Brampton residents rallied on Sunday in front of city hall, calling for additional help from the federal and provincial government to combat exploitative landlords in the city.
Locals say illegal rooming houses are putting renters at risk and making neighbourhoods unsafe.
“I think the worst case scenario is loss of life,” said resident Kasia Devlin, who attended the rally.
Interesting make-up of the protestors.
Douglas Todd: Not a word was directed at Ottawa to lower its migration targets, even while mayors are not normally shy about asking senior governments to come to their aid
Hundreds of mayors, councillors and planners from across B.C. showed up this week at the annual conference of the Union of B.C. Municipalities for a keynote session on the housing crisis.
After being informed housing prices in Kamloops are now higher than in Calgary, they heard experts, advocates and development-industry officials talk about the “sacrifices” and “uncomfortable” truths B.C. residents, specifically taxpayers, must face to address unaffordability.
From a downtown Ottawa sidewalk, Kevin Aubin has been watching what he describes as alarming changes in the city’s downtown, several blocks south of Parliament Hill.
The veteran panhandler says that he is seeing an influx of troubling newcomers on Bank Street in Ottawa’s core, a main street similar to downtown areas of Granville Street in Vancouver, Yonge Street in Toronto or Water Street in St. John’s.
OTTAWA — Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced Monday Canadians will be able to borrow for longer, while also increasing the maximum value for insured mortgages, potentially giving buyers more money in the housing market.
I don’t see this helping many people but I always get a laugh out of Liberals pretending they solved a huge problem while conveniently failing to acknowledge their disastrous immigration policy is responsible.
The residents of a tiny home village in Portland, Oregon are being blamed for a drastic increase in crimes in the neighborhood.
People living in University Park, a North Portland neighborhood, said that ever since the Peninsula Crossing Safe Rest Village appeared, crime rates have skyrocketed.
Portland police data supports this claim, according to KATU.
Ontario food banks “cannot keep up” as usage has reached an eight-year high, a new report reveals.
Feed Ontario, a food bank network in the province, released new data Tuesday showing that 1,001,150 Ontarians visited a food bank at least once between April 1, 2023 and March 31, 2024, an increase of 25 per cent over the same time period in 2022-23.
In light of the prevailing mythology that Canada is “empty,” it’s counter-intuitive to realize Canada’s cities are unusually crowded. And still unaffordable.
Wyndham Lewis once described Canada as a “monstrous, empty habitat”.
And the British writer is by no means the only one to say this country is vast, imposing and under-populated.
Given that Canada is geographically the second-largest country in the world, it’s understandable that many feel it is largely empty.
Across Canada, a nurse earns between $28 and $50 an hour, which works out to a moderate to median annual household income of $58,240 to $104,000. At the Canadian standard definition of housing affordability – that housing takes up no more than 30 per cent of pre-tax household income – a single-parent nurse would be looking for a two- or three-bedroom home costing between $1,456 and $2,600 per month. But the average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment rental in Vancouver is $3,666.
Everyone agrees that Canada faces a housing shortage. But it’s not a shortage of homes: it’s a shortage of homes people can afford. In Toronto, for example, there is currently a glut of condos on the market. Prices have fallen as investors offload properties: high interest rates mean their mortgage payments exceed the rents they can get.
Homes have become unaffordable because of the disconnect between wages and prices. Why? Because there’s a disconnect between wages and prices. The average price-to-earnings ratio in Canada more than doubled from 3.2 in 1980 to 6.7 in 2020. Vancouver currently has the highest price to earnings ratio , at 12.3, followed by Toronto at 9.3. To put that in perspective, to buy an average house in those cities in July 2024, you need a household income of $208,000 and $226,000 , respectively. Not exactly middle-class.
In July, Victoria firefighter Josh Montgomery wrote a letter to British Columbia Premier David Eby, imploring him to stop the city from relocating a homeless hub where people are expected to use drugs to a new space next to a senior’s residence — and only steps from his own home, where his young daughters play outside.
The top one per cent of Canadians pay only 23.6 per cent of their income in taxes, enjoying the lowest tax burden of all of us. Strangely, the anti-tax voices that have come running to defend the wallets of the middle class in recent months have failed to mention this fact.
In this time of rising living costs, Canadians are feeling the affordability pinch. Some powerful voices are quickly stepping up to say taxes are to blame, decrying the government’s supposed overreach into our pockets. But the real conversation we should be having is how Canada’s tax burden is distributed, and whether everyone is paying their fair share.
The US has sued a leading software company that collects and sells rental data, accusing it of subverting competition between landlords and feeding the country’s housing crisis.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has claimed RealPage‘s software algorithm meant rival landlords were sharing what would otherwise be private information, allegedly allowing them to illegally co-ordinate and raise rents.
“Everybody knows the rent is too damn high and we allege this is one of the reasons why,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit.
Feds to take steps on housing promises ahead of cabinet retreat in Halifax
HALIFAX – Housing Minister Sean Fraser is expected to unveil details on a Liberal promise to lease federal land to developers to build affordable housing on Sunday just before the full federal cabinet kicks off a three-day retreat in Halifax.
The annual end-of-summer cabinet session comes three weeks before Parliament returns for the fall sitting and is likely the last summer retreat for this cabinet before the next election.
It may be the last real chance this government has to reset itself with voters before asking them for another mandate.
Canada’s housing crisis is turning our hospitals into makeshift shelters for the homeless. In 2023, two Toronto-area hospitals reported that their 100 most frequent ER visitors, who were all homeless, made a staggering 4,309 combined visits. This isn’t just because they need shelter; their dire living conditions make it nearly impossible for them to follow basic medical care instructions, forcing them to depend heavily on hospitals to bridge the care gap.
Once seen as oases of calm and quiet, libraries across Canada are becoming increasingly chaotic – even dangerous – with staff often ending up on the front lines of crisis.
Data obtained by CBC News shows there’s been a dramatic rise in recent years in the number of security incidents — things like physical assaults, suspected overdoses, and thefts — at public libraries in Canada’s major cities.
Public libraries in Toronto are just another form of homeless shelter like the TTC.
Of course if they’re hosting Drag Queen Story hour I don’t care what the homies do.
