Yes. And Carney said the idea was to buy the condos from developers as a distress sale. That means buying the units for less than it cost to build them. That is not a ‘bailout’. This is what I mean about it being hard to discuss public policy if people’s understanding comes from vibes and ideology instead of looking at what people say and do.

That’s not what I heard from the interview with Carney. First, most of the money is coming from British Columbia. Second, that number is for a fund and there’s no commitment to spend a penny of it unless the condo owners are under significant distress and are willing to sell at a loss. Did you read my article and if so, did you watch the interview with the Prime Minister?

Where did you get the number of $650K each? Do you have a link?

I still think it’s all about supply. I think people try to bob and weave, tap dance, and do cartwheels to avoid admitting the problem is cities aren’t allowing enough housing to get built. The cost of borrowing wouldn’t matter much if there was enough housing to go around. I think people confuse the effects of the problem with the causes of it.

Of course people could believe that intensification will lower their property values, but from what I’ve read it usually increases the value of properties. When I hear these guys talk, however, I think it isn’t about the money–it’s just they are afraid of change. I can understand that, as there’s no ‘do over’ once the developers start building. I agree, however, that it ultimately comes down to the provinces—even though toads like Poilievre will go to great lengths to blame it all on the federal Liberals.

As for equity financing, I suppose boomers know it as a ‘reverse mortgage’–from the television adverts. It strikes me this only happens because of the weird situation we currently find ourselves in because zoning won’t allow cities (if they wanted) to build enough housing. Without the lack of supply, houses would cost less, so there’s less incentive to loam money to owners. It’s true the provinces have the last word, but I’ve had some weird conversations with ‘progressive NDP’ council members in the city where I used to live who refused to even consider allowing having enough housing for everyone as one of the city’s official plan criteria. I also have read that councils often move heaven-and-earth to get around reforms that were supposed to increase density–effectively sabotaging the province when it tries to do something right.

Frankly, the housing issue has made me somewhat bitter about the so-called ‘progressives’ I meet.

I don’t think it’s that fine-grained. My read is housing is stymied because the rules of city councils are set up so boomers who already own their homes have an effective veto against new, higher-density housing. I’m a boomer and I’m frankly appalled at the selfishness of people who don’t want anything to change in their neighbourhoods simply because they’re old and they don’t like change. This isn’t about people’s retirement income because the money you can get by selling your home just gets wiped-out when you buy your next place to live. (I know, the house I bought sold for something like 5 times what I bought it for. But the house I purchased to live in afterwards was so expensive that I pretty much broke even. That’s standard now.)

It doesn’t help when so-called progressive people throw around red-herrings like ‘financialisation’ and blame the problem on everything but the fact that most cities have made it illegal to build medium and high density housing in the vast majority of their land. Most (and mean the overwhelming majority) of the land in Vancouver and Toronto, for example, is zoned so it is illegal to build anything but single, detached houses. And any time someone pushes to change these rules Councils weave and dodge like crazy to avoid actually allowing things like duplexes, row housing, small apartment buildings, etc. That’s only because most councilors believe they won’t get re-elected if they stand up to the NIMBYs in their ward.

The other thing that people routinely forget is the constitution effectively ties the hands of the federal government by giving all the real decision-making into the hands of the provinces and city councils. That’s why the feds are reduced to coming up with financial inducements to ‘nudge’ cities into changing their rules–like Carney’s proposal to help Eby with the condo program.

So much of government policy is like this. When you dig into it, it turns out to be a clown show dominated by disinformation.

You make a good point about the $300 billion in investment. That will have to be up to the government in Tehran when it comes to signing off on any specific investment. But once the US carriers leave, I’d suggest that a lot of the leverage that Trump still has will vanish–no one is going to come back to the strait after the this humiliation. If Trump wants some graft for the deal, the Iranians can probably tell him to pound sand by that point.

Thanks for the suggestion about accessibility colour thing. I had no idea what you were talking about so I went down a bit of rabbit hole. It looks like none of the colours on offer from Substack meet the regulations, so I just removed them.

Repeat after me: ‘All charts are an approximation—especially ones that shows data reported from different nations, which often use different criteria. For macro political and economic issues, the point is gross relative difference–not the fine details.’

And your point being—.

China doesn’t post any statistics about its prison population. So, yes, it’s off the list.

But please note, China isn’t imposing tariffs on other countries that use forced labour either–which is the point of the article.

I keep hearing about these changes that Carney is making, but I have yet to see a real smoking gun.

Yes, the changes he’s bringing in could cause real problems. But they also could be exactly what he says he’s doing—making it easier for the government to actually get stuff done. A lot of regulation that’s come down the pipeline since the 1960s has been about giving various parties the ability to oppose and slow down action by both business and the government. The problem with this type of regulation is it has the opportunity cost of making everything more expensive and a lot slower to do—even if it is meant to, and actually could be a good thing for everyone.

The most obvious example of this is housing. We’ve made it really easy for existing home-owners to get Councils to refuse new housing construction. The result is a housing crisis. I suspect it’s much the same thing with regard to environmental regulation and working with the First Nations too. It’s understandable, there has been a lot of bad-faith bargaining by both business and government. But this adds a lot of costs to everything in society–and that’s money that doesn’t end up in social programs or worker’s pockets. (Yes, and profits too. But they can–at least in theory–be taxed. But that’s another issue.)

If we are going to build a carbon-free, sustainable, and just society, we aren’t going to do it by slowing everything down to a crawl and giving lots of people a veto. We shouldn’t go back to the capitalist free-for-all either. But there needs to be some sort of ‘third option’ on the table. I don’t know if Carney’s the person to do it—but I still don’t see anything from him that says for sure he isn’t.

The tone of Gilmore’s comment was pretty hot. But the interview with Guilbeault seemed a little less—he is still a Liberal MP after all. I’m still waiting to see more from Carney before I make up my mind about him.

I get accused of being too easy on Carney. But I wonder if the Strait of Hormuz is already enough inducement to get people to become more efficient and pivot away from fossil fuels. I’d suggest that the trickle of Chinese EVs that he negotiated to allow into the country might have a more positive effect than a higher industrial carbon tax. The fact that solar panels and wind turbines are the cheapest electricity sources also enters into the equation. If the need for taxes is waning, I think it would make sense for Carney to bargain some of it away so he can get concessions from Alberta.

I don’t know what specific campaign against Section 239 you are referring to, but it strikes me that it has pretty much been allowed to gut laws against libel, hate speech, truth-in-advertising, election financing, etc, much to the detriment of our society. It may be the case there could be frivolous lawsuits, but if so, I’d suggest the problem there would be the frivolous lawsuits, which could be dealt with without gutting hundreds of years of regulations that tried to curb the worst excesses of publishing. For example, there are anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws that have been passed in various jurisdictions. There is also the Fair Dealing provision in the Copyright Act. Both of which are meant to prevent frivolous lawsuits from harming people.

I don’t think the response to wrong-headed attacks on the Internet is to support the status quo. There are an awful lot of very bad things happening on line, and governments need to reign in the worst abuses. But it has to be done by people who know enough to preserve what is good while limiting the bad.

Thanks for the advice. I’ve added something to give people a better feel for the story before clicking the URL.

All you have to do is click on the ‘no thanks’ at the bottom. If you already have an account with substack it automatically goes to the article.

I wrote a book specifically for people like you. It’s titled “Digging Your Own Well: Daoism as a Practical Philosophy”. You can find for sale at many book sellers on line as either a paperback or ebook. It’s meant to be affordable, so don’t fall for a drop-seller.

I suspect most people know that Pierre Poilievre is no friend of anyone who isn’t a cis-white-male-Christian

Hmmm. I don’t generally like human interest stories, and I grew up in a redneck part of the country, and have worked at a variety of gruesome jobs–so while never working as a rough neck, it sounds familiar. As usual, the title doesn’t really describe the article, but you can’t blame that on the author. At the end there was a little bit of information but beyond that it’s just autobiographical narrative.

If anyone is interested, I’ve written four articles that give an analysis of how the oil industry has damage Alberta (collectively about the same size as the “Walrus” article): https://billhulet.substack.com/p/something-impossible-just-happened https://billhulet.substack.com/p/the-social-cost-of-oil-part-one https://billhulet.substack.com/p/part-two-about-oil-and-canada https://billhulet.substack.com/p/the-resource-curse

There’re several points to this article: first that it’s unhealthy to the Parliamentary system to put so much emphasis on the party leader, that this over-emphasis is a result of how they are chosen, second that politics is a lot more than just elections and progressive parties in particular have to work hard at things like public education and community organizing if they want to change the status quo, and finally that the Conservatives aren’t really “conservative” anymore because they’ve formed an unholy alliance with some pretty unsavoury types who are trying to undermine our political system through disinformation campaigns led by neo fascists.