Alexander Brown: Carney's condo bailout—a turn of the screw for 'Generation Screwed'
Canada's housing market was already rigged. The situation is made worse when those who can't afford homes are made to foot the bill.
The original version of this column first appeared in Acceptable Views.
The institutional memory of the Canadian electorate is famously short, yet even a goldfish should be able to recall the acts of structural white-collar criminality that got us here.
For more than a decade, the Canadian domestic real estate market has been treated less as a foundational social good and more as a protected financial asset class. First came the deliberate Trudeau invitation to his backers—the foreign speculators and mainland Chinese mega-players—through a policy that effectively opened the floodgates to capital influx and global wealth looking for a safe, wilfully-blind harbour, with a promised high rate on return.
Then came the era of deliberate and unprecedented population growth, which added layers of artificial gains to an already bloated system. The result has been Generation Screwed, who have been priced out of stability amidst a landscape of hyper-inflated evaluations, and a shadow economy that the feds now deem too big to fail.
The latest project from Managed Decline Inc. just unfolded in Vancouver, where former central banker Mark Carney ludicrously scaffolded a lump payout for ‘struggling’ dog-crate hustlers, insultingly disguised as benevolence. To anyone watching the political circuit or who understands the depth of the ‘Vancouver model’ of institutionalized real estate f*ckery and de-facto money laundering, the move felt entirely predictable, as it arrived on the heels of high-dollar, cash-for-access fundraisers hosted by prominent industry charlatans such as Bob Rennie, the contemptible owner of ‘Piss Christ.’
Kate Marland: Our cultural malaise in the age of progress
We are affected by a deep cultural malaise. News on Tuesday that the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton is to display Andres Serrano’s controversial “Piss Christ (Immersions)” is just the latest affront to the Western canon. For those blessedly unfamiliar, the 1987 work shows a photograph of a crucifix suspended in amber fluid that Serrano has ident…
When greedy developers overextend themselves on overpriced, single-bedroom ‘investment units’, primarily for foreigners to then overcharge Canadians to rent, the natural course of a market economy dictates that they bear the losses for their skullduggery, and for choosing, again and again, to ‘build’, barely, for those who they perceive as chattel. Instead, and like many of Liberal Canada’s failures, we are witnessing a concerted effort to socialize those losses, shifting the burden from the well-connected back to the already-struggling broader public.
To attempt to pass off this natural order-defying favour under the banner of housing affordability is a profound insult, particularly to our world-beating number of young and middle-aged workers on the hamster wheel. Subsidising developer losses does nothing to lower the entry floor for first-time buyers; rather, it ensures that prices remain artificially high. True affordability requires a downward adjustment in pricing, a correction that the experts of “experts say” will tell you will never happen if the state keeps guaranteeing the bottom line. By protecting the current price floor, policymakers are actively incentivising a permanent class of lifetime renters, ensuring that ownership remains an elite privilege, primarily to those who were born before price to income ratios of 10-to-1.
To make matters worse, there are looming indicators that the current ban on foreign buyers may be quietly rolled back or amended to backstop these exact projects, confirming the growing suspicion that Canadian real estate is increasingly designed for international capital rather than its citizens. That lingering feeling of modern Canada feeling more like an airport Hilton than a functioning, integrated society? That’s a feature, not a bug.
Slop like “Fortress North America”, “Protect Ontario”, and “Build Canada Homes” has always been purely cynical political performance: fictions designed to placate an aloof public while a non-loyal central planning machine grinds onward.
In this environment of deep, justified public anger among the have-nots, the duty of Pierre Poilievre and the Official Opposition becomes doubly important. Parliament may be in its summer recess, but egregious late efforts to ram through the problematic Bills C-9 and C-22, and now the presentation of a manila envelope to the friends of Gregor Robertson, mean there can be no vacation for the team in blue.
On this issue, Poilievre’s tone police can kick rocks. His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’s sworn obligation is to aggressively scrutinise and criticise a system when its mandate is abused, and the House of the Common People acts for everyone but.
Canada must be more than that airport hotel; more than a safety school for a global hyphenate class and its co-conspirators who would pull up the ladders on their own children if it meant securing an infinite supply of Mainland Chinese investors and dirt-cheap workers from the subcontinent.
For those who care to notice, this is now a nation of shadow consulates that dot half-empty, silent suburbs, where foreign police services roam with impunity, and where political leaders are allowed to mimic the hubris of Arab strongmen, without possessing any of the competence required to generate genuine economic prosperity.
Voters in this country can drive you mad, but I tire of the rebuke that “Canadians get what they deserve.” There are enough Canadians—in the tens of millions—who are deserving of a better class of criminal than this, and the continuation of Liberal Canada’s housing Ponzi remains entirely unworthy of our home.
Socialising loss makes it ours, but this was largely out of our hands. The game was always rigged, by players well-versed in feeding the selfish, nigh insatiable beast that is gerontocracy.
A refusal, now, to not raise holy Hell, would be our mistake, and ours alone.
Alexander Brown is the Managing Editor of Without Diminishment, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, a contributor to Project Ontario, and a former host on Juno News. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Hub and the Toronto Sun.
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“Canadians get what they deserve.”
Some Canadians got much more than they deserve, and others a whole lot less.
But it is important to remember that, in addition to voting Stephen Harper out of office, Canadians voted in the worst Prime Minister in the history of the Country; easily the worst Prime Minister and cabinet since Confederation. They didn’t just do it once, but three bloody times.
Canadians stopped voting for the best interests of the Country, and instead voted for their narrow, individual, personal preferences.
“The result has been Generation Screwed, who have been priced out of stability amidst a landscape of hyper-inflated evaluations, and a shadow economy that the feds now deem too big to fail.”
Without malice, you left out the biggest collection of zeroes affecting Generation Screwed: that being, the accumulated Federal and Provincial debt.
Low growth, high debt that is still growing, and a Government that just polls its way with respect to decision-making; like a blind dog leading a blind man, Canadians remain oblivious to the peril.