Faced with increasing pressure to respond to widespread concerns about the cost of living and questions about his leadership, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a series of new measures Thursday meant to deal with rising housing and grocery prices.
The federal government also announced it will bring forward legislation to empower the Competition Bureau to ensure that corporate mergers and acquisitions do not have an adverse effect on the affordability of goods and services.
I laughed at that part not gonna lie
Ah yes, just like how the CRTC ensures we keep paying some of the highest prices for internet and phone service in the world.
Wait a minute – what are they doing now?!?
Don’t worry Rogers, you’re safe.
Ah, yes, they’ll give the Competition Bureau teeth. Sure they will, the fucking liars.
Whatever teeth the Competition Bureau has, the Harper-appointed judge on the Competition Tribunal apparently has bigger ones.
So for how many years of the Liberal administration is the responsibility of the issues with the Competition Bureau going to be Harpers? Should we give it another 8?
The judiciary is complicated, since they can’t just fire a judge they don’t like. I think the Liberals have been stung hard enough on that front after SNC Lavalin.
It has to be satire.
Yeah, let me check
…
Yeah, that Harper appointee on the federal court of appeals says no.
Nothing with teeth unfortunately. Putting taxes on the corporations will just raise prices. Not very helpful. Getting rid of the GST on new rental units will mean bigger profits for the builders. Nothing here helps the people.
Taxing corporations does not just raise prices for consumers!! This is a hyper conservative worldview, and very convenient to corporations that don’t want their taxes raised. It is also contradicted by literally any first year economics textbook, so I don’t understand why it keeps getting repeated.
Tax changes to encourage rental construction have been advocated by urban economists for years. This particular measure was proposed by the NDP. An affordable rental market actually puts downward pressure on the overall real estate market.
That said, I agree the Liberals aren’t doing enough.
Liberals aren’t doing enough
Is this a situation similar to the US where the “progressive” party is not doing enough to help and the regressive party wont help at all?
I take the “something is better than nothing” view on this.
Liberals are socially progressive, but fiscally still quite conservative (but not as conservative as Conservatives).
Edit: Actually, I would say that Liberals are status quo conservative and Conservatives are regressive conservatives.
I general, I’d agree with that. On housing specifically, I wouldn’t.
Until recently, I would say Liberals were actively hurting housing affordability. Their signature housing proposal up to now is a tax cut for rich people who have maxed out their TFSA, which is the first time home buyers tax free savings account. That raises demand without addressing supply or disincentivizing investors. It sounds like a proposal written by the real estate investment community, and frankly, it probably was.
This recent proposal is full of good but minor stuff that should have been done a decade ago and will probably take another decade to have an effect. They’ve wasted a lot of time and I still doubt they’re taking it seriously.
Edit: I want to clarify that I think Conservatives would do an even worse job. Their voter base has even more home owners than the Liberals do and I seriously doubt they have any intention of shrinking real estate GDP growth, which is what is required.
The GST part is to incentivize new construction, and you are right it will increase profits but without increasing prices for the end consumer, on the contrary if more builders see this as an attractive opportunity, there will be more units built which increases the offer and when the offer goes up, the prices goes down.
Hopefully it somehow managed to avoid the trend of only building higher end housing to increase those profit margins.
That one is caused by zoning.
If I can make a low-rise building and sell 12 units for $250k on the same property that I can build two detached houses to sell for a $million, I’ll do the former, right?
But city hall is going to make me drag out the approval process for the low-rise for 3 years and grind me down to 6 units. I’ll just save the ball-ache and build the mcmansions.
Zoning laws are definitely a big (probably the largest) part of it, but it’s not the only issue. Even when buildings with a higher number of units is approved, they tend to be more upscale. There’s not a lot of lower end housing being built in any capacity.
I mean yeah, they charge what the market will bear, and the market can bare a crapload right now. I mean, if you just upzoned and cut out the red tape, eventually the price would come down as supply ramped up to meet the demand… but I don’t think anybody can wait for “eventually”.
Is it strongly worded?
What needs to happen is some prosecutions of executives and investors for price gouging.
The government needed to legislate price caps for key groceries and give the municipalities more control over their zoning and construction. This neoliberal policy bullshit just serves to take money from public coffers and put it in the pockets of the rich.
If you place price caps on a product that are below the point where it is profitable for companies to sell it then they will simply stop stocking them in in their shelves. There is historical precedent, too.
Profitability has clearly not been a problem for smaller grocers. Why is it only a problem for the big chains?
Greed.
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The government needed to legislate price caps for key groceries
By definition, a shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
Explain to us how creating a shortage of food, of all things, is a good idea. From my point of view as someone who likes to eat, a shortage of food is the scariest proposition.
Costs are driven up by grocery chain skimming. This is most obvious by stepping into any large independent grocer. In Vancouver, these include Foodymart in Richmond and the Crystal Mall produce stands in Burnaby.
All of these problems are symptoms of crony capitalism. He isn’t going to fix anything by treating the symptoms. Grocery prices are insane because Loblaws owns everything. Housing prices are insane because landlords own city councils all over the country and refuse to build more housing (and also because of an immigration policy which the Liberals themselves say is intended to prevent wages from rising)
Happy to see the Housing Generator fund pay out with some YIMBYism, but imho it doesn’t go far enough. I hate and fear Poilievre, but he’s right when it comes to the carrot-and-stick approach to municipal governments blocking housing:
They do not deserve the carrot. They deserve the stick. Poilievre, being a gigantic asshole, is much more willing to use the stick.
I don’t care what Poillièvre says he’ll do. He has a voting history, and his party has a very long history of siding with landlords and CEOs. Anyone who genuinely believes Poillièvre is going to help the little guy and not simply enrich the landlords just because he says he’s going to do something is a complete moron. He’s voted against it in the past, and he will in the future, because it’ll hurt his own bottom line.
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