Specifically it's bad for rich people who own offices, but good for rich people who own businesses that don't need offices and now aren't expected to waste money on them.

The issue is that office space is leased for several years at a time, with the shortest leases being something like 5 years. It looks bad on the spread sheets when you have 3 years left on your lease, yet you're not using those offices because people want to work from home, so a lot of companies are trying to force people to go back to offices so they can get their yearly bonuses, even if it costs the company millions doing so.

Few military assets are more expensive than fighter jets. Our CF-18s are verging on obsolete and the costs of just keeping them in the air is ballooning as every single part of them are going beyond their operational lives.

We basically won't have an air fleet in 2 decades if we don't buy the F-35s now, and trying to refurbish the CF-18s while we hold out for the next generation or something will cost us tens of billions in refurbishment and maintenance fees alone while running an air fleet that can only keep up with 3rd rate air forces. Even if we can somehow hold on until a newer and more cost effective jet comes to market, any discount we can get from that will be nothing compared to the extra cost of keeping the CF-18s running. Not to mention the pure reduction in capacity in the meantime. We still have to patrol the north, and anything we use for that can't be spending weeks under maintenance between sorties.

You know, the first thing I thought of is that you could build like 6x that many homes if you just didn't bother with the yards and added a second story. I mean, yes, what was done is nice, but it's basically just a trailer park. I bet that the land alone was like 70% of the cost if not 90% as well, so building the houses more densely would've provided for several times as many people for almost no extra cost.

Alternatively, a single mid-rise apartment building would've done the same thing on only a fraction of the land, and probably a lot more comfortable to live in, not to mention cheaper on amenities like heating and sewage.

No, I think such low density housing is actually the cause of the problem, at least around the big cities. Toronto already has some pretty terrible transit times at the average being something like 100 minutes each way due to the distance from one's home to their work place. Increasing density is the only option, though as a compromise, I think townhouses are extremely good.

Get rid of front yards and just make all the houses long, and you can fit as much as 3 units with the same or greater floor space as one of those houses on a single plot of land. Combine that with tons of mid-rise apartments and independent housing is accessible to even those stuck on minimum wage jobs.

A combination of a few million new high density housing over the next decade, a complete rewrite of zoning laws to take them outside of the hands of the cities, and the removal of any need of any neighbourhood association to sign off on any new development.

Commercial producers won't make housing cheap and affordable on their own in any reasonable time-frame. Even if they instantly become able to construct as they like, market forces will take time to let housing prices cool off.

Which goes into my second point, zoning laws as they exist prevent housing from being made in the first place. Especially single family house zones are the single biggest killer of affordable housing. People already make their houses massive, to the point that they're getting close to low-rise apartments.

Which goes to the third point: the character of a neighbourhood changes every single day, so any attempt at the preservation of such a thing is just a bald faced lie, even if they're lying to themselves saying it. The neighbourhood I grew up in were all small houses, from tiny two stories to bungalows. Every single house is easily twice if not three times bigger than the ones I remember as a child. There's no trace of the neighbourhood I grew up in, aside from the fact that they don't house any more families than before. Hell, they probably house fewer people than before as I bet almost all the families there have only one child at most.

The unfortunate result if there was actually the political will to do this is that it would cause a pretty big depression as people have been conditioned into treating housing as an investment for their retirement. A necessity of modern life being used to create profit, that in itself is a non-performing asset that adds exactly zero dollars to the economy and is worse than buying a whole bunch of gold ingots in the hopes that its value will rise faster than inflation.

Personally, I'm patient so I'm fine with house prices going down slowly, as long as rentals get cheaper. It's stupid when such a high number of young decide that they're pushing off moving out of their homes due to seeing it impossible to afford one of their own. Delaying getting a home, even an apartment, means delaying getting married, presuming you're even bothering to date. Delayed marriages means fewer children, which means a stagnating and eventually dwindling population.

If the population stagnates, then everything falls apart for the elderly as the price of everything goes up as there's fewer people to make, deliver, and serve everyday items. And that's not to mention that the entire RRSP system depends on sufficient new blood putting money into it just to maintain the status quo. Lots of retirees all over the world are going back to work only because inflation has gone up a bit. How many will do so when it becomes impossible to keep inflation in the most critical areas down due to the lack of workers?

In the end, housing is the root problem, and while I fear it causing a major recession, I still think it's preferable than for housing prices to never come down. The economy will tank in the future whether the housing bubble bursts or keeps its course. But only one of those two options gives us a hopeful future beyond that bleak one.

I agree. Or rather, I think a sales tax actually hits the less wealthy more in absolute terms than the wealthy as most of the big things they're buying aren't bought within the city.

Property tax on the other hand, scales very closely with how wealthy you are. I know some people will complain (or rather a lot of people) that property tax is already expensive and an increase of even 0.5% would make it almost impossible to pay all their bills including their mortgage, but to that I say that if your finances are that tight, either you're already spending above your means, or you're pretty bad at managing your money.

And now I hope that we upgrade the danger level of Canadians going to China now that they're pushing anti-spying laws and policies on par with wartime levels.

The two Michaels were just a warning. We need to increase separation from China until they cool off and start actually following international laws and conventions.

While true, electricity works a bit differently from most other resources, in that you don't have to build it where you use it. Power lines can easily go for hundreds of km if you need to, so if one area refuses to get rid of their fossil fuel power plant, just build excess power somewhere that's willing to do it and send the energy over. You can force that power plant to shut down just by being unprofitable.

This works even across provincial lines if you need it to. Ontario provides a lot of power eastwards, and there's talk of redirecting Newfoundland power back to Ontario when we close one of our nuclear power plants in the next few years. Theoretically it can work, if we upgrade the power lines to be able to handle the reverse flow at least.

While I disagree about service industries bringing less value to the economy (remember, the technical term service industry doesn't refer to the hospitality industries like hotels and restaurants, but instead things like programming, design, and making movies).

On the other hand, yes, suburbia is the death of economies and livability. I hate how people are more willing to spend two hours driving 100km every day to work than to live without a lawn but be in walking distance of everything you need every week. And that doesn't take into consideration that suburbia actually costs tax dollars to maintain rather than high density mixed uses urban areas that actually generate taxes instead. People forget that the downtown areas of most cities are actually subsidizing the suburbs, rather than their land taxes paying for themselves.

Pretty much every city in the country needs like ten times that much before things'll start getting better.

All these proposals are like trying to fight a forest fire with a squirt gun.

I would like to think so, but wouldn't this just make those who rely on facebook for news only hear from Jim the pogo anarchist and his constant rants about how the Jovian lizards are making everybody stupid drones with their vaxx rays?

It is free market since those others are technically able to sue the company for compensation...presuming that they can afford to hire a lawyer for the five years it takes to settle the lawsuit because the company's going to use every delay tactic and counter-lawsuit they can think of to just wait out the other guy.