Not to mention the people who have it are generally wealthier because it’s mostly for detached homes at this point.

Nah it doesn’t. It suggests that I’m being realistic.

These people have a method of getting food to their homes, they can figure out the mail too.

It’s like you’re imagining there are millions of crippled people living all alone in the middle of nowhere. They’d be dead if that was the case. They either live with caregivers, or they have caregivers that come over regularly.

I don’t need it. My parents don’t need it. My grandparent(the one that’s left) doesn’t need it. In fact I don’t know a single person who couldn’t get their own mail or lives with someone who could.

I live in a rural area, and I can see a shoreline from my house. It’s quite pleasant actually.

I’m usually very supportive of union strikes. Not this one though, the world has moved on from letter post, and while I think it’s important to still exist at a basic level I see no problems with the plans they’re proposing to remove home services entirely.

Yes a whole bunch of people are going to lose their jobs, and a few elderly people may need to figure out how to get a neighbour to grab their mail for them.

This is the reality of a digital world though, we shouldn’t keep jobs just for the sake of keeping jobs. Walking to your mailbox simply isn’t that big a deal that we should be paying $200 million a year to keep house delivery for a specific group of people (many people already dont have it)

Saw this article right before I came here.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ontario-housing-construction-collapse-should-alarm-policymakers-report-warns-110007649.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=YW5kcm9pZC1hcHA6Ly9jb20uZ29vZ2xlLmFuZHJvaWQuZ29vZ2xlcXVpY2tzZWFyY2hib3gv&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAD_aPS7Sg4Yhm58GQJH8_dYP5rdlzlG2saXWGeh-sRCRs9P8EBJ_lThWYTkXUv2mbdW-D_8zgNgTPr7aPBJ_qpSIecgMPb5LXv1wqOjF-jM9bLrS6ozuJpLjWQUmLHibauvgl4_oROL1hsmm6evYdqkHvuyy1Wf1VoAgD5CYeW2N

The Conservatives are now saying the quiet part out loud. They not allow socially liberal ideas in their party.

It’s not doubtful that condos are more expensive per square foot than detached houses. Google it, those numbers are widely available.

Condos do not house more people per square foot at this point, In Canada right now, most people in condos have 0 or 1 child. Total fertility per woman is like 1.2 at the moment, and lower than that average for people living in Condos. 800 square feet divided by 2 is 400 square feet each. Even if they had 1 child, it’s still 266 square feet per person.

Those houses they built after the war were small, less than 1500 square feet, and houses after the World War had LOTS of children. That was literally how the baby boomer generation came into being. The total fertility per woman was something like 3.6-4 for the decade after the war ended. 1500 square feet divided by 6 is 250 square feet.

I did the math on a condo project in Vancouver (not even in downtown, just in the City across the bridge) the land cost for each unit they were building was $300,000. That number alone makes them unaffordable, before even talking about the construction costs. That doesn’t include any interest cost on holding the property while under development.

Land costs are currently a prohibitive factor in literally everything at this point.

Oh I know what happened post-war, but that type of development isn’t possible anymore.

There simply isn’t the available land, the only costs associated with that situation were for the buildings themselves which they made very small and cheap.

Today, there’s no land just sitting there for free. Not to mention building condos cost a lot more per square foot than detached houses.

However, believe what you will. This push by Carney isn’t enough, it’s not even close. I wish it the best of luck, but I’m so certain it’s going to fail that I bought a house big enough for my children to continue living here as adults.

Excellent, so here’s what we’ll do. Ping me in 2035 and we’ll see if I’ve made a whole bunch more money or if my property has gone down in value.

I know I’m right here, which is hard for me, I don’t want to be correct. I would rather my children to be able to afford homes.

Unfortunately, people like you keep getting their hopes up on policies that have no historical record of working. Building more homes has never dropped prices anywhere in the world. Prices have always dropped because of other factors, and specifically those factors related to investment (like interest rates going up, the defaults from sub-prime mortgages, or the stagnation of the entire economy like in Japan)

Do you own a home?

I assume Carney can do basic math. If you watch the interview in the post, he notes that we’re only going to have a small number initially as we start scaling up new processes, companies and the like.

Housing productivity hasn’t improved at all over the last 50 years, in fact it’s gone down. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/the-strange-and-awful-path-of-productivity-in-the-us-construction-sector/

Carney can do basic math, but the reality is that he is lying to people. He doesn’t actually want house prices to go down. Voters would actually be quite unhappy with a 20% drop in prices that occurs too quickly and doesn’t have an external event to blame. The Conservatives would eat his breakfast in the next election if he dropped the value of homes by 10% before then. That’s the retirement savings for a lot of voters, they have far more money in their homes than they do in stocks and retirement portfolios.

Which is why every government is just picking some key items to say “look at what we’re doing, but it’s going to take time” knowing that they will get voted out before that lie starts to become apparent. The liberals launched a “National Housing Strategy in 2015”… it’s 10 years later and things are just significantly worse. Harper wasn’t any better before that, here’s their strategy from the 2006 election. https://www.poltext.org/sites/poltext.org/files/plateformesV2/Canada/CAN_PL_2006_PC_en.pdf where they acknowledged the problem, and agreed to do… almost nothing. The only reason that Harper didn’t have a massive explosion of the housing prices during his term was because the global financial crash nuked the real estate market right in the middle of his time in office, and they still managed to go up 15% in total.

Coupled with population decline

This one is a bit of a strange egg since it will happen completely unevenly when it occurs. Go look at housing prices in Japan over the last 10 years. Most rural houses are effectively worthless and practically ghost towns, while places like Tokyo are still up in prices despite completely flat population growth. Not particularly helpful for most people.

Seriously impressive. Sounds like we may need one on the island itself full time.

According to the CMCH, double the housing starts. Which is what the government is aiming to do.

Except the CMHC said you would need to double the housing starts between when they released that report and 2035 for that to happen. The report came out last year.

Did we double housing starts in 2025? Nope. Will we double it in 2026? Also no.

In fact, how long would it take to even train 100% more workers than already exist in that industry?

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020016-eng.htm Here’s the statscan data on new registrations for apprentices… I looked at plumbers and electricians specifically, but If you google around for total numbers of people working in those fields. It appears that even with the latest huge post-covid push of new apprentices it will take… 10 years to double the number of workers, and that assumes not a single existing one retires in that period.

So the reality of the situation is that we CANNOT build twice as many houses each year between now and 2035 to return the pricing level to 2019 affordability ratios. We realistically can’t even come close to doing such a thing.

This would always have been true, housing didn’t suddenly become investments in 2020.

And yet, houses were at 2019 prices in 2019, regardless of their ability to act as investments. And that happened without any of the radical proposals outlined. Why would these proposals not have been necessary in 2019 to hit 2019 prices but suddenly are required regardless of how much we build?

I don’t know how young you are, but housing has been getting more unaffordable for my entire life, it wasn’t affordable in 2019 either and it wasn’t unaffordable because we didn’t build enough houses. There are far more bedrooms in Canada than people (I did the math a while back), and that doesn’t even account for the fact that lots of couples and kids share a room. There’s more than enough housing for everyone, the problem is the distribution of housing. Home owners making money just living in their home, completely unearned. That is money that has to come from somewhere, and it’s always been coming from the next generation of buyers. It’s the largest pyramid investment scheme in history.

That’s one of the reasons I like the land value tax idea I mentioned above, if you use more land than you should for a given area desirability, you have to pay a larger amount of tax. This will cause a massive amount of downsizing for empty nesters, freeing up those larger homes for people who currently have children or even just for re-development into condos in urban areas. The re-distribution of the tax to offset income taxes/or a basic income make it more affordable for current workers and families to afford those bigger units because they’re still working and will collect more money from having more family members.

I have a couple Tapo cameras set up with HA, I had to use the tapo app initially to set up but once they’re set up you can ditch it and run the system entirely locally. I saw someone had a way to configure them locally too, but it wasn’t simple enough for me to bother and I was fine with the one time step.

Canada would be the France of that variation of World War 3. We would surrender almost instantly.

I disagree, there’s always a balancing act between being dependant and what you have to give up in order to do it yourself. In this case, I think being dependant is the better choice.

The thing is, this is just the tip of the tech iceberg. We’re also dependant upon the US for high-end computer parts, they can ban the sale of chips from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to Canada if they wanted. And in turn, the US and Canada are both dependant on Taiwan and other countries for the actual chip production from those companies.

Does that mean Canada should also invest in developing our own microprocessor design and manufacturing? Currently, the only two countries even trying that are the US and China, and China is still a ways behind. Those are the two largest countries by GDP in the entire world, Canada’s GDP is tiny in comparison. Anything we invest in isn’t simply going to be inferior, it’s going to be pathetic in comparison and leave us at a significant disadvantage in terms of operational capabilities.

We have to recognize the reality of the situation, and that is that being dependant here is the only realistic path forward given our size.

What the government is doing isn’t bad, it just isn’t significant enough to matter.

The simple answer is that in order for houses to be affordable, prices need to drop. Even to reach 2019 you’d have to see the value of ALL houses drop by 20%.

How many houses would you need to build in order to have prices drop by 20%?

I can tell you the answer, it’s way more houses than we could possibly build even with new tradespeople and new tech.

Current housing prices aren’t reflective of their availability, they’re mostly reflective of their value as investments (including for single home owners). Until that part is removed from their pricing, they will never become affordable again.

We need to implement one of the following to actually fix the problem:

a) Just have the government own all the land, and only lease it to people and companies. They then get to set the prices to whatever they choose. This is a fairly extreme option, but it does work somewhat although it does have it’s own issues, see Singapore.

b) Implement a 100% capital gains tax on the land value of a property. When you sell, you essentially get no value from the land becoming more desirable. You still benefit if you developed the property (new buildings, renovations, etc.) so developers wouldn’t really care. This has less immediate effect, and still has issues with people just holding land forever.

c) Implement a land value tax, again only on the land value of a property. This is a monthly/yearly tax for a significant portion of the value of the land. Essentially “rent” being paid to the government for use of the land, but you still exclusively own the property. This tax needs to be set high enough that the land can never appreciate in value more than the amount paid. The net effect of this would be a significant drop in land value, so that the tax becomes low enough people could afford it. The neat thing about this, is that it encourages densification, because the tax is only on the land, if you have 6 town houses instead of 1 home, the tax is now spread between 6 families. In an urban setting, putting up multiple units becomes the only viable option unless you’re extremely wealthy.

In all of these situations, I would like to see the tax money raised do two things. Reduce personal income taxes for anything below the median income to 0, and/or then be equally distributed to citizens in a basic income. The country IS the land, the benefit from the increase of value of the land should be recognized by everyone, not private land owners.

There’s plenty of shit that would stop working if the American government decided to disable us that are far more critical.

The US/Canadian militaries are very closely intertwined. NORAD and Five Eyes both come to mind. We also have hundreds of military members stationed on US bases, and they have people stationed on some of our our bases as well.

Besides, if the US chose to attack Canada, there’s not a godamn thing our miliary could do to stop them. Fully operational or not we simply are no match for the American military, nor could we ever be. We have 1/10th of the population.

So why waste money on preparing for something that would 100% result in us losing anyways?

All countries? Definitely not.

There are like 20 countries that don’t even have a military, so that’s impossible.

Would most countries with a military use Microsoft cloud services in some significant capacity? I would bet they do.

I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but it ain’t happening.

Housing prices will not drop relative to incomes from this plan. At best it’s going to keep that ratio level, but if you can’t afford one now that won’t help.

Countries? Name one.

I know a few places in Europe tried to avoid it, but that was at the state or city level, and most of them are back on windows again.

People keep trying it, but it’s incredibly hard to retrain literally tens to hundreds of thousands of people on everything from their operating system, to their word processor, to their enterprise commutation and server infrastructure.

The Microsoft stack is enormous. Google is the only other company even close to doing a cohesive structure, and it’s not great.

Picking 40 less than integrated replacement open source products is never going to work.

I say this as someone who uses open source stuff myself. The average user is dumb as shit, and has no interest in relearning how to use a computer.