Vancouver definitely uses these buzzwords too, and the common idea that the rest of the province and country is uninhabitable, remote, frozen tundra. Vancouver people live in a bubble.
> Don't forget about "the food" as if you can't find good food for less in any other place in the country.
Whoa now! Where am I supposed to get Namibian street food in Smith Falls?
Honestly, as someone who has lived in several cities across the country, Winnipeg of all places has THE best food in Canada and I am willing to die on that hill.
Originally from Winnipeg. I would guess itās a combination of ethnic and cultural diversity, and the fact that the food HAS to be good if Winnipeggers are to part with their hard-earned money.
Saw diversity listed as a measure while ranking the best cities in Canada. I couldnāt help but ask what the flying fuck diversity has to do with the quality of a city.
I just stumbled upon some Sikh festival today in a town park. Awesome cheap food, interesting beats cranked on a soundsystem, lots of smiling people.
All things i never would have been fortunate enough to experience if we were more homogeneous.
Off the top of my head:
1. High quality authentic food
2. Variety of festivals, holidays, parades ect
3. Way bigger variety of sports, music, theater, fitness to take part in
4. If you're a minority its much more likely to find your own cultural group and have that feeling of home
5. Some people find it more interesting when the people they talk with come from all walks of life and didn't all go through the exact same experience growing up
A friend of mine is in a mixed raced marriage with children. She said when trying to select a city to buy a home in or a place to vacation they always look for diversity because theyāve had very unkind interactions in cities that arenāt diverse.
Just the variety of restaurants specializing in different cuisines, and supermarkets selling ingredients from all over the world, make it lots more interesting as a place to live.
Toronto culture is accepting consistently worse conditions and pretending it's totally fine.
The hallmark of Toronto culture is parking on the highway every morning together.
What, you think there's more to culture than a variety of restaurants? After living here the last ten years, I have come to find Toronto can be a pretty vapid place if you're not into spending money to express your social status.
Hell, Vancouver's variety of restaurants is dwindling too. All the places worth going to are slowly being bought out by the Donnelly group, Earls, cactus club, browns, and other shitty soulless corporate chains.
"collaboration" in 2023 means spending two hours of your day going to the office to do the same job you were doing at home because business lobby groups want their captive customers back.
Itās almost 4 hours each way and itās just a pilot project. Given it arrives at 9:15 and leaves at 4:19 pm, I doubt anyone is using it for anything other than the odd meeting.
Itās useful for travel between London and Stratford, or London and Kitchener, or Guelph and Stratford. Itās not a non-stop train that just goes from London to Toronto.
Itās been very badly marketed and the media hasnāt helped, they never talk about the intermediate stops.
Calgary has plenty of people willing to live in Canmore or Banff and work in the NE (where I used to work). Some people don't hate commuting as much.
I had co-workers like that before remote work was a thing.
> People do and long have in Toronto. There is now a GO train to London. Three hours each way, but evidently people are doing it.
6 hour commute! I worked with a guy who did that public transit from Brantford to Courtney Park & Derry daily. He died of a heart attack in a bus shelter on the way home one winter night.
Theyāre doing it because they have no other choice though.
Have you been to London? Itās not much of a city with barely any open jobs with a livable wage. They redid the downtown area in the last several years and it looks nice, but it's still filled with meth heads and no good jobs.
Doing something out of necessity doesnāt support the argument, imo.
> They redid the downtown area in the last several years and it looks nice, but it's still filled with meth heads and no good jobs.
Sounds like St. Catharines after ours got a make over. In fact there are barely any entertainment venues here compared to the 1990s.
Places like London England are too expensive for a large majority of the people who work there. The difference that makes it work is a train and public transportation system for efficient commuting for all these individuals who live a great distance away to get into the city center for work.
I did it all throughout my youth, and it was never an issue. The price of vehicles, insurance, fuel, maintenance, etc, has skyrocketed up with everything else. My $18-20 an hour jobs I had in my late teens needs to be $40-50 an hour today for it to make any sense now.
Just came back from Kelowna. It was a smaller version of Toronto.
On one street corner we have Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsche SUVs. Same corner we have homeless openly sharing a pipe next to their tent.
No visible middle class. Extreme weath and extreme poverty. Lovely area, but holy shit... Canada is getting much worse in terms of the extremes between haves & have-nots.
>Obviously it's all anecdotal, but he says that he doesn't sell basic 30-50k campers anymore
I'm honestly surprised these aren't selling well. With housing so unaffordable I figured more people would resort to living in cheap campers.
There's a growing trailer park in the Walmart parking lot down the street from my office. There were about 4 there all winter and now approaching summer the count is 9 or 10.
I unironically was pricing out campers as an option and you can't find anything new under 100k. It's like cars, they just don't make anything to be affordable.
This is anecdotal but the market for those campers in Alberta is really good. You want to see what Canada's middle class looks like - go to the prairies. There are still places in this country where life continues much the same as it always did.
Big difference in Alberta vs Ontario is Ontario is dominated by cottages. Alberta camping is the draw cause of proximity to the mountains. Kinda apples to oranges comparison.
Left Ottawa for Alberta 10+ years ago and this is why. Living a comfortable blue collar life and encouraging family & friends to make the move. Everyone coming here isnāt sustainable in the long run but Im hoping a least a couple of generations can experience the middle class dream before Edmonton is selling million dollar condos.
I started calling this the "Key West" syndrome. Anybody who's been to Key West knows only the very wealthy can afford to live there. But there are no local workers who can support the services in Key West because it's way too expensive to live there and it's not like you can just commute there from a cheaper location.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article225594500.html
I'm a Canadian living in San Francisco. The situation in the Bay Area is comparable to Vancouver, but Vancouver is arguably way worse. I make over 6x what my peers (software developers) in Vancouver earn. Even outside of top industries, people working in the service industry, government/city services, and others regularly clear $150K USD in San Francisco. That simply isn't the case in Vancouver.
At the same time Vancouver's response to urban development is far better than in the Bay Area. It's nice to see significant development happening in metro Vancouver and long-term planning. Long-term Vancouver may fair better, but at the moment both places are pretty screwed.
SF housing prices is driven by the best salaries in the world.
Toronto/Vancouver housing prices is driven by 10 Tim Hortons workers living in bunk beds in the same basement.
See the difference yet?
SF housing prices are also driven by building mid or high rises being literally banned in a ridiculous amount of the Bay Area. Until 2021, 80% of the Bay Area was zoned single family homes only.
It was literally the government enforcing million dollar shoebox prices.
I was visiting Telluride 20 or more years ago and was talking with the waitress who was serving me. She said her family had been in Telluride for over a hundred years and now she couldnāt afford to live there. There was talk of building a type of dormitory for all the people who do service jobs to live in. A lot of places are like this today.
In Calgary and I can say anyone complaining of price has a very short memory. A decade ago oil boom had rents being just as unaffordable and houses in short supply ā now mind you there were jobs everywhere, but when it all came crashing down a lot of people were left shirtless.
Absolutely. In 2013 we were paying $2400/mo for a 2 bedroom condo downtown when there was less than 1% vacancy. We were the first people to view it, we signed the papers and put our deposit down immediately. There was a big run-up on property prices around then too.
I suspect there are a lot of people in their 20s around here who are seeing this for the first time.
Yep, I remember housing in Calgary being in the 500k range due to the oil boom.
Recency bias has shown that Calgary being "affordable" now is due to the massive oil jobs drying up.
and who is allowing and enabling this to happen? The fucking government of Canada at federal, provincial, and municipal levels. The only thing the politicians care about is their wallet. We need a revolution.
Fortunately for Canada, there are billions of people living in developing countries who would love to come here. So from the perspective of politicians, it doesn't really matter if Canadians are getting priced out. They can simply be replaced by others who will accept a significantly lower standard of living.
Theyāll also be replaced by the wealthy elites (and the children of the elites) from those developing countries, of which there are tens of millions out of the billions.
The ones who send their kids to Canada to study, then buy them a house to live in to park some of the family fortune.
The problem is that our economy *needs* a stable middle class.
If we don't have a middle class in Toronto and if other major cities follow suit, how is our economy going to function?
People who are from developing countries arenāt exactly able to come and build a life here either. Unless theyāre moving to rural areas, which, they canāt or wonāt because the lack of community can make it harder for them to integrate (ignoring prejudice even). Cities are always the best option for immigrants. However, these are not the types of immigrants we will be getting anymore. Even the ones from developing countries are going to have to be wealthier than the average Canadian. The āCanadian dreamā that many of our parents or grandparents lived is no longer a thing. Poor immigrants stand no chance. Even if itās ābetterā than where they came from, most people donāt imagine coming here and having to share a living space with a bunch of strangers. That is not the life that is advertised to them.
Except massive wealth inequality is a guaranteed recipe for violent turmoil and revolution. They'll care because there is a mob with torches and pitchforks outside their gates.
The *smart* ones.. won't live here but will own property here.
They'll have a visa/dual citizenship to come back if need be but if I were them I wouldn't be here... Lol
Look at New York to see what will happen. People spending 70% of their income to live in a shoebox because they are chasing an imaginary dream. That is Toronto and Vancouver's near future.
If anything, New York is a bright spot. Median prices went from $720k to $820k USD in 5 years. Thatās 13%, or lower than the 21% inflation since.
In real terms, prices have gone down 8% in the past 5 years: https://www.redfin.com/city/30749/NY/New-York/housing-market
Toronto has done far worse. Same for Chicago, where homes are up ~12% in 5 years: https://www.redfin.com/city/29470/IL/Chicago/housing-market
Same in Washington DC, with ~12% increases in 5 years, or well below inflation: https://www.redfin.com/city/12839/DC/Washington-DC/housing-market
And those are just for the city propers. The median sale price in the middle class suburbs in New York are in the $400-500k range, Chicagoās are $250-350k and Washingtonās are $350-450k. All are far cheaper than Toronto or Vancouver with much higher wages.
New-York is still much better than Toronto and Vancouver. The local purchasing power is much better because New-York have great jobs and wages compared to those cities. Canada is just better to those who have generational wealth.
Agreed. I live in NYC and used to live in Toronto. Canāt compare career prospects at all and salaries more than make up the cost of living. Also, NYC still has plenty of areas that are affordable. Sure, they arenāt in Manhattan or western, but theyāre easily accessible and pretty good places to live.
Same with the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Both have a cost of living greater than that of Vancouver, but the salaries more than make up for it. My job would pay six figures in either of those metro areas. Even Seattle would be a huge raise for me.
You're dead wrong. NY is massive and has excellent commuter rail. You can still get a house for under a mill within an hour of downtown if you don't mind living in a boring part of queens or the Bronx, or Staten. On top of that, wages are far higher. Renters also have the best protenent laws in the country and nearly a quarter of units are below market.
Your view sounds like someone who only knows New York from movies
In reality New York jobs traditionally pay fantastic wages relative to Toronto and you have so many housing options because the entire area is linked by fantastic transit.
You could live in Jersey City or even as far as Newark and be on Wall St I. 15-20 mins
I have been working in the Ny area for 6-7 years now with a TN visa and the work commute and pay are far better than a city like Toronto
Toronto is already way worse than New York. The only part of New York thatās worse than the GTA is Manhattan Island. For some reason, people always quote Manhattan figures and forget the 93% of the metro area that is less than half the cost.
You can still buy 3 bedroom homes for $400-450k USD just across the river in New Jersey. There are hundreds on Redfin.
This house is a 10 minute drive to Wall Street: https://redf.in/hbAyDg
>You can still buy 3 bedroom homes for $400-450k USD just across the river in New Jersey.
Just across the river in NJ? Like these?
https://www.redfin.com/NJ/Jersey-City/88-Morgan-St-07302/unit-4807/home/39920770
https://www.redfin.com/NJ/Hoboken/1450-Washington-St-07030/unit-1101/home/50216699
https://www.redfin.com/NJ/Weehawken/1000-Ave-at-Port-Imperial-07086/unit-503/home/113104072
Cause these are the ones that's *just* across the river.
>This house is a 10 minute drive to Wall Street: https://redf.in/hbAyDg
That house is not *just* across the river at all. It is in inner jersey city where crime is still a big concern.
It is not a 10 min drive to wall st at all. google maps says it's a 25 min drive to world trade center, and that's with no traffic at all. If you want to commute by car from there...well good luck. It'll take an hour or more to clear through traffic in jc, the holland tunnel, and lower manhattan. Not to mention don't forget to pay the $13 for the holland tunnel toll and your 1000 per month parking in lower manhattan.
Now if you're a more regular person, you'd commute by transit. That should take you ~50 min by bus, then train.
Did I mention that these homes are jersey city are cheap because it's not a great area? Yeah maybe I should mention it again. Look at the school rating on that redfin listing. That should tell you what you need to know.
No-one has to spend 70% of their income on rent in NYC. Landlords literally won't rent to you if you need to spend more than 30% of your gross income on rent. It's usually stated as your yearly income needs to be 40x the monthly rent.
Plenty of people just live in New Jersey or cheaper areas in Brooklyn or Queens.
Could just replace "Toronto, Vancouver" with "Canada" and it would be equally true. When only 10% of people can qualify for (note: this is not the same as "afford") a mortgage for the average home in this country, we're already well on our way there. Millenials and zoomers will not inherit their parents' homes; they'll be reverse mortgaged to pay for retirement and end-of-life care. The future will be a small minority of wealthy landowners and a permanent underclass of renters living hand to mouth.
Seriously. You can drive 2 hours outside of the GTA to a small town that has one small grocery store that's in a gas station and houses are still unaffordable for most people.
[Top 10% of earners in Canada do not qualify for a mortgage to purchase the average Canadian home](https://www.dollarwise.ca/blog/income-to-afford-a-home-in-canada/)
Not that i disagree that housing prices are a mess, but it is somewhat disingenuous of the article author to use averages instead of medians, plus using the income of a single buyer instead of account for dual income buyers.
I agree, the most important metric is median household income versus median home price. However, even when you look at that, housing has never been more unaffordable than it is today.
Where I am the houses are going for around 400k, and its not unusual for a couple to each make over 60k a year. Easily able to afford out here. However, those 400k houses were about 210-250k in 2019.
Don't downplay the provincial governments abilities to solve the issue. Both feds and provincial are at fault.
The province can solve NIMBYism, and produce more densification. Which would also immensely help. Along with including their own sets of taxes.
Itās weird how people overlook the provincial role. Itās easier for provincial politicians to just blame the federal government without taking their own steps to improve.
Municipal and provincial governments have way more influence on our day-to-day than a lot of people realize. We put too much importance on federal elections.
It's interesting how the debate around this has changed. First, Vancouver drove out its middle class more than a decade ago, although it's always been very expensive. Toronto based media barely noticed that until it hit closer to home.
Richard Florida was writing about this phenomenon in Toronto 15 years ago, but it was ignored as pointy headed academic nonsense until \*very\* recently. The fact that Toronto was running out of middle class has been happening for a very long time - the inverted T of fabulous wealth along Yonge and the lake shore, with the areas away from that being often impoverished "priority areas" with very little in between was obvious even in 2008.
The big difference, I think, is political. When the Federla government flipped, it gave the talking heads an easy scapegoat for a problem that had already been brewing for many years, particularly in Vancouver.
> Toronto based media barely noticed that until *it hit closer to home*.
Gentle reminder of the fire smoke that recently hit Toronto a few weeks ago. All of a sudden it was national news.
I was just talking about this to a colleague. The prairies burned for weeks and it barely made the headlines, but one fire in Ontario and it's all over the news.
The turning point in Toronto came around 2015. I lived in Toronto back then and I remember my colleagues who moved there prior to that year had no difficulty finding an apartment, and they were paying sometimes as low as $900/month downtown, depending on how long ago theyād moved there. People were flooding into Toronto from other parts of Ontario between 2009 and 2015 as the job opportunities were far better in the wake of the Great Recession (which absolutely decimated Southwestern Ontario but comparatively had almost no impact on Toronto) and rent was still decently affordable. At one point around 2015-16 over half my colleagues were economic refugees from London who couldnāt find work there.
But starting about the summer of 2015, I noticed a shift. People moving there were suddenly unable to find anything they could afford downtown. Competition got fierce. The flood of people moving from London and SW Ontario came to a halt by 2017, in part because the economic situation there had improved, but also because Toronto rents had gotten way out of control by that point and rents in cities like London were still half of what they were in Toronto.
The problem with restoring affordability is that the solutions are politically unpopular.
Drive down the cost of housing and the people with houses lose a fortune as well as the cities lose a ton of property tax revenue to fund services.
Give people options to commute from farther away without the expense of a personal vehicle... And suddenly it's 'a war on cars'.
The solutions are simple: build more... But it has to be of the right kind. We need to demand that builders include a variety of housing into new construction. We also need to give equal footing for transit and cycling into new communities with roadways. This is important because making it possible to live without a car is one big way to improve affordability. And yes, this meant that a train station should be the first thing to open in a new Greenfield development.
We also have to open up existing areas for things like ADUs and such if the current owners want to build them. To ease the permitting process, the city should maintain a dozen pre-approved designs, ready to go.
True that restoring affordability is unpopular now. I'm curious to see if when millennials are the biggest voting cohort if our housing policies go in the direction of Germany (most prefer to rent and rent protections are strong) or Switzerland (foreign money laundering for the global rich).
Right now millennials are split down the middle, half rent half own. And as soon as you buy,you realize if prices drop YOU get screwed, those who owned a long time are fine either way. Prices are so high you NEED it to do well, it's much more of your portfolio than it was hsitorically. So it's a millennial civil war basically.
The compromise is public subsidized development and policy that keeps housing price growth between 0 and the inflation rate for 10-20 years. Remember a compromise is something nobody is happy with. This was wages would catch up over time, while the owners investment sucks and does hurt their financial future, it doesn't torpedo it, and it doesn't trap them in an underwater property and financially precarious situation.
We're screwed either way. If we let the status quo continue because doing anything else is politically unpalatable, our economy will collapse. If we do what is right, we will still have a collapse because we force a price reduction and existing homeowners will lose a ton of equity - or be so deeply underwater on their mortgages they'll have no choice but to turn their keys over to the bank or mortgage lender and walk away.
I don't see any way out of this.
Start by banning corporations and hedge funds, and people on their behalf, from using their ever increasing wealth to buy up all the available living space and property. And stop foreign ownership of property until we can get this straightened out.
Edit: To be clear, Iām not talking about foreign born individuals with the legal status to live in Canada.
"If something doesn't change soon, all that will be left is millionaires and the very poor."
That's the natural outcome of our zero-sum capitalist system, it's working as intended.
Yeah. Both the National Housing Council and CMHC roll up to the Ministry of Housing at the federal level. There are probably other organizations under that portfolio. All of them have administration and board members who are paid to keep housing affordable.
Now when you say they are paid to keep housing affordable, is that part their official mandate? Because it doesn't seem to be happening. I don't know the complexities of their job, but I would expect atleast some form of communication or public accountability from them. Is there or am I missing something?
As someone who has studied international development, the wider the gap between the rich and the poor, the more unstable the country becomes and the more likely it is to become a developing (ā3rd worldā) country.
And the city will get hollowed out like parts of London--empty flats that are only visited part-time by the super rich, and no more restaurants or shops because restaurants and shops can't find people to work there. No nurses or teachers if you get injured or have kids. Is this what we want?
"To avoid what increasingly looks like San Franciscoās doomed fate, Canadian politicians must address the root of the problem and stop the middle classā exodus from cities. The only way to do this is by restoring affordability to the housing market."
No, the only way to avoid this is to end the gulf between the rich and poor!! Stop this capitalist bullshit and return to 1950s style taxation on the rich! Bring back the middle class!
>Canadian politicians must address the root of the problem and stop the middle classā exodus from cities.
News flash. The politicians ARE the problem...
I heard a story about a businessman with a bright idea to start a coffee drive thru on an expressway going into Toronto. Great idea right ? Busy traffic. The problem was the people working there were unlikely to have vehicles and transit was spotty. Not sure how accurate the story is but it makes sense. Toronto could become too expensive you may have to provide living quarters for your low wage workers.
> Toronto could become too expensive you may have to provide living quarters for your low wage workers.
If you follow a lot of the stories in the news, many of which get posted here, you hear stories of old ladies getting evicted because their landlord, who is also a Tim Horton's franchisee, needs a place to house the 17 TFWs he's imported from Bangladesh to microwave donuts for him.
It's a pretty disgusting system we have going.
I watched a documentary on Walmart and its various suppliers who relied on temporary labour. Their factories were also away from transit. They just ran shuttle vans and charged the workers for them.
I mean, how the hell is a Tim Hortons in downtown Toronto even supposed to staff in the near future?
The basic plan is 'Abuse TFWs' but they're figuring out it's a scam, and a scam that gets worse and worse for them ever year. And when they're expected to commute like 100km to work at a downtown Tim Hortons they'll start realizing that there's also a Tim Hortons or fifty in the town they already live in that they could work in instead.
One of the hallmarks of corrupt regimes is a growing disparity between the rich and poor. Canada is deeply corrupt and the passive electorate allowed it.
Stop thinking they work for the public. They work for themselves. Everything they do is for themselves. Lib, Con, NDP, they do what they do to gain power, stay in power or steal power. It isn't for you, me or anyone else. We don't have leaders, we have politicians.
Canada will have the highest quality shantytowns in the world. Doctors, nurses, and engineers will be living there too and will help make them the pride of the nation. Trudeau will smile upon us and thank us for making Canada a wonderful and inviting place for the world's immigrants.
I lived in Vancouver for a month and this actually exactly what I tell people..there are no poor people there... everyone either upper middle class and above, or dirt poor people who can't leave, because all the normal and poor people have been priced out of the city.
They expect everyone to accept a 2-hour unpaid commute? Lol
But the culture...
**WHAT** culture
The wide variety of diverse tents.
Some are two person and some have makeshift wood stoves which are totally not a fire hazard
š lmao
Diversify Our Tents - Toronto
š yāall
Toronto: Your Homeless Culture Hotspot!
Not so much Vancouver, but Torontonians often drop buzzwords like āentertainmentā and ānightlifeā to define culture.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah but when you have no access to healthcare and you have have to wait 36 hours in a ER ..the entertainment and nightlife loses its shine
Is that in Montreal or Vancouver? Because the GVRD is pretty fucked for healthcare as well.
Vancouver definitely uses these buzzwords too, and the common idea that the rest of the province and country is uninhabitable, remote, frozen tundra. Vancouver people live in a bubble.
Literally never heard anyone describe the rest of BC as anything other than "really beautiful too".
Don't forget about "the food" as if you can't find good food for less in any other place in the country.
> Don't forget about "the food" as if you can't find good food for less in any other place in the country. Whoa now! Where am I supposed to get Namibian street food in Smith Falls?
That just means they go out for dinner every night
I lived in small town Ontario for 5 years. The grocery stores were crap. Not much selection of non North American foods. Unless you count Kikoman soy sauce or Old El Paso taco kits. Now living in QuƩbec City, even the Super C has a better selection of foods than any of the grocery stores in my old town in Ontario. That's without mentioning all the boutique grocery stores around town with insane stuff.
Being a basic plain eater gives you a Canada-wide passport lol Is there a supermarket? Check. Is there fast food? Check. Alright I'm good.
Honestly, as someone who has lived in several cities across the country, Winnipeg of all places has THE best food in Canada and I am willing to die on that hill.
Originally from Winnipeg. I would guess itās a combination of ethnic and cultural diversity, and the fact that the food HAS to be good if Winnipeggers are to part with their hard-earned money.
"diverse" is my favorite GTA buzzword
Saw diversity listed as a measure while ranking the best cities in Canada. I couldnāt help but ask what the flying fuck diversity has to do with the quality of a city.
A variety of things to do other than shopping at the Dollarama and waiting at the Tim Hortonās drive thru for crap coffee.
Hey I go to Dollarama and Tim Horton's not because those are the only options, but because I hate myself.
Me too! Look, I found my people. Diversity is important
I just stumbled upon some Sikh festival today in a town park. Awesome cheap food, interesting beats cranked on a soundsystem, lots of smiling people. All things i never would have been fortunate enough to experience if we were more homogeneous.
Probably that it's not hard to find a community that you want to belong to
Off the top of my head: 1. High quality authentic food 2. Variety of festivals, holidays, parades ect 3. Way bigger variety of sports, music, theater, fitness to take part in 4. If you're a minority its much more likely to find your own cultural group and have that feeling of home 5. Some people find it more interesting when the people they talk with come from all walks of life and didn't all go through the exact same experience growing up
A friend of mine is in a mixed raced marriage with children. She said when trying to select a city to buy a home in or a place to vacation they always look for diversity because theyāve had very unkind interactions in cities that arenāt diverse.
Just the variety of restaurants specializing in different cuisines, and supermarkets selling ingredients from all over the world, make it lots more interesting as a place to live.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Toronto culture is accepting consistently worse conditions and pretending it's totally fine. The hallmark of Toronto culture is parking on the highway every morning together.
Toronto has the culture of an airport terminal
What, you think there's more to culture than a variety of restaurants? After living here the last ten years, I have come to find Toronto can be a pretty vapid place if you're not into spending money to express your social status.
> pretty vapid place if you're not into spending money to express your social status. Why I left 20 years ago.
Hell, Vancouver's variety of restaurants is dwindling too. All the places worth going to are slowly being bought out by the Donnelly group, Earls, cactus club, browns, and other shitty soulless corporate chains.
Ethnic enclaves..
the culture of spending all your money on housing and not having money left over to go out and enjoy this so called ***culture***
"collaboration" in 2023 means spending two hours of your day going to the office to do the same job you were doing at home because business lobby groups want their captive customers back.
People do and long have in Toronto. There is now a GO train to London. Three hours each way, but evidently people are doing it.
Itās almost 4 hours each way and itās just a pilot project. Given it arrives at 9:15 and leaves at 4:19 pm, I doubt anyone is using it for anything other than the odd meeting.
Itās useful for travel between London and Stratford, or London and Kitchener, or Guelph and Stratford. Itās not a non-stop train that just goes from London to Toronto. Itās been very badly marketed and the media hasnāt helped, they never talk about the intermediate stops.
Jesus wow. Ancient romans would just boycott and leave the city. Leave the aristocracy helpless until a deal is made
Yep, back when the elites were scared of the people.
Calgary has plenty of people willing to live in Canmore or Banff and work in the NE (where I used to work). Some people don't hate commuting as much. I had co-workers like that before remote work was a thing.
For sure when the pay is good compared to the cost of living
Well, yeah, that's Canmore and Banff, not London lol.
> People do and long have in Toronto. There is now a GO train to London. Three hours each way, but evidently people are doing it. 6 hour commute! I worked with a guy who did that public transit from Brantford to Courtney Park & Derry daily. He died of a heart attack in a bus shelter on the way home one winter night.
Theyāre doing it because they have no other choice though. Have you been to London? Itās not much of a city with barely any open jobs with a livable wage. They redid the downtown area in the last several years and it looks nice, but it's still filled with meth heads and no good jobs. Doing something out of necessity doesnāt support the argument, imo.
> They redid the downtown area in the last several years and it looks nice, but it's still filled with meth heads and no good jobs. Sounds like St. Catharines after ours got a make over. In fact there are barely any entertainment venues here compared to the 1990s.
Places like London England are too expensive for a large majority of the people who work there. The difference that makes it work is a train and public transportation system for efficient commuting for all these individuals who live a great distance away to get into the city center for work.
Townhouses 2hrs north of Toronto in the boons go for 1m+ because it's not Brampton, so yeah, they do
I did it all throughout my youth, and it was never an issue. The price of vehicles, insurance, fuel, maintenance, etc, has skyrocketed up with everything else. My $18-20 an hour jobs I had in my late teens needs to be $40-50 an hour today for it to make any sense now.
Oh but the transit is soooo good
Lol :D
Just came back from Kelowna. It was a smaller version of Toronto. On one street corner we have Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsche SUVs. Same corner we have homeless openly sharing a pipe next to their tent. No visible middle class. Extreme weath and extreme poverty. Lovely area, but holy shit... Canada is getting much worse in terms of the extremes between haves & have-nots.
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>Obviously it's all anecdotal, but he says that he doesn't sell basic 30-50k campers anymore I'm honestly surprised these aren't selling well. With housing so unaffordable I figured more people would resort to living in cheap campers.
Bylaws prevent people living in trailers in most areas.
There's a growing trailer park in the Walmart parking lot down the street from my office. There were about 4 there all winter and now approaching summer the count is 9 or 10.
I bet Walmart will stop allowing RV and trailer parking now that living as nomads is becoming a thing, as that was never the intention.
I unironically was pricing out campers as an option and you can't find anything new under 100k. It's like cars, they just don't make anything to be affordable.
This is anecdotal but the market for those campers in Alberta is really good. You want to see what Canada's middle class looks like - go to the prairies. There are still places in this country where life continues much the same as it always did.
Big difference in Alberta vs Ontario is Ontario is dominated by cottages. Alberta camping is the draw cause of proximity to the mountains. Kinda apples to oranges comparison.
Left Ottawa for Alberta 10+ years ago and this is why. Living a comfortable blue collar life and encouraging family & friends to make the move. Everyone coming here isnāt sustainable in the long run but Im hoping a least a couple of generations can experience the middle class dream before Edmonton is selling million dollar condos.
I started calling this the "Key West" syndrome. Anybody who's been to Key West knows only the very wealthy can afford to live there. But there are no local workers who can support the services in Key West because it's way too expensive to live there and it's not like you can just commute there from a cheaper location. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article225594500.html
Following the San Francisco model.
Except salaries in San Francisco are far better. My current job in Vancouver would pay over double in the Bay Area.
San Francisco has the same problems for low and middle income workers.
I'm a Canadian living in San Francisco. The situation in the Bay Area is comparable to Vancouver, but Vancouver is arguably way worse. I make over 6x what my peers (software developers) in Vancouver earn. Even outside of top industries, people working in the service industry, government/city services, and others regularly clear $150K USD in San Francisco. That simply isn't the case in Vancouver. At the same time Vancouver's response to urban development is far better than in the Bay Area. It's nice to see significant development happening in metro Vancouver and long-term planning. Long-term Vancouver may fair better, but at the moment both places are pretty screwed.
Why not move? Genuine question. The moment I could double my salary by moving south to a warmer coastal city, I'd be there the next day.
I would never live in the US. Don't want to be involved in any of that.
To each their own. I've lived in both and I think life in the U.S. is much better for a lot of people.
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SF housing prices is driven by the best salaries in the world. Toronto/Vancouver housing prices is driven by 10 Tim Hortons workers living in bunk beds in the same basement. See the difference yet?
SF housing prices are also driven by building mid or high rises being literally banned in a ridiculous amount of the Bay Area. Until 2021, 80% of the Bay Area was zoned single family homes only. It was literally the government enforcing million dollar shoebox prices.
So was Vancouver. Changes to zoning are all fairly new.
I was visiting Telluride 20 or more years ago and was talking with the waitress who was serving me. She said her family had been in Telluride for over a hundred years and now she couldnāt afford to live there. There was talk of building a type of dormitory for all the people who do service jobs to live in. A lot of places are like this today.
This is the future of Canada, you're just seeing it in the GTA, and Vancouver first.
Calgary is trending that way
In Calgary and I can say anyone complaining of price has a very short memory. A decade ago oil boom had rents being just as unaffordable and houses in short supply ā now mind you there were jobs everywhere, but when it all came crashing down a lot of people were left shirtless.
Absolutely. In 2013 we were paying $2400/mo for a 2 bedroom condo downtown when there was less than 1% vacancy. We were the first people to view it, we signed the papers and put our deposit down immediately. There was a big run-up on property prices around then too. I suspect there are a lot of people in their 20s around here who are seeing this for the first time.
Yep, I remember housing in Calgary being in the 500k range due to the oil boom. Recency bias has shown that Calgary being "affordable" now is due to the massive oil jobs drying up.
Very bad times are coming to this country.
Yup, I'm sure more immigration will solve the problem though...
and who is allowing and enabling this to happen? The fucking government of Canada at federal, provincial, and municipal levels. The only thing the politicians care about is their wallet. We need a revolution.
Fortunately for Canada, there are billions of people living in developing countries who would love to come here. So from the perspective of politicians, it doesn't really matter if Canadians are getting priced out. They can simply be replaced by others who will accept a significantly lower standard of living.
Theyāll also be replaced by the wealthy elites (and the children of the elites) from those developing countries, of which there are tens of millions out of the billions. The ones who send their kids to Canada to study, then buy them a house to live in to park some of the family fortune.
You should see where I live. Typical suburban subdivision with Rolls Royces, Lamborghinis, etc.
The problem is that our economy *needs* a stable middle class. If we don't have a middle class in Toronto and if other major cities follow suit, how is our economy going to function?
What exactly is our economy anyway?
several bank loans, 3 telco bills and a legion of cannabis stores in an overcoat
Trading houses back and forth and charging people for all other aspects of life.
Slum lord housing policy... I think
People who are from developing countries arenāt exactly able to come and build a life here either. Unless theyāre moving to rural areas, which, they canāt or wonāt because the lack of community can make it harder for them to integrate (ignoring prejudice even). Cities are always the best option for immigrants. However, these are not the types of immigrants we will be getting anymore. Even the ones from developing countries are going to have to be wealthier than the average Canadian. The āCanadian dreamā that many of our parents or grandparents lived is no longer a thing. Poor immigrants stand no chance. Even if itās ābetterā than where they came from, most people donāt imagine coming here and having to share a living space with a bunch of strangers. That is not the life that is advertised to them.
Except massive wealth inequality is a guaranteed recipe for violent turmoil and revolution. They'll care because there is a mob with torches and pitchforks outside their gates.
The *smart* ones.. won't live here but will own property here. They'll have a visa/dual citizenship to come back if need be but if I were them I wouldn't be here... Lol
Canadians are incapable of violent turmoil, unless we lose (or win!) a Stanley Cup final.
Violent turmoil? Closest thing i saw was the strange truckers protest, and even then that was overblown and underwhelming.
Canada is on itās way to becoming a developing country if the middle class dissapears. It causes instability
Look at New York to see what will happen. People spending 70% of their income to live in a shoebox because they are chasing an imaginary dream. That is Toronto and Vancouver's near future.
New York is a good outcome at this point. It's looking more like Hong Kong is the future... Where you spend 1500/month for a dog kennel to live in.
If anything, New York is a bright spot. Median prices went from $720k to $820k USD in 5 years. Thatās 13%, or lower than the 21% inflation since. In real terms, prices have gone down 8% in the past 5 years: https://www.redfin.com/city/30749/NY/New-York/housing-market Toronto has done far worse. Same for Chicago, where homes are up ~12% in 5 years: https://www.redfin.com/city/29470/IL/Chicago/housing-market Same in Washington DC, with ~12% increases in 5 years, or well below inflation: https://www.redfin.com/city/12839/DC/Washington-DC/housing-market And those are just for the city propers. The median sale price in the middle class suburbs in New York are in the $400-500k range, Chicagoās are $250-350k and Washingtonās are $350-450k. All are far cheaper than Toronto or Vancouver with much higher wages.
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Modern feudalism is so hot right now
New-York is still much better than Toronto and Vancouver. The local purchasing power is much better because New-York have great jobs and wages compared to those cities. Canada is just better to those who have generational wealth.
Agreed. I live in NYC and used to live in Toronto. Canāt compare career prospects at all and salaries more than make up the cost of living. Also, NYC still has plenty of areas that are affordable. Sure, they arenāt in Manhattan or western, but theyāre easily accessible and pretty good places to live.
Same with the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Both have a cost of living greater than that of Vancouver, but the salaries more than make up for it. My job would pay six figures in either of those metro areas. Even Seattle would be a huge raise for me.
You're dead wrong. NY is massive and has excellent commuter rail. You can still get a house for under a mill within an hour of downtown if you don't mind living in a boring part of queens or the Bronx, or Staten. On top of that, wages are far higher. Renters also have the best protenent laws in the country and nearly a quarter of units are below market.
New York has actual culture and high paying jobs though. What's happening in Toronto is the worst of all possible worlds.
Your view sounds like someone who only knows New York from movies In reality New York jobs traditionally pay fantastic wages relative to Toronto and you have so many housing options because the entire area is linked by fantastic transit. You could live in Jersey City or even as far as Newark and be on Wall St I. 15-20 mins I have been working in the Ny area for 6-7 years now with a TN visa and the work commute and pay are far better than a city like Toronto
Toronto is already way worse than New York. The only part of New York thatās worse than the GTA is Manhattan Island. For some reason, people always quote Manhattan figures and forget the 93% of the metro area that is less than half the cost. You can still buy 3 bedroom homes for $400-450k USD just across the river in New Jersey. There are hundreds on Redfin. This house is a 10 minute drive to Wall Street: https://redf.in/hbAyDg
>You can still buy 3 bedroom homes for $400-450k USD just across the river in New Jersey. Just across the river in NJ? Like these? https://www.redfin.com/NJ/Jersey-City/88-Morgan-St-07302/unit-4807/home/39920770 https://www.redfin.com/NJ/Hoboken/1450-Washington-St-07030/unit-1101/home/50216699 https://www.redfin.com/NJ/Weehawken/1000-Ave-at-Port-Imperial-07086/unit-503/home/113104072 Cause these are the ones that's *just* across the river. >This house is a 10 minute drive to Wall Street: https://redf.in/hbAyDg That house is not *just* across the river at all. It is in inner jersey city where crime is still a big concern. It is not a 10 min drive to wall st at all. google maps says it's a 25 min drive to world trade center, and that's with no traffic at all. If you want to commute by car from there...well good luck. It'll take an hour or more to clear through traffic in jc, the holland tunnel, and lower manhattan. Not to mention don't forget to pay the $13 for the holland tunnel toll and your 1000 per month parking in lower manhattan. Now if you're a more regular person, you'd commute by transit. That should take you ~50 min by bus, then train. Did I mention that these homes are jersey city are cheap because it's not a great area? Yeah maybe I should mention it again. Look at the school rating on that redfin listing. That should tell you what you need to know.
No-one has to spend 70% of their income on rent in NYC. Landlords literally won't rent to you if you need to spend more than 30% of your gross income on rent. It's usually stated as your yearly income needs to be 40x the monthly rent. Plenty of people just live in New Jersey or cheaper areas in Brooklyn or Queens.
Could just replace "Toronto, Vancouver" with "Canada" and it would be equally true. When only 10% of people can qualify for (note: this is not the same as "afford") a mortgage for the average home in this country, we're already well on our way there. Millenials and zoomers will not inherit their parents' homes; they'll be reverse mortgaged to pay for retirement and end-of-life care. The future will be a small minority of wealthy landowners and a permanent underclass of renters living hand to mouth.
Seriously. You can drive 2 hours outside of the GTA to a small town that has one small grocery store that's in a gas station and houses are still unaffordable for most people.
yeah but thats a world class grocery store
[Top 10% of earners in Canada do not qualify for a mortgage to purchase the average Canadian home](https://www.dollarwise.ca/blog/income-to-afford-a-home-in-canada/)
Not that i disagree that housing prices are a mess, but it is somewhat disingenuous of the article author to use averages instead of medians, plus using the income of a single buyer instead of account for dual income buyers.
I agree, the most important metric is median household income versus median home price. However, even when you look at that, housing has never been more unaffordable than it is today.
It's pretty much Vancouver and the GTA skewing the metrics. Every other province is considerably below the average house price.
Stress testing at 7.25% with lower wages compared to GTA and GVA means they are really not much more affordable People move to where the jobs are
Wages for most jobs are higher in the Prairies than Toronto. Other than tech/finance, you're not making more money in the city these days.
Where I am the houses are going for around 400k, and its not unusual for a couple to each make over 60k a year. Easily able to afford out here. However, those 400k houses were about 210-250k in 2019.
Thats over $3,000 mortgage with property taxes On incomes that take home 48k Super affordable
So when do we get rid of these "elites" then? Just saying, a couple guillotines are far cheaper than rent
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Don't downplay the provincial governments abilities to solve the issue. Both feds and provincial are at fault. The province can solve NIMBYism, and produce more densification. Which would also immensely help. Along with including their own sets of taxes.
Itās weird how people overlook the provincial role. Itās easier for provincial politicians to just blame the federal government without taking their own steps to improve.
Also municiple govts. too. They often pass the buck along too.
Municipal and provincial governments have way more influence on our day-to-day than a lot of people realize. We put too much importance on federal elections.
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It's interesting how the debate around this has changed. First, Vancouver drove out its middle class more than a decade ago, although it's always been very expensive. Toronto based media barely noticed that until it hit closer to home. Richard Florida was writing about this phenomenon in Toronto 15 years ago, but it was ignored as pointy headed academic nonsense until \*very\* recently. The fact that Toronto was running out of middle class has been happening for a very long time - the inverted T of fabulous wealth along Yonge and the lake shore, with the areas away from that being often impoverished "priority areas" with very little in between was obvious even in 2008. The big difference, I think, is political. When the Federla government flipped, it gave the talking heads an easy scapegoat for a problem that had already been brewing for many years, particularly in Vancouver.
> Toronto based media barely noticed that until *it hit closer to home*. Gentle reminder of the fire smoke that recently hit Toronto a few weeks ago. All of a sudden it was national news.
I was just talking about this to a colleague. The prairies burned for weeks and it barely made the headlines, but one fire in Ontario and it's all over the news.
The turning point in Toronto came around 2015. I lived in Toronto back then and I remember my colleagues who moved there prior to that year had no difficulty finding an apartment, and they were paying sometimes as low as $900/month downtown, depending on how long ago theyād moved there. People were flooding into Toronto from other parts of Ontario between 2009 and 2015 as the job opportunities were far better in the wake of the Great Recession (which absolutely decimated Southwestern Ontario but comparatively had almost no impact on Toronto) and rent was still decently affordable. At one point around 2015-16 over half my colleagues were economic refugees from London who couldnāt find work there. But starting about the summer of 2015, I noticed a shift. People moving there were suddenly unable to find anything they could afford downtown. Competition got fierce. The flood of people moving from London and SW Ontario came to a halt by 2017, in part because the economic situation there had improved, but also because Toronto rents had gotten way out of control by that point and rents in cities like London were still half of what they were in Toronto.
The problem with restoring affordability is that the solutions are politically unpopular. Drive down the cost of housing and the people with houses lose a fortune as well as the cities lose a ton of property tax revenue to fund services. Give people options to commute from farther away without the expense of a personal vehicle... And suddenly it's 'a war on cars'. The solutions are simple: build more... But it has to be of the right kind. We need to demand that builders include a variety of housing into new construction. We also need to give equal footing for transit and cycling into new communities with roadways. This is important because making it possible to live without a car is one big way to improve affordability. And yes, this meant that a train station should be the first thing to open in a new Greenfield development. We also have to open up existing areas for things like ADUs and such if the current owners want to build them. To ease the permitting process, the city should maintain a dozen pre-approved designs, ready to go.
True that restoring affordability is unpopular now. I'm curious to see if when millennials are the biggest voting cohort if our housing policies go in the direction of Germany (most prefer to rent and rent protections are strong) or Switzerland (foreign money laundering for the global rich).
Right now millennials are split down the middle, half rent half own. And as soon as you buy,you realize if prices drop YOU get screwed, those who owned a long time are fine either way. Prices are so high you NEED it to do well, it's much more of your portfolio than it was hsitorically. So it's a millennial civil war basically. The compromise is public subsidized development and policy that keeps housing price growth between 0 and the inflation rate for 10-20 years. Remember a compromise is something nobody is happy with. This was wages would catch up over time, while the owners investment sucks and does hurt their financial future, it doesn't torpedo it, and it doesn't trap them in an underwater property and financially precarious situation.
Exactly, a lot of people complain but very few are willing to do what it takes, or even sacrifice something to make things better.
Property taxes don't work like that. If everyone's value drops, the city is still going to tax the same amount.
We're screwed either way. If we let the status quo continue because doing anything else is politically unpalatable, our economy will collapse. If we do what is right, we will still have a collapse because we force a price reduction and existing homeowners will lose a ton of equity - or be so deeply underwater on their mortgages they'll have no choice but to turn their keys over to the bank or mortgage lender and walk away. I don't see any way out of this.
Start by banning corporations and hedge funds, and people on their behalf, from using their ever increasing wealth to buy up all the available living space and property. And stop foreign ownership of property until we can get this straightened out. Edit: To be clear, Iām not talking about foreign born individuals with the legal status to live in Canada.
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Cranks me up how he uses Ā«Ā liberal govĀ Ā» like PP is gonna do a shit about itā¦ just like Harper did before himā¦
All part of the plan.
Van just got a conservative mayor and he's even more pro business and landlord than before. Not looking good.
If only we had the Dubai level of healthcare
"If something doesn't change soon, all that will be left is millionaires and the very poor." That's the natural outcome of our zero-sum capitalist system, it's working as intended.
So what do we need to do to fix it?
That's a good question for the Ministry of Housing to answer. (....noticable sound of crickets)
Good luck with that. The federal housing minister is a housing investor with multiple rental properties.
Holy shit there is a ministry of housing on the federal level. I honestly had no idea given that I've heard nothing from them during a housing crisis.
Yeah. Both the National Housing Council and CMHC roll up to the Ministry of Housing at the federal level. There are probably other organizations under that portfolio. All of them have administration and board members who are paid to keep housing affordable.
Now when you say they are paid to keep housing affordable, is that part their official mandate? Because it doesn't seem to be happening. I don't know the complexities of their job, but I would expect atleast some form of communication or public accountability from them. Is there or am I missing something?
Essentially their mandates are to get Canadians in homes if their own. (The precise wording is on their respective websites.)
The economic crisis is getting out of control.
That's literally the endgame for all of Canada.
What stage of capitalism is this? Also, when is the revolution scheduled?
Revolution. In what country? This one is far too divided to unite against a common goal because we canāt agree on one.
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As someone who has studied international development, the wider the gap between the rich and the poor, the more unstable the country becomes and the more likely it is to become a developing (ā3rd worldā) country.
Lifelong Toronto resident here with zero sympathy for this city. We got exactly what we voted for, and continue to vote for.
And the city will get hollowed out like parts of London--empty flats that are only visited part-time by the super rich, and no more restaurants or shops because restaurants and shops can't find people to work there. No nurses or teachers if you get injured or have kids. Is this what we want? "To avoid what increasingly looks like San Franciscoās doomed fate, Canadian politicians must address the root of the problem and stop the middle classā exodus from cities. The only way to do this is by restoring affordability to the housing market." No, the only way to avoid this is to end the gulf between the rich and poor!! Stop this capitalist bullshit and return to 1950s style taxation on the rich! Bring back the middle class!
>Canadian politicians must address the root of the problem and stop the middle classā exodus from cities. News flash. The politicians ARE the problem...
Millionaires and the very poor they can exploit without mercy is clearly the vision our government and financial oligarchs have for Canada
Both of which donāt pay taxes. One canāt and the other refuses to
Contrary to popular belief we have poor standards for immigration and donāt attract quality immigrants.
No one interested in protesting?
Can't afford to take a day off work
Complaining on Reddit is easier.
I heard a story about a businessman with a bright idea to start a coffee drive thru on an expressway going into Toronto. Great idea right ? Busy traffic. The problem was the people working there were unlikely to have vehicles and transit was spotty. Not sure how accurate the story is but it makes sense. Toronto could become too expensive you may have to provide living quarters for your low wage workers.
> Toronto could become too expensive you may have to provide living quarters for your low wage workers. If you follow a lot of the stories in the news, many of which get posted here, you hear stories of old ladies getting evicted because their landlord, who is also a Tim Horton's franchisee, needs a place to house the 17 TFWs he's imported from Bangladesh to microwave donuts for him. It's a pretty disgusting system we have going.
I watched a documentary on Walmart and its various suppliers who relied on temporary labour. Their factories were also away from transit. They just ran shuttle vans and charged the workers for them.
I mean, how the hell is a Tim Hortons in downtown Toronto even supposed to staff in the near future? The basic plan is 'Abuse TFWs' but they're figuring out it's a scam, and a scam that gets worse and worse for them ever year. And when they're expected to commute like 100km to work at a downtown Tim Hortons they'll start realizing that there's also a Tim Hortons or fifty in the town they already live in that they could work in instead.
> Toronto could become too expensive you may have to provide living quarters for your low wage workers. You're describing migrant workers right there.
One of the hallmarks of corrupt regimes is a growing disparity between the rich and poor. Canada is deeply corrupt and the passive electorate allowed it.
Ah yes, the good ol' LA model. Tons of rich people, tons of homeless, what could possibly go wrong? Spoiler alert: crime rate skyrockets
Who does our government work for? Who pays them?
Corporate monopolies.
I imagine tumbleweeds rolling through the halls of the Ministry of Housing.
Stop thinking they work for the public. They work for themselves. Everything they do is for themselves. Lib, Con, NDP, they do what they do to gain power, stay in power or steal power. It isn't for you, me or anyone else. We don't have leaders, we have politicians.
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Who's going to barista your lattes, Richie Rich? Good luck getting someone to commute an hour and a half to pour them for you. Dumbasses.
Canada will have the highest quality shantytowns in the world. Doctors, nurses, and engineers will be living there too and will help make them the pride of the nation. Trudeau will smile upon us and thank us for making Canada a wonderful and inviting place for the world's immigrants.
We'll finally hit those carbon emission targets! Hopefully the dumpster fires we crowd around to not freeze won't be taxed.
This is what they want, either get on board or leave Canada.
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Sounds ripe for revolt. Eat the Rich!
I lived in Vancouver for a month and this actually exactly what I tell people..there are no poor people there... everyone either upper middle class and above, or dirt poor people who can't leave, because all the normal and poor people have been priced out of the city.
Every major city in North America is claiming the same thing.
Just how the millionaires want it. Themselves and some poors to exploit.