Have they tried building average, affordable condos instead of luxury condos?
They don't want to, because that would mean less money. If they slap some cheap faux marble and an extra sink in the bathroom, they can charge tens of thousands of dollars more for the same space.
The rich will not accept making the same or less money for a year or so. They have to have more. A lot more.
Could nurse practitioners fill the primary care gap?
Oh look, another way to avoid funding the healthcare system!
I don't mean to demean NPs, but this is like saying "Can EAs fill the teaching gap?". Sure, they could, in theory, but they won't because the government doesn't see NPs as a solution per se; instead, they're a way to avoid spending money and create a two-tiered system where if you want to see a doctor you have to pay, but if you want to try and see an overworked, undercompensated NP you might be able to, if we actually had any.
A "Groceries and Essentials Benefit" is basically a wage subsidy, and you can bet the grocery chains would raise prices by just a little less than the benefit, and if it's like food stamps in the US, it'll be chipped away at and rendered humiliating and useless.
We've seen this play out with gas tax reductions: resellers know a lot about price elasticity, and any savings from a tax cut gets quickly eaten up by price increases.
Here's what we could do:
Tax the rich until we can afford to pay for services again
Raise marginal and corporate rates, forcing companies to re-invest instead of hoarding profits
Make stock buybacks illegal
Significantly raise capital gains taxes
(this is tricky) find a way to tax net worth as income
In seriousness, this is the problem: capital won't take a haircut because line must go up, and labour is absolutely tapped out. There's no more easy debt to leverage, and thanks to inflation, and more thanks to rampant profiteering and an immigration policy designed to suppress wages and strip-mine new Canadians, no new wealth generated.
The game of musical chairs that is the real estate market was always going to stop, it was only a question of who was going to be left standing at the end. What will be interesting is, is this the first domino in the chain, as the dearth of condo-to-home buyers in the pipeline blows up everything else?
My hope is that this whipsaws through the economy and hurts so many people so badly that a) we learn to never let it happen again, and b) that it emboldens governments to finally tax the shit out of the rich.
In Ontario, the average wait time for the thousands of prospective patients on the province’s list looking to be connected to a family doctor is, according to the government, around 90 days.
Wow, so I must be much younger than I think, because it's been eight fucking years since I've had a GP, in a city (not a town, a city) with no walk-in clinics and no NPs taking patients.
This was terrible under McGuinty & Wynne, and Ford's response was basically "hold my (buck a) beer!"
Conservative politicians want to be elected. And the way they want to do this is by stoking meaningless (and mean) culture war issues to keep their base a)angry and b) not focused on economic inequality caused by their donors.
China being authoritarian is a "Dog bites man" story. It's expected.
Same with police misconduct in the US: it's also dog-bites-man.
Trump and his team realized that outrage fatigue is a thing: fuck up daily and with such magnitude that being a corrupt fuckup becomes a non-story and then you can get away with anything.
Steve Bannon even had a term for it: "flood the zone".
The one social media network the amplified left-wing radicalism--Twitter--got bought and tanked by a billionaire.
I can barely recall the last time I saw real left-wing content on Youtube, and the others (Facebook, Reddit) are fine with overt Naziism, but say "eat the rich and pass the ketchup!" and you're looking at suspension.
If I were leading the NDP, I would be banging this drum constantly. Instead, we have the fucking Conservatives acting as the party of the working class, which is insane.
It seems to work for Sanders in the US, but the NDP parties in Canada seem afraid to be called socialists, having been stung during the Rae era in Ontario.
If you're not white and you're voting for Trump and his sycophants, be aware that you're just a line in Niemoller's poem that they haven't got to yet.