Well John, your latest ramblings, ‘Will Our New Government Solve Our Housing Crisis?’ as your tone deaf hypocrisy complaining about ‘overtourism’ while jaunting off to Venice and Tybee Island as a tourist, did not disappoint.
Have you not wandered around the Tub in the summers and noticed a subtle change in the numbers of people over the last few years?
Have you not seen the videos of the tent cities that have sprouted up everywhere in cities across the country for the last decade?
The intellectual dishonesty you displayed by refusing to acknowledge or address the many other root causes of the housing crisis here on the Bruce as a downstream effect, is astonishing.
We need to explore how this housing crisis happened on the Bruce to begin to fix it.
Well, the main culprit is the federal Liberal government, who for the last ≈10 years quietly implemented the now widely recognized, reckless policies of allowing millions and millions of people into our country who have absolutely overwhelmed not just the housing supply, but our schools, hospitals, policing, et cetera and it’s not just going to get any better with our ‘new federal government’. In fact, it’s going to get a whole lot worse for the same reasons. How could the Liberals have been so foolish to not have had the foresight to anticipate the disastrous results that would unfold as they have?
The boomers began to retire in droves, selling into the new demand for record prices and moved, bought or built up here to retire, increasing prices and overwhelming services.
Then these newly arrived hordes discovered us, beginning the ‘overtourism’ and of course, STAs took off.
Now add in the record inflation and owning a house or even finding affordable accommodation of any type will be difficult if not financially unattainable not just on the Bruce but everywhere, for many, many years.
Note that any chest thumping on how we’ll build our way out of this mess with millions of homes when historically we can only construct about 250k a year at most, is pure government propaganda.
So your solution is to cry out to the very instigator of these problems, wondering if our now ‘new’ Liberal government “will do anything to help create affordable housing in rural areas like ours.” followed by your proclamation that “They need support, not tax breaks.” as service industry people don’t make enough to make tax cuts worthwhile. Well, it might be a start. I don’t know about you, I sure could use a cut.
What do you think bringing in millions of people does to wages?
So just how should our government fix our housing in the Bruce?
Your primary recommendation is the usual solution of interventionist government policy in the free market by limiting STAs which is government breaking more legs to fix the legs they broke and higher rates of pay parking, always a sure way to drive tourists away as I read last month. Other than that, what? Government built and subsidized housing? Low rate/free mortgages? Whatever it is, rest assured it would involve more confiscatory taxation and wealth redistribution. Why am I to subsidize these costs again, for the profits of businesses?
You do understand that there are no guarantees that limiting or even eliminating STAs will result in more housing availability either, since this problem has evolved from many complex inputs to create this massive shortage?
So not just to be just a critic, I’ll volunteer my and many others’ solutions to the problem of lack of accommodation that would eventually trickle down to the Bruce.
We need to start by removing the millions of temporary visitors, the visa holders that are due to expire by Dec. ’25, the phoney asylum seekers, foreign students and all the rest we can, opening up housing access to allow the market to find its affordable equilibrium again.
We also need to demand a government that will not magically print gobs of money through debt, debasing our currency and thus creating inflation that dramatically distorts prices.
In the meantime, maybe our ‘new federal government’ or council will ‘okay’ a tent city on the Chi-Cheemaun parking lot like most cities and towns across the country now have to endure?
Spoiler alert! Meet the ‘new federal government’ same as the ‘old federal government’.
Douglas Sweet
