Solar Eclipses and Government Nonsense!
Today's The Day!
It's eclipse day! Around here in Saskatchewan, we'll see a partial eclipse of about 30%, over the course of about two hours. It's not a huge event, but for folks interested in that kind of thing there is a bit of hype going around.
I'm mostly interested in hearing about the crazy events of a few spots in the US when things start to pop off today, as anything that puts a whole bunch of folks from the US into one place is a popcorn-worthy event. Someone is going to do something stupid, and I can't wait to read about it over the next few days.
Myself? I'm planning to keep my head down and work. I've got a hive-related project I'd love to make some actual progress on as well as my day job, which will no doubt keep me fairly busy until the kids get home from daycare. I may pop out to see if I can snap a photo of our partial eclipse (without burning my eyes out), but we'll see what the day brings. It's a pretty cloudy day here so far.
It's also tax season in Canada - with the deadline coming up quickly and I've yet to actually sit down and even start looking at filing. I'm not too worried as we have until the end of the month, and I don't anticipate owing much if anything. I also don't expect a big payout, but hey... every penny I don't get back at tax time is a penny I didn't leave sitting in a government account accruing interest for them, so it's all good. Whatever I do get back will go towards paying down a line of credit so that in a month or two I can end up filling the damn thing back up as we get a second vehicle lol. Ahh, good times.
Speaking of taxes, it's also budget season for the Federal Government, and in true fashion it's promising to be a whopper. The Liberals are doing everything they can to delay the next election until late 2025, but they know as well as everyone else does that it is almost certain they'll be getting the boot no matter how long they push off the election. As such, they're making wild promises that, somehow, those freaking clowns are still managing to fumble.
6 billion set aside for housing development, in a bid to help lower housing costs so that more folks can enter homeownership. Only, there's a catch. To get that funding you need to force 4-plexes and other multi-tenant developments. Instead of letting the provincial governments and local municipalities decide what's best for them, we get to see yet another case of the Feds forcing their way of thinking on everyone.
Which, in case we haven't already established: is incredibly short-sighted. Per usual.
You know who buys four-plexes?
It's sure as shit not brand new home-owners. It's not the young couple looking to break into home ownership. It's not the kid out of college and stepping into the workforce.
It's businesses. Businesses buy multi-tenant housing and then rent that out. So, Mr. Trudeau, how in the shit does a bunch of multi-tenant housing help drive housing prices down? Oh that's right, it doesn't, because even though it's your soundbite line - you shitheals don't actually care about that.
Trudeau is pitching a lot of his campaign at gen z, banking on being able to say the right thing to get them to vote for him. Housing is a huge problem right now, with a lot of different researchers and industry folks saying that this upcoming generation is very likely to never own a home unless it's something they inherit. Housing prices are outpacing the ability for most folks to own in a lot of places across the country - particularly in cities. So, in his infinite wisdom Trudeau has decided to lean into what the Opposition has been harping on for the last year and is promising to drop housing prices... somehow... with this 6 billion in funding for multi-tenant properties which will inevitably get snapped up by folks already doing just fine and then rented out. Because that's how multi-tenant buildings work! I say that with authority because understanding multifamily real estate is part of my bloody day job!!
But, per usual, while some folks are making a stink about the way that funding is tied up nobody is actually talking about the part that matters. Well, the two parts that matter. First, this is a gross overreach of federal power, and secondly: this isn't going to solve the housing cost problems because it's not building single-family detached homes!
Condos are just apartments you get to paint without asking, and these will at best become condos - but far more likely they'll become low-to-mid range apartments.
NDP MP Jenny Kwan said Canadians "can't trust those who created this mess to fix it."
"Developers who recently bought off an affordable housing complex in Dartmouth have served renoviction notices to about 1,000 tenants so they can jack up rent," she said. "The Liberal government's efforts to build affordable homes have not even offset the loss of affordable rental homes."
Trudeau though is still going on about it reducing costs:
"This is how we'll address the shortage of housing options for Canadians. And this is how we'll make it fairer for younger generations, who feel like they're falling behind because housing costs are too high," Trudeau said. "We're making a lot of progress cutting red tape to fast-track the construction of hundreds of thousands of homes, but we want to go even faster."
This is a lie and they know it won't drop single-family housing costs. It won't drop condo costs.
It won't even drop rent costs.
Mark my words. Check if I'm right in a year, because I fucking promise you I will be. None of this song and dance is going to do a single thing for anyone entering the housing market, and these clowns know that.
They're gambling on outside factors coming together in the next few years to cause prices to fall into a more reasonable range, so they can retroactively point at their 'incentive' and go: "Look, look, we did that, it worked!"
Anyone with half a brain will know that to be false, but a depressingly large number of people will just happily and vapidly hear what is being told to them and take that at face value as 100% fact.
Anyhow, that's all the time I have for ranting about government nonsense today.
Future so bright.. gotta wear shades! 😎🤙
I have a feeling it's not about selling houses, it's about implementing the "You'll own nothing and be happy... or else" ideology.
It seems the idea is that if they take away people's security (in this case, forcing people to rent instead of buying somewhere they can call home), it creates an ongoing state of anxiety and they believe anxious people are easier to control.
Interestingly, the Thatcher government in the UK reached the diametrically opposite conclusion. It was the height of the Cold War, there was a huge amount of social unrest (some of it encouraged by the KGB) and there was a real fear of a Soviet-style revolution. They implemented measures to massively increase home ownership (selling council houses to their occupants, freeing up the mortgage market etc). It certainly wasn't perfect - they failed to replace the stock of social housing that was sold off.
But the logic was that people who own their own homes have something to lose and therefore don't start revolutions. They appear to have been right, and I think the WEF have forgotten this valuable lesson.
So true man. It's hard to live in a rent-focused society and feel like you aren't being taken advantage of, which in turn breeds discontent with the government.