Andrew Scheer Has a Shockingly Bad Housing Plan That Could Leave Canadians With Riskier Debt
Not you….
The Conservative leader’s platform offers a pretty bad solution to Canada’s housing affordability crisis — more debt.
Tag Archives: housing
Advocates say decommodified housing and free transit needed to fight climate emergency | Ricochet
When the largest demonstration in Canadian history happened,
Montreal’s car traffic came to a standstill. It was predictable —
hundreds of thousands of people were expected to descend on the downtown
that day, conditions that aren’t exactly ripe for the free flow of
cars.
Montreal’s car traffic came to a standstill. It was predictable —
hundreds of thousands of people were expected to descend on the downtown
that day, conditions that aren’t exactly ripe for the free flow of
cars.
It was a sort of poetic justice, considering that the demonstration
on Sept. 27 was in favour of dramatic action on climate change, a
phenomenon caused in large part by the personal-use car. That poetic
justice was only amplified when the City of Montreal announced, in the
leadup to the demonstration, that it would be making all public
transportation free for the day.
“We need to make transportation a human right, and make housing a human right”
It was, above all, a symbolic measure, meant to demonstrate the
city’s commitment to fighting climate change and its support for the
strikers, as well as offset some of the transport-related havoc
engendered by 500,000 people in the street. The metro trains were packed
that day, often filled with sign-carrying youth on their way to or from
the demonstration.
The NHS had lofty aims. It would cut chronic homelessness by 50 per
cent, remove 530,000 families from housing need, renovate and modernize
300,000 homes and build 125,000 new homes with a budget of $55 billion
to be spent over a decade.
But the plan was not universally welcomed.
B.C. economist Marc Lee wrote that “much of the commitment is in the
form of loans not grants, is spread over 10-years and is back-end loaded
(meaning that most of the money is spent at the end of the 10 years).”
The 23-year-old was paying roughly $1,200 a month for his portion of a four-bedroom house in the Roncesvalles area — more than a third of his monthly salary working in the ad industry — when all of a sudden, the ceiling of his room collapsed from water damage.
Two months later, he’s still subleting from a friend while he tries to find a new, affordable place to rent — something he calls a seemingly “hopeless situation.”
“I have all the different alerts set up on my phone from all the different rental sites in Toronto,” he said. “There’s nothing really within a regular person’s budget."