It's another day as Canada moves towards the Federal Budget being announced, which means our glorious leader has decreed more billions of dollars be spent!
Gosh, its almost like he's trying to buy his way into the next election. I wonder why.
It's almost like years of scandal, disastrous policy choices, and wild spending is catching up to him.
The federal Liberals have unveiled their plan to solve the housing crisis, building on recent announcements with new tax incentives, more than a billion dollars for homelessness and a country-wide effort to build more housing on public lands.
I've harped on this a few times now because it's a bad plan that exists only to dupe folks who know nothing about the housing market into thinking this will improve anything for anyone.
Even the extra billion to fight homelessness is, realistically, going to do almost nothing. And, that part is the best damn part of the whole plan. The rest is entirely useless... Unless you're planning to jump into owning rentals, at which point the next five years are going to be great.
Maybe I should start setting aside a "become a landlord" fund.
It's also noteworthy that, of course, part of the governments big plan is simply to force provinces to match the money they spend.
As if that won't cut into provincial budgets and cause us to have to cut something else we would have been spending on.
Great plan, gang.
On the opposite side of the fence, the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre have a plan that might actually reduce housing costs:
Poilievre has argued that government should get out of the way and let developers build more homes.
His proposed housing plan centres heavily on requiring cities to increase home building by 15 per cent each year to receive their usual infrastructure spending, or see their funding withheld. Those who build more than the target would be eligible for “bonuses.”
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not onboard with the Conservatives, and I think Poilievre is crazy. But, after right years of Trudeau I'm willing to let some other type of crazy screw things up.
I also don't love the idea that city funding could be withheld. But, the main thing here is that at least Poilievre is attacking the actual problem: supply.
Housing costs will remain well out of the ability for most folks if we don't dramatically increase supply of single family houses. It's incredibly simple supply and demand, which the Liberal plan of multifamily housing does fuck-all-nothing for!
Despite that, the Liberal minority government is still trying to spend its way into buying votes for the next election. We are days away from the budget reveal and they've already announced $18 BILLION dollars of spending!
NONE OF THAT IS SURPLUS. This is all deficit spending, adding to our astronomically high national debt that the Liberal government keeps lumping on.
Trudeau's government ALONE has spent MORE than every single other government combined in the history of Canada. But hey, what's 18 billion more on that pile eh?
Our national debt has more than doubled under this government, and yes, a big part of that was COVID, but even that was mishandled by this party and for all their chants about "thinking about future Canadians", they're sure spending those futures away.
Debt isn't free, and the same people they claim to be trying to help are going to be the ones footing the bill for this.