Canada doesn’t have a productivity crisis. It has a lack of JOBS. And the lack of JOBS comes from the lack of LEADERSHIP. All our country’s problems are ARTIFICIAL (MAN MADE). We can’t even build a fucking road in this country!

Rent is too damn high

Before we address home ownership, we must first dissect this statement. A lot of people who will never own a home are under the impression that rent itself is too high and that owning would be comparable or cheaper rather than more expensive. I agree with them that renting is too expensive but disagree that they think improving ownership is not important.

To fix the rental market we must first understand what allows rent to be so high in the first place. Sure, land lords choose to charge rent at a high level, but the how isn’t because of a lack of government intervention, and that’s because we don’t just have high rent, we have a shortage of housing units. If the government simply added a price cap per square footage, then all it does is make hoarding rental units more lucrative than building new units!

So to address high rent, we need more housing units to be built. Why is housing shortage an artificial problem? Well let’s focus just on Toronto, as Ontario has a greenbelt and zoning limited to triplexes.

The first problem regarding housing shortage is that housing starts have plummeted. A few levers that are in the government’s control are as follows.

1. Allowing foreign buyers to buy pre-construction condos. They were banned a few years ago as they were scapegoated. Clearly, they had nothing to do with the housing crisis and interestingly were helping out with ensuring new housing got built by taking the risk on behalf of domestic investors. Without foreign buyers, developers are having a harder time selling pre-construction condos at prices they are still profitable. It is simply absurd to expect a developer to sell pre-construction condos at market prices that would result in them losing money. They are not forced to build, and increasing property taxes on the land itself wouldn’t ensure housing gets built, but ensures developers realize a loss on the land itself.
2. Lower taxes, even temporarily, so that pre-construction costs can fall lower than market clearing prices. Taxes are slowing down the growth of housing supply. This is a fact.
   • One such tax is the GST and HST applicable to even buyers who want to upgrade from their existing home. The more costly and thus difficult it is for existing home owners to upgrade, the slower the housing supply grows, and the less affordable options remain for first time home buyers. It is very improbable that a new house in an equal location without GST will be cheaper to buy for a first time home buyer than an existing 20+ year old house. The GST being removed for first time home buyers would push prices of existing homes down if only the new homes were even within the same price range to begin with!
   • Lower developer charges. The city of Toronto’s development reserve fund has ballooned for the last 10 years. The federal government must mandate that any funding for the city will come only after the developer reserve fund has been used such that it sits at the per-100k values before 2017 (adjusted for inflation). If the city is forced to use their development reserve fund, they may willingly lower developer charges. If they don’t and they stick to the growth pays for growth, then the federal government will save money and be able to redirect money into housing initiatives in cities that have the lowest developer charges like Edmonton. My thoughts are that the government should step in once the free market has actually failed rather than stepping in while the free market has significant blockades!

Repeat Offenders

The very fact that repeat offenders exist, where they commit violent crimes more than once within a few years, is evidence that the justice system itself is failing. This isn’t some natural world sort of ordeal. This is entirely in the government’s hands to prevent violent criminals from re-entering society without any sort of rehabilitation whatsoever. If criminals don’t receive rehabilitation, then they should be kept in prison. And if prison is too cruel, then improve the conditions of the prison so that they can live a life without endangering law-abiding residents. A prison town is a fine solution if the courts seriously think 5 years is too much for sexual assault.

Healthcare

The problems in healthcare is multifold, but stems from a lack of investment and long-term planning from the government.

Completely artificial. The doctor shortage comes from a residency shortage which comes from a lack of investment in building hospitals. We are behind the USA when it comes to MRIs per 100,000 population. A country with free healthcare should strive to make healthcare more accessible than a country with private healthcare, rather than accept it is less accessible!

By building more hospitals, yes the demand for doctors grows, however, there will be more space to train new doctors which is where one of the bottlenecks are.

The second bottleneck is education. We need new universities catered to the medical/healthcare field. We need a University of Ontario Institute of Medicine similar to how we have a University of Ontario Institute of Technology. The later was created from Bill 109, so yes doctor shortage is an artificial one.

It is simply absurd that smart Canadians who want to become doctors have to go study outside the country and even then can’t do their residency here. Not to mention, the wages are completely obscure. What I mean by that is that when you search up physician wages in Ontario, you can’t tell if its the revenue that a self-operated clinic will get or the earnings before tax. A physician operating their own clinic will get revenues from the government via OHIP but has to pay for all this:

• office rent / mortgage
• secretary (software might be able to automate this, but not really since there are too many seniors who are not tech savvy enough to deal with the lack of a person at the front desk)
• supplies
• book keeping

And then they pay themselves a salary. This is too much business stuff for someone who wants to practice medicine! My personal take is that we allow non-physicians to create and manage clinics so that they are the ones competing with hospitals to hire physicians rather than putting the onus only on physicians to start one up or scale it. Maybe this is already the case, but this is not my major point anyways.

Tariffs

Trump is a blessing in disguise for two reasons. First the government can blame Trump for Canada’s problems, even those that existed before. Secondly, it gives Canada a strong reason to address non-US trade issues.

Jobs

This is how most people measure success. Success is that you have a well paying job and can enjoy life based on your salary. Salary comes from a demand for labour at a price point that labour will be supplied. By jobs, I mean jobs all over the spectrum.

There are two “fixes” regarding the jobs problem. We effectively want to lower the unemployment rate so that it equals the historic natural rate of unemployment. If we are above the historic natural rate of unemployment, we need to either create more jobs or decrease the competition for jobs.

1. Keynesian infrastructure spending policies: applicable only during economic contractions, not expansions. If the government is borrowing during an economic expansion, something is seriously wrong with how the country is managed and the consequences are not known and will be felt in the future.
2. Reduce immigration. I made the argument 4 months ago in May 2025 that immigration should be reduced from 395,000 to 240,000. This is based on the fact that the job shortage went from increasing at 20k/mo in 2024 to 10k/mo in 2025 after a cut from 485,000 to 395,000. So if we extrapolate, we get to the 240,000 figure.
3. Picking winners correctly; Investment in high profit margin businesses. The government must stop picking winners and losers and rather follow where the winners already are. We have basically missed the boat regarding GPUs. China has already started creating their own GPUs. GPUs during the AI rush are like the shovels during the gold rush! Instead of investing in the core technology that makes AI profitable, the government is helping our companies pay for importing expensive GPUs!
4. Stop. picking. losers. The government is picking losers when it defends bills like C-69 (impact assessment act) and the emissions cap. This also follows through the recently passed Bill C-5, which lets the government decide which projects are worthy of cutting down the impact assessment act. Theoretically, if Canada was 10x the population with 10x more proposed projects, the government would be spending 10x more effort at achieving the same economic growth. That’s how futile this sort of “office” is. But the worse part is that it ensures the sandbagging of economic growth by favouring some projects over the others. The best example of how the government is doing a bad job at picking losers is the Marten Falls Access Road, the Webequie Supply Road, and the Northern Road Link. These are all INDIGENOUS LED PROJECTS. Also, another thing that destroys down economic activity are small taxes like the luxury tax which reduced our ship building industry’s economic output.

Boogeymen

1. Galen Weston. Groceries are too expensive at Walmart, it’s actually his fault.
2. Donald Trump. The trade war is the reason you can’t find a job!
3. Land lords. Can’t afford to buy a house? It’s because land lords bought them all!
4. Doug Ford. Renting a condo unit for less than the monthly mortgage your land lord pays? GRrr “fuck” Doug Ford. If rent control had existed, less housing would’ve been built, ensuring that land lords wouldn’t have lost so much money in the crash. I actually hate it when land lords lose money renting to me.
5. Steven Harper. Housing affordability may have gotten worse during both Cretien/Martin (30%), and Trudeau (50%), but it’s Harper’s fault for letting it get 20% worse. Harper is to blame! He should’ve ran on housing!
6. Corporations. What do you mean Carney is pro-TFWs? It’s actually the corporations fault for hiring the cheapest labour class legally available to them. Carney is not at fault. He’s a central banker. He is the most qualified person for the job. Poilievre would’ve done the same thing. He’s totally lying when he says he wants to end the TFW program. What do you mean he said it in August 2024. What do you mean the NDP ran on completely reforming the TFW program?
7. Danielle Smith. What do you mean she didn’t want the handmaid tale’s banned and that the author fell for the Edmonton school board propaganda. The author can never be wrong! She’s an author! Author’s are never wrong.