More and bigger homeless encampments have been set up across Canada recently and, with the help of advocacy groups, they’re taking on a more permanent feel.
Hunkering down for the winter, some have generators, heating stoves, winterized tents, and more. Advocacy groups have helped them obtain these supplies, along with legal help to stop attempts at moving them.
Pierre Poilievre’s 15-minute advertisement masquerading as a mini-documentary on the housing crisis contains inaccuracies and distortions. That doesn’t matter. The thing is a work of genius.
The Conservative Leader has taken ownership of an issue critically important to many Canadians: the seeming impossibility of ever being able to afford a home, or even rent one.
Calgary outreach worker Chaz Smith and his team of volunteers have been distributing food, clothes and referrals for services to the city’s unhoused for nine years.
The founder of BeTheChangeYYC says most of those facing homelessness during that time have been Caucasian or Indigenous.
But these days, he’s noticing more newcomer faces.
Keep those immigrant floodgates open.
Poilievre now owns the housing issue — the most important issue to most voters — and the Liberals are seen as culpable for presiding over a hot mess
Housing hell: How we got here and how we get out. pic.twitter.com/vVLsXMVM35
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) December 2, 2023
Neither Ivison or Poilievre mentions the Liberal party’s destructive mass immigration policy and its role in the housing crisis. Silence is complicity.
OTTAWA – Every week now for more than a month, cabinet ministers have been appearing in front of cameras on Parliament Hill in an effort to convince Canadians that the Liberal government has the housing crisis in hand.
Ever since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s summer cabinet shuffle, they’ve been scrambling to be seen making the cost of living a top priority, hoping to catch up to the runaway Conservatives on the issue of affordability.
Like clockwork, Housing Minister Sean Fraser appeared Tuesday alongside Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, this time to announce millions in spending to build or upgrade thousands of co-operative homes.
A new 15-minute video produced by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is the latest salvo in the political fight over housing policy, which has dominated the second half of this year in politics.
Poilievre made housing costs and affordability a key part of his message early in his leadership run, and housing has now become an issue that parties across the political spectrum agree is a crisis facing Canadians.
Thank you to the 2 million people who have watched “Housing Hell” on X in the last 36 hours.pic.twitter.com/vVLsXMVM35
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) December 4, 2023
Jaqueline Belardi doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to afford a home even though she earns a good salary. Belardi and her partner make a combined income of more than $180,000, but saving up enough money for a down payment feels out of reach.
“We can’t just borrow $50,000 from our parents,” she said. “That seems like the only way younger people are able to buy property these days.”
It is now widely understood that Canada’s housing market is critically undersupplied. A 2022 study by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported that the country will need to produce 3.5 million more housing units than are currently in the delivery pipeline by 2030, to restore housing affordability.
Yet it is obvious that we will not be able to correct this situation by 2030, and probably not even by 2040.
Every “New Housing” announcement made by the Liberals is Hot Air.
Nothing they have done to date will have significant impact on the housing and affordability crisis.
The decision to continue their massively harmful immigration policy shows they do not care about you and your family.
Stop voting for people that hate you.
What happens to equality when young adults who don’t have homeowner parents are far less likely to be able to buy a dwelling?
It’s not every day you are cited in the introduction to a Statistics Canada study.
But that’s what happened this week when a new report by housing researchers at the Crown corporation highlighted my 2021 column, titled Canada’s ‘bank of mom and dad’ returning us to 19th-century inheritance culture.
In their groundbreaking study of a disturbing trend toward inequality in Canada, Michael Mirdamadi and Aisha Khalid discovered young adults who have parents who own their home were twice as likely to own a home themselves.
The inability to afford a home is an awful prospect to face. That twit in Ottawa is doing everything he can to make it worse.
Canadian Housing Resembles A Return To Victorian-Era Inheritance Culture: Stat Can
Canada is quickly reverting back to a Victorian-era style inheritance culture. That was the suggestion from the country’s national statistics agency, when exploring the role of parental wealth on the homeownership rate of young adults. A lack of upward social mobility can turn into a big problem for Canada, which depends on attracting immigrants. No immigrant has ever said they moved across the world and worked hard so their children could have less opportunity.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland expects banks will follow a new series of rules and guidelines designed to protect Canadian homeowners, millions of whom are set to renegotiate loans at potentially higher rates.
“The thing that I hear the most right now is people are concerned about interest rates, especially people who have mortgages and are concerned about the renewal of their mortgages,” Freeland said in an interview airing Sunday on Rosemary Barton Live.
“And I think that is very understandable,” she told CBC’s chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton.
I don’t think Banks are going to be into the “feels” of “working with you.”
The federal Liberals’ housing announcements are nothing if not predictable. Their lead up tends to involve much pomp and circumstance, only for the payoff to be an inevitable letdown.
See: former housing minister Ahmed Hussen, who had a habit of scheduling press events to reveal plans for a couple dozen new units in a country where the housing deficit is well over five million units.
A new commentary on Canada’s support system for low-income households says many of the programs perpetuate dependency and don’t help people do what is needed to get out of poverty.
In Dan Carter, whom I profiled this week, Oshawa, Ontario, has a mayor with an unusual background. But the city faces a situation that is confronting many, perhaps most, Canadian municipalities: a growing population of homeless people, many with addiction and mental health issues.
The federal government was prepared to offer the City of Toronto two locations as temporary shelters, and operational funding for a third location but the city declined the offer late last week, Global News has learned.
At its November meeting, City Council passed a motion requesting Ottawa “take urgent action to address the refugee crisis including funding and operationalizing emergency accommodation at federal sites, including federal armouries, and funding and operationalizing a regional refugee reception centre.” At that same meeting, all 25 councillors and Mayor Olivia Chow signed a letter addressed to the Ministers of National Defence and Emergency Preparedness, reiterating the requests and urgency.
