Years on the internet and somehow i still click on comments sections with the insanely optimistic idea that I’ll learn something new instead of being subjected to the dumbest motherfuckers online typing like their sole purpose in life is to make me want to end mine
“Wow, what an interesting post! I want to see what sort of fascinating discourse is being generated by the idea posited by the original poster” <- Me, operating under levels of delusion yet unexplained by modern science
For the life of me I can’t find a news article about how upwards of 100% of new developments are bought by investors or flippers but that’s another issue. Supply doesn’t meet demand but the majority of supply is bought before people who need it can get it (and is then rented back to them at a further inflated place if they’re lucky).
Then there’s how more and more development is being put on hold because workers literally cannot afford to live in the area.
And that transit largely sucks so people get pushed further and further out to the suburbs—or completely different cities—because they can’t afford to live even near the area they work.
The Canadian government got out of building affordable housing in the 90s so we’re at decade 3 of relying on private companies with a profit motive to build all our housing with little control over what happens and politicians being happy to get kickbacks to keep it high (assuming they don’t have investment properties themself). There’s also zoning issues and NIMBYism which further restricts the supply.
And by the time anything gets built, what’s considered affordable is now hundreds more a month while wages have stagnated since the 80s.
This doesn’t even get into how while minimum wage is no longer enough to afford a 1 bedroom in some markets (nor a bachelor’s nor studio) and disability is less than minimum wage. By a lot. It varies by province, of course, but some haven’t seen an increase in decades and were considered low even back then.
There’s also a societal view of it, by which I mean I’ve seen far more support for building institutions to forcibly lock up homeless folks and addicts than for building affordable housing and/or forcing housing rates to enter the same realm as affordable. To say nothing of how any mention of housing issues gets derailed to become xenophobic, racist BS about how immigration is bad and the immigrants are causing the housing crisis.
That last one is more anecdotal and could be my personal experience, but given the Americanization of our politics and the current Conservative party (to say nothing of the PPC…) I don’t think it’s just me.
tl;dr There’s a multitude of issues that have compounded to make housing in Canada particularly bad. While in terms of landmass, Canada is one of the biggest countries in the world, much of our population is concentrated in a handful of areas while a lack of investment into public transit infrastructure further concentrates people into those areas or punishes people who leave them.
Canada’s far-right “freedom movement” is planning yet another convoy, except this time their goal is not to end vaccine mandates or replace the country’s democratically-elected government – this time, they say, their goal is to “save the children.”
Organizers say they are currently holding secret, in-person meetings to iron out their plans and aren’t sure where they’ll stay when they get to Toronto.
They also admit that what exactly they’re trying to “save the children” from is not straight-forward and could be open to multiple interpretations. […]
McDavid accuses Alberta’s Child Protective Services of running a “child trafficking ring” and alleges the Government of Alberta is “colluding” with insurance companies to produce child pornography. McDavid also claims without evidence that “Trudeau’s paying LGBTQ a million dollars” to promote “the sexualization and the grooming” of “children in the hospitals and at schools and stuff.” […]
I, a hearing person who likes subtitles just as a preference, shouldn’t have to read a subtitle that’s obvious nonsense, go back a couple seconds, and listen again in order to figure out what’s going on. An accessibility feature should not be the most half-assed part of a professionally made production. Scripted media has absolutely no excuse for not having subtitles or having subtitles that aren’t perfectly verbatim. Professional captioning services should be ashamed of the shoddy work that they put out. Captions should be treated as a part of the production, just like filming, editing, audio balancing, etc - and anything that releases with missing or bad captions should be seen as unfinished
