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.
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)
What needs to happen is some prosecutions of executives and investors for price gouging.
The government needed to legislate price caps for key groceries and give the municipalities more control over their zoning and construction. This neoliberal policy bullshit just serves to take money from public coffers and put it in the pockets of the rich.
The government needed to legislate price caps for key groceries
By definition, a shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
Explain to us how creating a shortage of food, of all things, is a good idea. From my point of view as someone who likes to eat, a shortage of food is the scariest proposition.
If you place price caps on a product that are below the point where it is profitable for companies to sell it then they will simply stop stocking them in in their shelves. There is historical precedent, too.
Profitability has clearly not been a problem for smaller grocers. Why is it only a problem for the big chains?
Happy to see the Housing Generator fund pay out with some YIMBYism, but imho it doesn’t go far enough. I hate and fear Poilievre, but he’s right when it comes to the carrot-and-stick approach to municipal governments blocking housing:
They do not deserve the carrot. They deserve the stick. Poilievre, being a gigantic asshole, is much more willing to use the stick.
I don’t care what Poillièvre says he’ll do. He has a voting history, and his party has a very long history of siding with landlords and CEOs. Anyone who genuinely believes Poillièvre is going to help the little guy and not simply enrich the landlords just because he says he’s going to do something is a complete moron. He’s voted against it in the past, and he will in the future, because it’ll hurt his own bottom line.
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?
