Way too little, WAY too late.
Plus if it’s like any of their other demand side policy tweaks (first time home buyers savings account…), it will only make things worse
In fact has there ever been a single Liberal policy that made housing more affordable? Over how many years?
I struggle to even understand what people expect the federal government to do about house prices.
This is a problem that lives 95% in the jurisdiction of the provences and their cities. The most the feds can do is the demand side tweaks like you mention.
I haven’t seen any decent ideas from the conservatives on how they plan to address this either, like usual they just seem to be making noise to try to get people angry.
I’m always surprised by the lack of imagination when folks bring up jurisdiction with respect to the housing crisis. The federal govt has an abundance of tools it can use to leverage pressure on the provinces. Even if we were to go by your rather narrow view of the issue, that the federal govt has yet to even begin to make noises about supply-side tweaks certainly suggests that it is simply not a priority for them, that they are comfortable with the seriously disturbing rise of unhoused Canadians and tent encampments in most major Canadian cities.
Personally, I’m pretty shocked that things have progressed to where we are now, and, despite being quite left of centre, this is such an issue in my area that voting Liberal again is simply unimaginable. I’m certainly not proud to be forced into considering voting blue (orange is a much likelier option but i cant say I’m particularly pleased with them having tied their cart to the govt’s horse) but I simply can’t reward a govt for such inaction on such a fundamental issue.
Like you say the feds have leverage on the provinces, but in reality we just saw how long the provinces dragged their feet on childcare, and they’ve been dragging their feet on healthcare.
I like to imagine that the feds have more influence, and if they wanted to spend all their political capital they might be able to force through a single issue like this (but take your pick on what that single issue is).
You’re delusional if you think voting blue would make this situation any better, orange is a much better bet, but even better, vote red or orange at the provincial level or even better, vote in your municipal elections, both those levels have much more direct tools at solving this issue.
At this point I’m convinced the federal conservatives and provincial conservatives are intentionally trying confuse voters by shifting the blame from the currently in power provincial conservative governments to the federal liberals, and it feels like it’s working 😞.
Are they going to call an election soon or something? Why are they suddenly pretending to give a shir?
Housing is like a third of the economy at this point and no one is willing to hurt it when they are at the helm.
They probably see how much success PP is having with his messaging and are getting spooked.
They do have the housing generator fund to bribe cities into approving more housing, which is a nice supply-side carrot. The problem is that municipalities don’t deserve carrots. They deserve sticks. I can’t stand Poilievre, but he’s right there.
The feds don’t really have sticks to use against cities, that’s the provinces jurisdiction…
They give the cities a bunch of money. Poilievre proposes that they not do that for ones with lackluster performance building housing. I have trouble disagreeing with him despite how disagreeable he is.
Are you talking about funding for infrastructure or other big projects like that?
I’m not aware of any city getting regular blank checks from the feds in the same way they get from the provences.
Typically a city will ask the province and feds to help fund large projects they couldn’t hope to fund on their own, this is partially realted to cities having lots of limitations on the kinds of debt they can carry.
So ya, mostly large infrastructure stuff.
Maybe if cities didn’t waste so much space for car parking and ridiculous house regulations, there wouldn’t be a crisit at all. I mean, let’s build houses closer together, more densely. It does not even need to be a mega condo tower. It can still be single family house. It just need to be a bit more dense.
Cars are really fucking us up big time. There is SO much space wasted for personal cars that we don’t even have space for people.
Stop building parking lots and start building 3 to 5 story building.
Car centric design is definately an issue. There’s an open mall near my place, and even during peak hours more than half of the parking lot is empty, two thirds more often than not.
Even then, I think the zoning laws and related regulations are far worse. I mean, every plot should allow for townhouses. Most are little bigger than existing houses from the front, but fit four or more families in the same plot. If even a third of single residential plots were replaced with townhouses, we wouldn’t even have a housing crisis in the first place.
Though the biggest reason why there’s a housing crisis is because people are allowed to treat housing like an investment, not a necessity. Imagine if you could invest in a loaf of bread. There’d be lobbies to mandate that all bakeries reduce output so that a loaf would cost $50 each and out of the hands of young people and low income earners.
Yep. My first house was in Acton Ont. It was a “war time house” that was built to house returning vets after the war. They just don’t build houses like that anymore. 2-3 bedrooms (small enough that a king size bed won’t fit in the largest), 1 bathroom, a kitchen/dining area, and a living room. That’s it. You walk in the front door into the living room. There should be a mandate in place that forces developers that a certain percent of new developments (say…75%?) cost LESS than $300K. Instead they are making these huge McMansions, with a patio bug enough for a BBQ as a backyard, and they cram as many as they can in. They’re not building communities. They are making horizontal condos and selling them for over $!M. each.
Maybe I didn’t read this right but how is this drawing contrast to conservatives? Are conservatives promising to make housing more expensive? Feels like all politicians from every corner of the political spectrum will sell themselves as affordability-focused.
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Of course, I’m not defending that conservative policies for affordability work. They don’t. Just like their policies for public safety, transportation, healthcare and most things don’t, because they’re naive and backwards.
Still, they’ll still market themselves in defense of affordability, safety, transportation, health etc. So declaring oneself as “affordability-focused” is not a differentiating factor.
You’ll find the Liberals and Conservatives are frequently presented as being a opposite spectrums. When in reality their political goals is essentially just based off of capitalism at a higher level.
Liberals will say that Canadians would starve if we dont treat the Weston’s favourably while Conservatives will say we’d all be walking to work of we don’t treat O&G favourbly. You could also look at how they value people for example both parties would tax doctors out the ass compared to housing investors.
I think the contrast is that the Conservatives have talked about addressing the supply side rather than the demand side. Pollievre has talked about “removing the gatekeepers” to allow more homes to be built.
I’m not sure if cities are actually making it hard to build more homes. But I would guess that from a city’s perspective, you’d want to limit the rate of new homes being built so you can keep your land valuations as high as possible to maximize property tax revenue. But again, that’s just a theory. And not sure the Conservatives could do anything about that anyway if it were the case
