What's going on Canada?
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
💻 Schools / Universities
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
🗣️ Politics
🍁 Social / Culture
Rules
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
Anytime someone wants to build housing, they better be increasing regulations to prohibit investment housing. Housing is meant to give people shelter and home, not make investors rich.
As you'd expect from the central banker whiz kid, he has creative policy ideas. I'm pretty excited to see the budget split into separate maintenance and investment budgets if he gets in, and now this.
That being said, there's definite notes of what Gould was talking about here. It's just way, way more focused and detailed. I'd give a summery, but the CBC version, at least, already feels like a summery.
As long as most of this money goes mainly towards high density housing, it's not a whole lot but infinitely better than what I was hearing just a few days ago. We don't need houses three hours drive away from work, but homes where people can not only live in, but around.
I really hope this new organization will have the power to ignore NIMBY organizations while listening to city councils for advice. At the very least I hope they get things done directly plotting out and signing building contracts rather than simply instructing and funding individual municipalities and delegating. We can't have people divert this desperately needed money for homes to be diverted towards private projects and making political buddies wealthier.
non paywalled: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-double-pace-home-building-1.7497947
It's something. Not clear it has to be public-private partnership, or focus on manufactured housing. 4 story apartment buildings is a good mix of density and low cost. CMHC made a lot of this post war baby boom.
Seems like some of the funding is for this.
Remember when the Liberals also promised the 2015 election would also be the last under FPTP?
I'll never forget, but that doesn't really have much to do with this.
Good luck finding a party that always follows their promises exactly.
This isn't just about a party not following "promises exactly" - it's about a fundamental democratic reform promised and then deliberately abandoned. The electoral reform promise wasn't a minor policy detail; it was presented as a pillar of their platform with Trudeau stating it over 1,800 times.
When a government makes a major promise about democratic reform and then breaks it, it directly undermines their democratic legitimacy to make all other promises. This pattern goes back a century - Liberals have campaigned on proportional representation since 1919, starting with Mackenzie King.
In 2024, Trudeau even admitted they were "deliberately vague" about electoral reform to appeal to advocates while never intending to implement proportional representation.
Housing promises matter deeply, but they're built on the same democratic foundation that was undermined by this broken commitment. A government elected through a system where millions of votes don't count is structurally limited in its ability to represent Canadians' actual preferences on any issue, housing included.
Yes, it was a particularly bad one. He wasn't lying about a new system, but he definitely left out that he wanted a possibly worse new system.
A government elected through a system where millions of votes don’t count is structurally limited in its ability to represent Canadians’ actual preferences on any issue, housing included.
Unfortunately, there's no credible path to proportional rep this election.
I'm willing to give a 2nd chance after a decade
I understand the commendable instinct to give another chance, but this isn't about a one-time broken promise - it's about a century-long pattern. Liberals have promised proportional representation since 1919, starting with Mackenzie King.
The 2015 promise wasn't just casually broken - Trudeau literally admitted last year that Liberals were "deliberately vague" to appeal to electoral reform advocates while never intending to implement proportional representation.
Just last year, 107 Liberal MPs (68.6% of their caucus) voted against even creating a Citizens' Assembly to study electoral reform, despite 76% of Canadians supporting it.
This isn't about partisan politics - it's about our declining democracy. Canada's effective number of parties is down to 2.76, showing we're sliding toward an American-style two-party system under Duverger's Law.
In a democracy, citizens deserve representation. Every election under FPTP means millions of perfectly valid votes are discarded. How many more decades should we wait?
What is your solution
I don't know the particular solution to the housing crisis (nor did I insinuate I have one).
But the solution to the millions of perfectly valid ballots being tossed out every single Canadian election, is proportional representation.
I've been repeating this: Simple things you can do to grow the proportional representation movement.
Perhaps after we get PR, we can get actually effective governments, that respond even more deeply to the people's needs.
This is an amzing comment. Thank you soo o much for the links.
Just a Canadian concerned about democracy!
Here are some more links: Simple things you can do to grow the proportional representation movement.
This is exciting news!
Now, what do we do when our Provincial or Municipal governments become the barrier to housing? Because lord knows that Doug Ford is fully capable of screwing this up.
They should be pushing to restrict these rental company assholes from buying all the houses and preventing potential owners from getting them. "Landlord" is not a job.
They should only allow Build Canada Homes to sell to first time home buyers, Co-operatives, and not-for-profit Community Land Trust.
Corporate and "mom and pop" investors must be barred from buying these units. Otherwise, the problem will not go away.
I mean, if they can make a meaningful increase in supply, no investor is going to want to hold onto a house in that market. You might get that result without having to enforce it.
I'd say better safe than sorry.
I listened to his speech. He's talking in no uncertain terms that he's going for a post-war style build-out. He also pointed out that the market hasn't delivered and won't solve our housing crisis.
This is exactly what's need on high level.
I agree, but I'm also acutely aware that it is campaign season, and the LPC has a nasty habit of running left and governing right.
If we wind up with a Liberal minority with Conservatives in opposition, or with a Liberal majority, I honestly fully expect this to get dropped or strategically undermined the way electoral reform did.
In other words, we're gonna have to be ready to fight for it.
I mean, pretty much everything else the Liberals promised has at least been attempted. They've gone extra ambitious on some things, even, like doubling their tree planting goal because they were ahead of schedule.
Main exception being voting reform.
I did say everything else.
That is the only major one I recall - they have been pretty darn good overall, I certainly have few complaints - most of those lie with provincial premiers and not the federal liberals.
It's a breath of fresh air to hear an actual plan that sounds like it would actually work. This is what Carney is here for.
100%
That said, I think there's a better chance this to materialize because I think Carney knows he'll lose the next election if he doesn't deliver on this file. This isn't 2015 when things were not great but tolerable. We have a huge homeless population which is not limited to the largest cities anymore, and the cost of housing is hitting every part of the economy. The knife has hit the bone for way more people today than even a few years ago. So while I completely agree with the skepticism, I have a sliver more optimism this time around.
I've been concerned that we might get a giant influx of Americans, who have more purchasing power with that strong USD and would price Canadians out of any and all housing. Plus building aggressively like this is a good stimulus to the economy. Let's hope it works.