Canada has become a hostage of its own housing bubble
View looking south over Edmonton’s downtown core. Photo by Jeff Wallace/Flickr. At the beginning of the millennium home prices began rising faster than incomes. As time went on, housing be...
James Hardwick
Mark Carney’s new housing agency is built to protect the bubble
Construction site in Vancouver. Photo by Ted McGrath/Flickr. Housing advocacy groups have expressed varying degrees of optimism about the $13 billion the federal government allocated to Build Ca...
The deficit is not an economic problem—it’s a political weapon
Photo courtesy the Bank of Canada/X Mark Carney’s long-anticipated investment-austerity budget has finally been tabled before Parliament and it’s set to raise the deficit to $78 billion. While t...
The Regina Manifesto’s unfinished business: the case for public banking
Federal CCF Caucus, 1942. Left to right, Tommy Douglas, George Castleden, Angus MacInnis, Clarie Gillis, Joe Noseworthy, Sandy Nicholoson, and Percy Wright. Photo courtesy Library and Archives Canada. ...
Canadians are living through a people’s recession
Photo by Ian Muttoo/Flickr This article has been updated and republished to correct and clarify aspects of the original analysis, ensuring a more accurate reflection of the underlying da...
Canada’s debt time bomb
Photo by ginza_line/Flickr This year, Canada’s household debt climbed to $3.07 trillion, topping the G7 for the 15th consecutive year. With debt—including mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards...
What if productivity isn’t the problem?
Financial District, Toronto. Photo by Sean X Liu/Flickr. Lagging productivity has plagued the Canadian economy for generations. Over the last 50 years, Canada has slipped from being the sixth-mo...
Mark Carney is no wartime homebuilder
Workers complete a wartime home in Vancouver in May 1944. Photo by Harry Rowed/NFB. Mark Carney has consistently drawn parallels between his government’s $25 billion housing program and the wart...
What we really mean when we talk about solving the housing crisis
Toronto’s St. James Town, the largest high-rise community in Canada. Photo by Ashton Emanuel/Flickr. In his fourth-century memoir Saint Augustine recalls his youthful struggle to become a ...
The supply and demand myth of housing
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki/Unsplash Housing costs are high because there are not enough homes. We must do everything in our power to add as many residences to the nation’s stockpile…
Federal housing plans keep us trapped in a no-win situation
Photo by Viktoria Chemberlidi/Unsplash Sovereignty and international relations have rightfully dominated the news cycle since the federal election was called earlier this year, but around the di...
Rent control goes a long way to solving the housing crisis
Photo by Daniel Lobo/Flickr Economists agree, rent control doesn’t work. It makes housing less profitable and disincentivizes both the construction of new builds and the maintenance of existing ...
Why landlords need to be regulated
Apartment block on Queen Street East, Toronto. Photo by Can Pac Swire/Flickr. Sonia is a social worker in Alberta. Her sister Elizabeth is a registered nurse. As licensed professionals they…
I read Mark Carney’s book so you don’t have to
Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, speaks during a news conference in London, August 13, 2014. Photo courtesy the Bank of England/Flickr. Sovereignty has become the single mo...
Taking housing policy solutions to their failure point
Photo by Alan Harder/Flickr Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis Carolyn Whitzman UBC Press, 2024 Carolyn Whitzman has all the answers. She has a plan to fix ...
Zoning deregulation won’t fix the housing crisis
View over Toronto toward downtown. Photo by Michael Monastyrskyj. A garden once thrived at the corner of 89th Street and 92nd Avenue in Edmonton. Every spring residents of the city’s…
Decriminalization is only half the story
Rally to end the war on drugs, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Drug Policy Alliance/Flickr. British Columbia began a three-year experiment with drug decriminalization at the beginning of 202...
Safer supply is under attack when we need it most
Cubicles at a supervised injection site in Strasbourg. Photo by Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons. Across the street from a ceramics studio on Dundas Street in London, Ontario there’s...
Involuntary treatment is a policy fad destined to failure
Homeless man resting on a sidewalk. Vancouver, Canada. Photo by Jay Black/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons. If a person is using drugs, should the government force them to accept treatment? The recentl...
Why the National Housing Strategy failed
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland joins officials in Vancouver to announce funding for a 10-storey, 231-unit development slated for the city’s Downtown Eastside. Photo courtesy Chrystia Freeland/X. ...