sbv @ sbv @sh.itjust.works

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Like I’m sorry but these kids were in elementary school when Trudeau got elected and every day since their parents have been paying for less and less of their stuff.

The article interviews people in their 30s, and the poll is of Canadians under 35. I'm not sure about our demographics, but I'd expect many of the respondents have been in the workforce for a few years. They're generally priced out of home ownership and their rent has skyrocketed. Those are the same people who are reporting lower levels of happiness (as per the article), and probably having a harder time with the inflation we've seen since the start of COVID.

Blaming their concerns on "scrolling social media endlessly" doesn't address the problem that they are legitimately having a shit time. I don't think the Conservatives have the answers to these problems, but dismissing them out of hand sucks.

The article isn't really about support for the Conservatives, it's more about affordability issues (outside of housing) not really registering in the campaigns.

most anti-immigration arguments completely forget that they help with the supply by bringing manpower to build the homes.

To a degree. Canada's point system for immigration selects white collar workers, while most students coming in on education visas are aiming for office or healthcare jobs. The last time I looked, the trades had the same proportion of new Canadians as the rest of the population - so yeah, some immigrants are in the trades, but they aren't overrepresented.

The federal government should be selecting for more construction workers. IIRC there are a couple of programs that encourage tradespeople to immigrate, but they don't bring in a significant number of people.

Bringing more manpower doesn’t help since it’s not the bottleneck.

Lack of construction workers is a bottleneck. It's just one of many, including: increased construction costs, developer incentives, zoning, lack of government construction, etc. Like you say, we need to solve all of those at once.

The anti-immigration arguments are mainly from the racist right that looks for a boogyman while ignoring the real causes of our issues.

I don't think that's fair to say. Immigration exacerbates the housing/healthcare crises, even if it isn't the sole cause. Lining it up on political lines turns immigration into a wedge issue, which doesn't help anyone.

It's much faster for the federal government to reduce the number of newcomers than it is to build houses, train healthcare/construction workers, etc. A reduction would reduce strain on our society while we fix the many problems we're facing. Once housing is again affordable, and every Canadian has access to appropriate healthcare, then we can see about increasing admission if appropriate. In the meantime, we really need to increase the number of tradespeople (and healthcare workers) we're bringing in (and certifying) even as overall numbers fall.

A more realistic plan would involve the definancialization of Canadian housing. As long as homes are a lucrative investment vehicle for middle class Canadians, we're going to keep laddering up the price.

I'd take another look at the Liberal's housing platform in detail.

The plan has the issues I listed above: no near term construction targets, no affordability guarantees for new units, and no price goal for the total housing stock. It promises money for builders, but includes no mechanism to ensure prices fall.

I struggle to think of a more ambitious but realistic plan released by any comparable party among any of our developed nation peers.

I hear good stuff about Singapore's model. Denmark and Vienna apparently do social housing well.

Hey fellow Canadian. I pay about the same. Looking at these other responses, I think we're getting screwed.

And then those changes in the rules are meant to spur developers

That's the root of the problem. Both the LPC and CPC plans rely on "reducing red tape" so private developers will charge homebuyers less for their product.

There's nothing in either plan to ensure home prices will fall - just the hope that the invisible hand will whisk our problems away.

I'm not saying that's impossible, but it would require a concerted effort to build a huge number of units in a short period of time. No Canadian party has released a plan to do so.

I'm not sure on the timelines but it seems a much more comprehensive plan with an appropriate amount of funding to get us in a good place not for now but for long term

Thanks to the cost of living crisis, we're losing a generation of young people to conservatism. Throwing a bunch of money at developers in the hope that they charge less for their product in ten years time is a recipe for stagnation and alienation.

I love that idea. I'd happily pay a reasonable amount for good services.

raised home starts by 2 percent within a year or so

We've only got something like 240k starts per year. 2% growth won't get us there - that's like 5k extra houses/year?

CMHC says we need 3.5 million homes by 2030 to restore affordability, so we need something like 700k starts per year. That's an extra 460k?

IIRC, the LPC plan is 35 billion over ten years, with 500k starts/year reached in 2035. It isn't clear how that will restore affordability.

I'm ambivalent about population growth. It undoubtedly contributed to the housing crisis, but there's a lot of other stuff going on: speculation by Canadians, a bit of foreign money, a bit of money laundering, and poorly designed tax law. I've been watching housing prices slowly taking off since the early 2010s. That's long before Trudeau was elected, and before the massive bump in population.

Ouch:

Globally, there are some examples of governments successfully developing homes at scale for citizens. But Ottawa struggled to deliver on core services, such as issuing passports and tax collection, even as the size of the civil service grew by 42 percent and total spending on outsourcing reached a record high of $17.8 billion last year under Trudeau’s leadership. Similarly, the Liberals’ claim that these measures would kickstart 500,000 homes a year is disconnected from recent precedent. In 2024, just over 245,000 homes were started, a 2 percent increase from 2023.

The reviewer mentions the Liberals plan to juice rental construction.

The reviewer has little positive to say about any of the plans. They say the removal of GST on all houses (part of the CPC plan) is more effective than the LPC proposal to drop it on new builds. Fair enough.

The plans aren't enough. The reviewer mentions the demand side but fails to state that none of the parties are trying to lower it, which is disappointing. Nor do they discuss the financialization of housing.

I recently crossed by car. It was no different from pre-Trump crossings: a few pro forma questions, they looked in the trunk, and then waved us through.

I was expecting them to demand my phone or be difficult. That wasn't the case.

Said Indigenous Peoples needed to learn the value of hard work more than they needed compensation for residential schools

He apologized as soon as he got pushback. (Assuming this is the same one you're referring to)

In a lot of ways I think that's worse: he's an asshole until he's called on it, and then he hides behind an apology. It's right up there with "just a prank bro."

I can't speak to the US, this is a Canadian community.

Edit: That might have come across as impolite. Here's a summary of the Canadian state of affairs.

In Canada, the leader of the incumbent centre-right party (the LPC) made a series of insensitive and alienating statements that minimized our cost of living crisis between 2023 and 2024. The LPC put a number of policies into place starting in around 2018 that are generally credited with exacerbating the crisis. The right-wing party (the CPC) was able to capitalize on the widespread dissatisfaction with the LPC and looked ready to win government in the 2025 elections.

That changed when the leader of the LPC stepped down and a life-time bureaucrat was elected as the head of the LPC. At this point, support for the LPC and CPC is close, but the LPC has a slight advantage in most polls.

The vote tally for the 2025 election will occur on April 28.

At this point, I don't believe there are any billionaires running in the election. Generally speaking, the wealthy class (such as the Irvings, Rogers family, etc) typically support proxies who will advance their interests. It's rare that they appear in public with politicians. Having said that, the leaders of both the LPC and CPC are life-long government employees that have enjoyed impressive salaries, and are both much wealthier than the general population.

The current leaders of the LPC and CPC are on record as being very wealth-friendly. It is unlikely that either of them would make any changes that would address the root causes of our cost of living crisis - that would require significant changes to how real estate and businesses are taxed, etc. It's fair to say that the LPC would probably offer more bandaid solutions, so that is fairly positive.

People have a bunch of legit complaints about their quality of life, that the right is capitalizing on. If we don't address those, progressive parties will do poorly.

Yes.

I spent a bunch of time translating some notes into posts and got one comment and a handful of upvotes. If I saw stats saying 20 or 30 people spent time looking at the posts without interacting, then it would feel like it's worth doing again.

(I realize Lemmy doesn't track view time, but still)

Sometimes it feels like I'm posting into the void. It doesn't feel like it's worth the effort.

There are the pocket book issues: food is expensive, housing is wildly expensive, jobs are hard to come by, and healthcare is basically ERs at this point.

There's a reason people are angry at the incumbents. The right are the ones capitalizing on it.

I saw a post on Reddit about a person in their early thirties who had done everything "right" but was being evicted so their landlord could raise the rent. They couldn't find a place in their community that they could afford.

This is the world that kids are entering: it's hard to find a decent job; and unless you have family money, you'll spend most of your income on rent.

It's totally understandable they want to kick the incumbents out. And it's fucking depressing that there's no progressive politician in Canada presenting a viable alternative.

Your original comment states that Poilievre wants more gun violence.

You've made an assertion about his personal goals - supporting that requires information about him: either stuff he has said or reliable second hand reports of what he has said.

True. I guess the question is what can a PM accomplish without legislation?

I'm surprised what a US president can do with executive orders. I don't know if prime ministers have similar power.

Storage and indexing is cheap. From a usability perspective indexing makes sense: call centre staff can tell someone why their unemployment application has been denied/delayed etc.

From a security perspective, Google, Proton, and friends want to track failed login IPs so they can assign (internal) reputation scores to incoming requests.