Faced with increasing pressure to respond to widespread concerns about the cost of living and questions about his leadership, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a series of new measures Thursday meant to deal with rising housing and grocery prices.
The federal government also announced it will bring forward legislation to empower the Competition Bureau to ensure that corporate mergers and acquisitions do not have an adverse effect on the affordability of goods and services.
I laughed at that part not gonna lie
Ah, yes, they’ll give the Competition Bureau teeth. Sure they will, the fucking liars.
Whatever teeth the Competition Bureau has, the Harper-appointed judge on the Competition Tribunal apparently has bigger ones.
So for how many years of the Liberal administration is the responsibility of the issues with the Competition Bureau going to be Harpers? Should we give it another 8?
Nothing with teeth unfortunately. Putting taxes on the corporations will just raise prices. Not very helpful. Getting rid of the GST on new rental units will mean bigger profits for the builders. Nothing here helps the people.
Taxing corporations does not just raise prices for consumers!! This is a hyper conservative worldview, and very convenient to corporations that don’t want their taxes raised. It is also contradicted by literally any first year economics textbook, so I don’t understand why it keeps getting repeated.
Tax changes to encourage rental construction have been advocated by urban economists for years. This particular measure was proposed by the NDP. An affordable rental market actually puts downward pressure on the overall real estate market.
That said, I agree the Liberals aren’t doing enough.
Liberals aren’t doing enough
Is this a situation similar to the US where the “progressive” party is not doing enough to help and the regressive party wont help at all?
I take the “something is better than nothing” view on this.
I general, I’d agree with that. On housing specifically, I wouldn’t.
Until recently, I would say Liberals were actively hurting housing affordability. Their signature housing proposal up to now is a tax cut for rich people who have maxed out their TFSA, which is the first time home buyers tax free savings account. That raises demand without addressing supply or disincentivizing investors. It sounds like a proposal written by the real estate investment community, and frankly, it probably was.
This recent proposal is full of good but minor stuff that should have been done a decade ago and will probably take another decade to have an effect. They’ve wasted a lot of time and I still doubt they’re taking it seriously.
Edit: I want to clarify that I think Conservatives would do an even worse job. Their voter base has even more home owners than the Liberals do and I seriously doubt they have any intention of shrinking real estate GDP growth, which is what is required.
The GST part is to incentivize new construction, and you are right it will increase profits but without increasing prices for the end consumer, on the contrary if more builders see this as an attractive opportunity, there will be more units built which increases the offer and when the offer goes up, the prices goes down.
Hopefully it somehow managed to avoid the trend of only building higher end housing to increase those profit margins.
That one is caused by zoning.
If I can make a low-rise building and sell 12 units for $250k on the same property that I can build two detached houses to sell for a $million, I’ll do the former, right?
But city hall is going to make me drag out the approval process for the low-rise for 3 years and grind me down to 6 units. I’ll just save the ball-ache and build the mcmansions.
Is it strongly worded?
What needs to happen is some prosecutions of executives and investors for price gouging.
All of these problems are symptoms of crony capitalism. He isn’t going to fix anything by treating the symptoms. Grocery prices are insane because Loblaws owns everything. Housing prices are insane because landlords own city councils all over the country and refuse to build more housing (and also because of an immigration policy which the Liberals themselves say is intended to prevent wages from rising)
