We spend billions subsidizing oil and gas, which are industries with dimming importance in the future. Meanwhile, we have some of the best artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive science university programs in the world, and we send all of our graduates to the US.
We should nurture a tech sector in Canada, not just focus solely on natural resources.
I don’t know about that. Twitter seemed like a pretty stable platform before the acquisition, not a platform on the decline. Lots of problems, but now it’s a whole different level.
To be fair, the word “liberal” has two meanings. In the US and Canada, the word commonly means “vaguely leftish”, as when people say “the liberal media” or “college makes you liberal”. I think the person you’re responding to is using it this way. This usage is slowly phasing out I think.
The definition you cited is another totally correct usage of the term. It is close to the idea of libertarianism, and is associated with conservative economic policies. So it has the opposite meaning.
I’m really strongly against saying “both sides” or “all sides”. It’s not only factually incorrect but it breeds apathy. If you want things to change, you need to notice when the parties are trying to appeal to you.
In the last election, the NDP were the only ones to seriously bring up housing affordability. Singh said he thinks even current homeowners understand that people are suffering and are OK with lower prices, and the debate moderator grilled him for it. She “called him out” for supposedly hurting people who are relying on their home value as their retirement. I was shocked.
Meanwhile, the Liberals and Conservatives explicitly supported high home prices and “free market” solutions (except don’t mention zoning!). That makes sense given that they (especially the conservatives) get their voteshare from older homeowners.
If you think all the tenets of good urbanism from the academic and progressive community are just “buzzwords of the developer community”, then you are in the grips of an ideological NIMBYism.
Low supply is an empirical fact. Vacancies are low throughout the country, and we have less housing per capita than almost all of our peers. Views like yours do not take the lack of housing seriously enough.
It’s because public housing in the US is a ghetto to segregate poor people and undesirables. On the Scandinavian model, non-market and market housing are mixed together. Rich and poor live next to each other. These are highly successful.
Are you a NIMBY? Our zoning is horrible. It is mathematically impossible to reach our climate goals if we maintain the terrible zoning laws that we have.
You also totally misunderstand why we build tall expensive towers. It’s BECAUSE we don’t allow middle density in SFH areas. Please read about the “missing middle”. Both tall towers and SFH are symptoms of the same disease.
You might want to actually read about the last housing bubble. When the bubble finally burst, people couldn’t sell their homes and vacancies were high. That’s also why the government stopped building non-market housing. They thought we had built too much. 
No, market failures exist. It’s not all supply and demand. The cartoon economic world of libertarians is not reality.
That said, we do have a supply problem. Vacancy is essentially zero in Canadian cities, and that’s not true in more affordable housing markets like the US or Japan.
Zoning plays an enormous role. The Lower Mainland is one of the densest regions in Canada, and it has a fraction of the density of virtually all European countries, even mountainous and rural Switzerland. Our urban planning is sprawly and terrible.
Even ignoring housing supply, if you want walkable livable cities, low transportation costs, low environmental impact, and high quality of life, then we should seriously rethink our zoning and urban planning. The consensus on here against more supply, which is also against better zoning and more density, is seriously mind boggling.
How about non-market housing supply, like the spacious comfortable middle class condos that Scandinavian countries provide? Vienna is also a model for government owned housing.
How about co-op housing supply, for people who want to live in communities and not live in an investment?
How about we free up zoning like they do in Japan, where you can buy a spacious new detached SFH in the middle of Tokyo for a fraction of the price of Toronto?
Do you know why the last housing bubble popped in Canada? Because we had a massive oversupply of condos and homes relative to demand. Being against supply is absolutely delusional.
Please no, don’t stop building supply until we get the demand side just right. We also massively lack supply, with the lowest housing per capita in the G7. It takes years to build supply. It’s insane that people want to slow that down!
When are people going to understand it’s both? What makes housing such a “good investment” is that we don’t build enough of it for the people we have. Investors aren’t snatching up affordable housing in rural Arkansas because they have way more supply. We should absolutely deal with investors, make their lives miserable, but we ALSO need supply.
Americans support a lot of things they don’t vote for. Most Americans want universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, more government services, etc. But many famously “vote against their interests”. Abortion is turning out to be the surprising exception.
I can confirm. It feels like it’s down even less than Reddit when I used to be on there.