They really need to include the US too, they are the biggest meddlers. Manipulating our politicians so they can exploit our resources. And a lot of the discontent in Canada is funded by US political organizations.

Nobody or country should get a free pass, foreign interference from anyone is an attack on our country, we need to defend ourselves.

These type of arguments do not look at the big picture.

Stealing from big companies can sound noble if you only look at the theft itself. But when you take a step back and look at how the money flows, you will see that the company does just take the loss and do nothing. What actually happens is the company sees the theft as an additional cost, and includes those costs in the prices charged to everyone else. Resulting in the money to cover the theft coming from other customers.

So the net result of stealing from a big company, is stealing from ever other customer.

Most of the safety problems are caused by cars, not ebikes.

This is like around some of the schools where people are trying to blame the children walking to school because people in cars are running them down. We need to stop victim blaming and go after the source of the problem, the cars and the people recklessly driving them too fast.

So of I understand this correctly, that means there is very little the federal government can do besides use indirect levers to decrease cost, like:

1. Further increase immigration to ensure there are enough workers to avoid labour cost from increasing.
2. Keep driving inflation down so general costs don’t get worse.
3. Resist calls for short term relief schemes which will increase prices by letting people spend more.

What else can be done at the federal level?

The big cost savings items all seem like they are Municipal and Provincial, like: getting rid of minimum parking requirements, deceasing per unit land costs, and allowing more units to be built in the communities people want to live in.

My understanding is this is not happening because of one time thing. What has gotten people upset is the ongoing and repetitive nature of it.

Just boosting a toot will not get you in trouble. It only happens after people have discussed with you multiple times that the person you are boosting is problematic, and you keep decide doing it anyways and keep helping that person evade blocks.

Socially it is no different than if you try to introduce an awful person to your friends. At first they will tell you that they did not like that person and to not bring them around. But if you ignore them and keep doing it anyways, you eventually put them in a position where the only way to avoid the awful person is to avoid you too.

This chart has been around for a long time and is getting out of date. It should now be called: How Older Canadians Measure Things. Younger Canadians are getting a lot more metric.

For example none of the younger people at my office know their weight in imperial. The most they knew were some baby weights they had to convert to imperial for their parents.

To add to this, that sprawl relies on heavily subsidiaries to exist. Tax wise they collect a fraction of the taxes needed to maintain their infrastructure (depending on where suburban areas collect ½ to ⅒ of the cost needed to sustain themselves). So they are rely on subsidies from high density areas and deficit spending to exist.

As a society, spending so much to subsidize low density developments is why we have a housing crisis. It is an economically unsustainable way to build housing, and that is coming back to bite us now. We cannot afford to keep building like this.

The idea of further subsidizing people to live in already subsidized areas is terrible economic policy. It is paying someone to waste your money.

If people want to choose to live in low density areas, that is fine by me, but they need to actually pay for it themselves. We need to end the subsidies that exist now, not add new ones.

The trouble is our current demographics mean that reducing immigration would have massive downsides to the economy too.

There are just too many people retiring (now and over the next decade). Without immigration to have a large enough workforce to support the people retiring, the economy will contract. Contracting economies are terrible for citizens and their countries.

The on top of that, the people retiring have a proportionally large amount of wealth. That will cause a lot of demand on our economy. If we do not have equally high immigration to increase the supply of our economy, inflation will go very high to balance supply and demand by decreasing the value of retirees savings.

Not an easy problem to deal with, big tradeoffs every way. But compared to other countries we are better situated because we can avoid the worst tradeoffs by using immigration to solve this problem. If we can figure out how to significantly increase the amount and density of our housing, Canada will be in a great position globally.

I cannot say for how it is for other companies, but for the tech company I work for it was the immigration and visa mess that pushed us to move all of our operations from the US to Canada. These are not call center jobs either, they are good high paying development jobs, from our architects to junior developers.

The United States has made it too hard and slow to get the visas we need to conduct business. We sell our software online, we have customers all around the world. When we need to get the right employees and customers in one location to meet, we can do that in Canada. The United States, starting around 2016 and getting worse from then, there just became too many random work permit denials and extra hoops to jump through.