Canada in Crisis

Canada is home to some 38 million souls. It has a rich history and heritage, represented by a tapestry of British, French, Native, and American influences. The Laurentian corridor might reflect a distant political past, but most of Canada’s lands are rife with the harvest of raw resources and large quantities of energy.

The Trans-Canada Highway links the country like a sparse string of Christmas lights. Like our highway, our common uniting culture is weak. The West and the East could not be more different, and within these two sides, the differences are as vast as the provinces themselves. Within each Province, there is division, and within each region, there is more. Between each level of division, there is hardly more than a wisp of shared interest. The strange result is a “nation” of desperate conformism.

Western interests vary from those of the East, and British Columbians vary vastly from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba or the three northern Territories. Within BC, Islanders, Kootenays, Okanoganers, Northerners, and Lower Mainlanders share nearly nothing. Beyond that, ruralists and city dwellers share little and often conflict; within the regions, ethnic divisions are stark, with Taoist/Buddhist East Asian Richmond versus Sikh South Asian Surrey, versus the Evangelical White Fraser Valley, all against Shitlib Central (Vancouver proper). What interest could these disparate groups share when they have fundamentally different ideas on what life means, what it means to work, and the meaning of family and friends? What happens when some groups act in nepotism while others are explicitly anti-nepotistic? In my view, we are in crisis, and we have been going through it piecemeal.

The housing crisis has been going on for my entire adult life. I started living on my own on Canada Day, 2006. Then, it was possible to afford rent, and this roughly continued until around 2011, when things changed. The price of housing itself had already started to be out of reach for young people, and we have had nothing but excuse after excuse, as well as equivocation after equivocation, as to why things aren’t that bad or why things are bad, X is why we deserve it. Over time, excuses have failed one after the other, growing only more dire. “Experts” told us:

-housing has always been expensive (boomers used to get houses for $60k or less, with programs like AHOP to get younger or poorer people into the market)

-there is a shortage of land (yes, in CANADA, the 2nd biggest country in the world with a population less than Greater Tokyo!)

-Not everyone deserves a home (a crap rationale in a crisis, we aren’t talking about drug-addicted homeless people, but hard-working people with jobs and families!)

-Rich Chinese people are buying up property (true, but barely the issue!)

-“You should have bought earlier!” (We would have if it were possible! I’d been trying since 2007 before my purchase in 2012, bought a mobile home seated upon Native Reserve land)

-“It was hard to buy a house back in the day.” (houses are a Million dollars now!)

-“You have to move where the deals are.” (But even then the prices are too high once you factor in the lower wages)

-“Save your money and buy land and build a house!” (For one, the rate of being able to save before your fertile years expire cannot exceed the rate of inflation/price increase, and even if you managed to, building regulations won’t allow you to build a basic structure on that land without bureaucratic approval)

-“Avocado Toast!” (I couldn’t believe this one, as I am allergic to avocados, and houses are $1 Million!)

There are some half-truths to the excuses above, but none of them address the real problems. The first is regulatory, which makes housing development extremely punishing, resulting in high costs for developers. This cost must be borne someplace, and that ends up being the end consumer. On top of that, new sales have sales taxes applied to the total cost, adding a further 5% or more! This may not seem like a lot, but mortgaged over 30 years equals sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost. The people most interested in the regulation of development are existing property owners who benefit by restricting supply. Taken to the extreme, this massively expands their property values, at the cost of very much needed supply. They are also the most likely to vote in their local elections, meaning they essentially have a personal incentive based on the political process, at the collective cost of community and family well-being, on the most basic of needs, shelter.

Leftists say social housing is the solution, but this too has failed. Social housing comes at a massive and continuous cost, borne by the rest of society. It cannot create enough supply, because it is subsidized. Social housing development can only come in two forms: shortage and slums. Neither is good. In the developed world, social housing is always in shortage because there is no incentive to create it, and where it is done via fiat (government mandate and wealth redistribution) there are simply not enough resources to meet demand. In the developing world, this results in not shortage, but slums, as desperate people do whatever they can for shelter. The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are a good example of this.

Normally I would say that we could solve this crisis by building more market housing, and by reducing regulations and restrictions on building. Most of this would not affect safety standards, as there already exists the building code. Most regulations which retard development are essentially nuisance regulations like overzealous zoning rules. This would solve the problem eventually if the market were in a state of equilibrium. It is not.

Because of Canada’s welcoming immigration policies, the equilibrium is constantly swung to the side of shortage as more people chase a tightening supply of housing. This rate and character of population growth mean that supply cannot catch up to demand. The character is that of adults who need a home, rather than natural birth rate growth which is more flexible as children can remain at home longer while supply catches up their incomes rise, or the prices reach a fair equilibrium to their wages in some manner.

The crisis in housing is extreme. Native Canadians are more and more stuck living with their parents, finding growing difficulty in forming their own families (with the knock-on effect of lowering birth rates even more). Meanwhile, an increase in the supply of labour via immigration keeps wages lower than they’d be under market equilibrium, acting together in an economic pincer movement upon the average worker. So what do all the mainstream political parties suggest to solve this issue? More immigration of course! Well, we have tried this before, and have only accelerated the policy since, and the problem has only gotten worse, so I think the mainstream parties must be trying to cope with the reality of having to admit that immigration at the levels we are allowing it is having serious detrimental effects on the average Canadian.

As far as my research has been able to tell, only the fledgling PPC (People’s Party of Canada) has shown interest in limiting immigration. As it stands, current government goals aim to increase Canada’s population to 100 million by the year 2100. I have yet to see any convincing rationale or reason for such an idea. If the same proportions of people by that time spread out according to the distribution of population now, Ontario would have over 38 million people, Quebec over 22 million, BC 13.5 million, and Alberta 11.5 million.

Housing that many people, at the same average rate per person per dwelling unit, Canada would need to build 25.5 million more dwellings, on top of maintaining the existing ones, and that’s only to maintain current standards. There are currently fewer than 15 million dwellings in Canada (16 million when you account for vacation and summer homes). The average cost of housing for all of Canada as I write this is about $656,000. If we consider that housing will continue to increase in cost given the proposed population growth, we know that multiplying the average housing price with the needed houses will give us the lowest estimated price possible. This equals $16,718,704,453,441.30.

That’s sixteen trillion, seven hundred eighteen billion, seven hundred four million, four hundred fifty-three thousand, four hundred forty-one dollars and thirty cents. Now this would be in TODAY'S dollars, and who knows what inflation lies ahead of us between now and then (certainly we have seen how it changed between 1900 and 2000!).

I could not find an estimate for the expected GDP in 2100, so it is hard to compare, but since we are using today’s dollars, it is nearly eight times our GDP, and if we take the OECD’s estimates for 2060 (40 years shy of 2100) of $3.05 Trillion*, that is still more than quintuple our GDP (and still we would have another 40 years of unaccounted for!).

One must consider this cost would be spread over some 76 years (starting in 2024). We would need to allocate nearly 10% of our gross national product, roughly $220 Billion per year, each year, in TODAY’s dollars, to achieve and maintain our current housing market balance. This is also as mentioned, a conservative estimate, and does not factor into account the huge strain this would put on our natural resources, which would no longer be able to be exported (it would be needed for construction), and the likely need for importation of materials to achieve these goals. Given we are a resource export-driven economy, this only compounds the economic strain.

This is just one issue among many that derives from our profound leadership crisis in Canada. It needs to be said loudly and often, that our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not a great leader, nor does he have the training or experience to run a first-world nation. Countless gaffes and a profound lack of insight have plagued his tenure, yet the middle school drama teacher and part-time ski instructor continue to be elected. The vacuous desiccated husk Liberal Party of Canada, is filled with mutually incompetent ministers, combined with a judiciary which is by and far Liberal in its discernment, mocks law and order and makes Canada an international joke. I need not point out the profound hypocrisy, backpedalling, backstabbing, and snake-tongued policies of this regime (and its cowardly and unethical Public Service managers), but the fairness upon which they claim to rule is a bold blundering farce, being constantly exposed month-in and month-out with scandal after scandal. The regime rounds up its political enemies and puts them on trial, commands their banking cartel to damage clients, and enables the emergencies to act under thin or preposterous pretence, to silence critics. There is no need to hear them if you can beat their teeth in with batons and cut out their tongues with your Liberal-appointed judiciary, consider the polling numbers!

The politicians aren’t all there is to blame, however. As mentioned, the Public Service managerial system has its role in this mess. It is the deep state of Canada, unelected, conniving, a permanent leech on the corpus Canadien, feasting on our lifeblood, treating the average person (especially Westerners) as cattle. This institution will decry anti-abortion as interfering with a woman’s bodily autonomy, and out of the other side of its mouth, it will declare your right to choose medical treatments moot and you will be punished for not surrendering your bodily autonomy. Later in that breath they will denounce you for questioning the mutilation of minor bodies, and take your children away from you after they’ve been brainwashed by the “education” system to mutilate themselves, to be put into their foster care system where more than half of homeless people originate. This would be considered genocide in any other era. This is a crisis of ethics.

What defence against such things does the average Canadian have? Western Religion is in decline, Christianity is hardly found in any institutional framework and is being actively purged. Christian, Muslim, and Jewish pastors in the military can no longer display symbols of their faith in ceremonial settings, even at Remembrance Day ceremonies. This is cultural erasure. This is a crisis of morality, right at a time when people are deep in a crisis of meaning and being. What drives us? Why are we here? Just to work and live and die? Why? Many people are asking this, and yet the Government thought it would be the perfect time to legalize suicide in the form of “MAID” (Medical Assistance in Dying)! Are you feeling kind of bad, are you feeling kind of sad? Life isn’t going anywhere because you can’t find a job, home, or a partner. Depressed? Have you turned to drugs? Or maybe you were just “born wrong” and are tired of suffering? Well, there is no better solution than a final solution, plus, it has the added benefit of lowering healthcare costs and allows certain people to feel morally superior to others! Very dark, and becoming darker. Sam Hyde is a Prophet of our times.

This darkness would be better with an actual community, an actual family. But family formation has been attacked too. The COVID-19 era left a chasm in this regard, and in many ways desocialized millions. Combining this with ready access to sexual biomass via dating apps like Tinder, family formation continues its decline, and with it so does our culture. Without children, there will be no future Canada, at least as far as we see it now. Like Matthew 19:24, forming a family will be like putting a camel through the eye of a needle, if things do not change.

But that was not all that the COVID-19 policies damaged. It increased our debt and fostered our current inflation problems. It revealed our industrial weaknesses, which we have yet to address. It exasperated the drug problem, with more overdoses than ever before. Despite this, the Liberal mind doubled down on every policy. Before cannabis was legalized, soon followed the decriminalization of possession of small amounts of drugs, and our streets became a testament to the treatise. Despairing, filthy, ruined people litter the streets begging for change so they can bang another needle in their arm, harassing people, and at times hurting people. We went from, “Dude, weed, lmao.” to “Dude…we're broken.”

But who at the top can point out these failures without doing so cynically? At this point I don’t care about cynicism, I want solutions! I write this not to “own the libs” but to wake them up. They are drunk on their narrative fallacies. This is a crisis of power. Who is in charge? Where does the buck finally stop? Anyone in Canada who has tried to deal with that will know that you just get put into an endless chain of buck-passing. There is no leadership unless it’s easy and obvious, but at that point, hardly any leadership is needed anyway!

The leadership instead stewards to “climate change” advocacy, a virtual nothing-issue according to much-acclaimed economist Bjørn Lomborg. Perhaps it is because it is such a worthless policy that they put their energy into it. It is a crisis of hubristic, leadership failure here and it is unclear how this can be fixed. There is also the war in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. Why are these our issues? Why am I being asked to care? Slavs fighting Slavs is a Slavic problem. Semites fighting Semites is a Semitic problem. Neither are mine, but you can be sure that our leadership will involve us for no good reason. What would have Wilfred Laurier said about the Ottomans dealing with their Arab subjects? He would have said, “Why would I care?” Good question!

Loss of narrative control is evident. If a regime had control, people like you and me would not say anything beyond the banal. They’ve sacrificed the Mandate of Heaven, for what I do not pretend to know, but one of the remaining shibboleths in the GAE as far as Canada is concerned is its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is a long document with a lot of empty promises, except one. Section 1 of the Charter states that all rights are subject to reasonable limits per the "principles of democratic governance." This is not how it was originally supposed to be interpreted (according to Brian Peckford, former Newfoundland and Labrador Premier, the last living First Minister signatory to the document), but alas the Judiciary has seen fit to make the remaining sections advisory. In other words, you have no rights whatsoever. The only way that can be fixed is if we realize that truth.

So there we have what can be summarized as the crisis in Canada. I don’t know where this ends, but we cannot get there without principles and a vision of what we want our future to be. Tripling our population makes no sense the way we are planning to; the manipulation of the interpretation of our charter of rights and freedoms by an activist judiciary will make us no different from any third-world dictatorship; genocide of the people who made Canada what it is will simply make Canada something completely different, and democracy itself must be put up to question. Where does the buck stop? Can this mess be fixed? We need answers.

Source: * https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gdp-long-term-forecast.htm