the inevitable conclusion of late stage capitalism
Our left leaning leaders should update tax laws to address the growing wealth gap. And start building homes so average Canadians can afford a decent home in a decent location.
Agree completely. Carney is a neoliberal and will not address this problem - I fear the next election people will be unhappy that their life still sucks due to late stage capitalism and vote in Cons out of some desire for change, and they will destroy our institutions like the Americans.
NDP need to step up with a real candidate that will challenge these systems of wealth extraction.
Unfortunately, due to the piss-poor human condition, Canada - and every country on Earth that allows free speech - will go whatever direction the bots run by the nations that do NOT allow free speech want them to go. Anything else is a temporary reprieve.
Boy, I sure didn’t see that coming. It’s going to be very interesting seeing where such a path ends. Uncomfortable, likely, but interesting.
Totally. I was thinking about China the other day, how crazy they seemed for building the Great Firewall fifteen years ago. I felt sad for their citizens being cutoff from the internet. Now I’m sitting here looking in and I’m all like - fuck, this has been a major contributor to their sovereignty. Both in that this allowed their own strong digital economy to develop instead of getting hooked on American Big Tech, and in that it keeps the propaganda that’s threatening us at bay. I’m not saying that censorship is amazing all around but just like you said, had they gone with free speech online, they’d be subject to whatever Big Social makes money from that day. It’s crazy how the tables have turned from this perspective. I’m not optimistic that there’s a solution that both keeps speech free and protects us from this problem.
Newspapers aren’t allowed to print whatever they want, news networks can’t straight up lie on TV, why are we obsessed with the idea that tech platforms need to be able to wash their hands of everything on their platform.
Maybe we don’t need the web to be full of user submitted content. I remember the early Internet, it was way better than what we have today.
