Does Canada need to maintain relevance in Europe? Asia? Africa has the fastest growing and youngest population in the world — the region will no doubt play a key role in global commerce in the next century. Why is it justified to ignore Africa but not other parts of the world?

“We need tons of parking lots until we get walkable cities” gets things totally backwards. Walkable cities are impossible because of the stupid amount of parking lots we have.

The dilemma you pose of “parking vs walkable cities” isn’t even real: we massively overbuild parking lots so we can stand to get rid of most of them. I’ve been to SK many times. Strip mall parking lots are half empty even during the busiest times of day. It’s insane. You could build housing on tons of that land without ever causing parking lots to fill up.

Here in Vancouver, there are almost no strip mall parking lots and the absolute number of cars is higher than anywhere in SK, and yet, there’s STILL too much parking. There’s almost always parking within a block or two of any store outside of the downtown core. The distance you walk probably isn’t that different from across those huge parking lots.

Honestly, we can go on a massive parking diet and, because we overbuild parking so much, there won’t even be any downside for drivers.

I agree with your sensible degree of caution, given the context. It’s good media literacy.

If the NDP pull this off, they’ll deserve a ton of credit. It’ll be the biggest expansion of public services in decades. We’re one of the only countries with universal healthcare but not pharmacare.

That’s possible but Canada (and the US) are outliers on this. In Japan, the Netherlands, etc. kids are still encouraged and allowed to play outside without adult supervision. I think we have a particularly paranoid parenting culture in this country.

Yeah sorry it sounded like I was correcting you, but I meant to say I agree with you too.

Canada spends a LOT less on policing than the US and has MUCH less crime. Crime severity is basically half in Canada, and per capita police spending is half. For example, the safest major city in North America is Toronto.

Not coincidentally, Canada also has better social services like public healthcare, more equitable access to schooling, and higher social mobility. This is the argument for defunding the police. We need police, but other things have a much bigger effect on safety.

There can be a deterrent effect in very specific situations. At crowded public events, like a parade, a police presence can lower crime at that event. Sometimes. But otherwise, police don’t work like that.

“No consistent correlation” means that likely nothing dramatic will happen. Police don’t prevent crimes. They come after a crime has already occurred.

If you’re worried about cost: car infrastructure is the most expensive per capita. Unlike public transportation, roads are almost entirely government subsidized, with virtually no tolls or pay roads anywhere in the country. The worst part of subsidized highways are the spillover costs: oceans of subsidized parking lots and wide subsidized roads to service all the cars. In most NA cities, 60% of surface area is devoted to cars. What a waste.

That’s not counting the private costs, which people massively underestimate. Cars cost an average of $14k a year. This is why Canadians and Americans spend more on transportation than almost any country in the world.

And what do we get for all that extra cost? A lower quality of life: The longest commute times in the world, amongst the highest traffic deaths in the developed world (which is the biggest killer of children in Canada), a housing crisis due to low density, obesity and cardiovascular disease due to lack of incidental exercise, and high property taxes to maintain all that inefficient asphalt.

Canadians are also amongst the highest per capita carbon emitters, in large part due to tailpipe emissions and car centric urban design.

Canada today is almost certainly less corrupt and rent seeking than the literal Gilded Age, when the country was founded! In fact, the Pacific Scandal was our first major political scandal, involving political bribery by railroad investors and leading to the resignation of John A Macdonald.

I really have to push back against this pessimism about government. It only serves conservative pro-privatization interests to push that narrative. The problem is political will. Voters easily approve major new highways in ON. We would get rail if voters demanded it. So let’s start a movement!

We waste a lot of immigrant talent in Canada by not recognizing foreign credentials.

8 hours to be seen is possible in greater Vancouver, but definitely not typical. Current wait times are about as bad as they’ve ever been, but avg wait times are still about 1 to 4 hours. I think it’s the rural hospitals that get really bad.

Canadians are considering voting in conservatives at every level of government. I would love for it to be true, but what makes you think Canadian voters are pining for more left leaning policies. If anything, absurdly, voters seem to want to punish Trudeau for going too far left!

But Canadians keep voting in conservatives at the provincial level, across the whole country. Only two NDP provinces (BC and Manitoba), and MB is very recent. This really seems like “voting against our interests”.

I would say it’s a very noisy signal but not meaningless. Also, one affects the other: the polling affects when there will be an election. Not now!

The provinces across Canada have been surprisingly conservative for a while. Even supposedly left leaning BC went through 16 years of a conservative government until just relatively recently in 2017. All while conservative governments have endured scandals, mismanagement, limp economies, and chronic underfunding of healthcare and housing.

The quick upshot: upzoning worked to lower prices. But there’s been a political backlash against the most ambitious country wide reforms, and a lot of forward thinking policies are now at risk of being reversed.

BC is the only province that has been doing similar things, especially recently with province wide zoning reforms. (Not coincidentally, BC is one of the only provinces with a progressive government in the country.) There’s a lot of political buy in at the moment in BC, including municipal government support, but I’m worried about how the homeowner class will react when the policies actually start taking effect.

Super low property taxes, besides starving government services and causing renters to make up the difference in fees, is precisely one of the reasons why places like Vancouver have one of the worst housing crises in the world. Economists agree that profiting from the increase in land value is a kind of theft from society, called “economic rent”. (This is why a land value tax has the nickname “the perfect tax”.) That theft is at the heart of our dysfunctional housing market.

You have a lot of concern for the hypothetical possibility of increases in property taxes forcing homeowners to sell. But in reality, annual property taxes on a $3 million house isn’t even the average single months rent on a 1BR. They should be taxed properly, and that money should help renters! We desperately need public housing and co-ops. This is absolutely a class struggle, but you seem to only see the harms of the homeowner class, not renters.

The goal absolutely should not be to subsidize homeowners. That is precisely the problem! When you subsidize a group, non-members pay the cost. That means non-homeowners pay for homeowners! It is precisely this mindset, that homeowners deserve even more from society despite their incredible privilege, that is causing our housing problems. More to the point, institutional investors inevitably benefit from many of these policies, perpetuating the housing crisis.

A lot of people in this thread are claiming that homeowners are not really rich. A bunch are citing some Marxist definition of “rich” or raising the bar to “never having to work again”. OK, fine: they’re “rich enough” to be a problem, then.

The truth is, homeowners in Canada have enormous power, both economic and political, and they have been advocating for policies at every level of government that have both exacerbated the housing crisis and grown their own wealth.

“But they’re working class because they can’t enjoy their wealth without selling their home!”

That’s just not true. Homeowners enjoy enormous privileges at the cost of renters, most notably blocking new developments, which homeowners do with passion. Their mortgages are guaranteed by the government, subsidized effectively at the cost of taxes by non-homeowners, i.e. renters. And homeowners have enormous generational wealth to pass on, which if we don’t address, will cause an economic caste system to permanently root itself. Yes, this is real wealth, causing real social problems. This article is right to call it out!