Canada's Perpetual Neoliberal Housing Crisis

The West is suffering death by multiple ideologies all racing out of control where no leadership or accountability is in force. Our elites have been shitting in their own sand boxes for too long.

You might say we are suffering a civilizational “housing” crisis. Like war Canada’s housing crisis will be perpetual as it is not a neoliberal priority where war, profiteering, privatization and megalomania are.

PREFACE

As back ground to this blog I must point out that political events and refugee policy have a big influence on this crisis.

In both Canada and the US record numbers of refugees are being admitted for political purposes. Incumbent politicians like to stack their vote by admitting refugees that gratefully vote for the party facilitating their entry. Both the Democrats in the US and the Liberals in Canada are desperate to revitalize their declining voter bases and therefore are letting in massive waves of refugees for partisan gain.

Many US states are protesting this refugee “dumping” as it taxes their limited resources to accommodate them.

In Canada we are letting in one million refugees a year which is the highest per capita of any country. Even so there has been no coordination between the inflow and the housing available to accommodate them —which should be a basic function of government and it has failed to do so.

Even though the government has committed new funds to rectify the situation the crisis won’t be ameliorated any time soon. It wll inevitably fail because of pervasive ideological/neoliberal considerations, and this governments suffers an acute lack of basic competencies. Anything in the public interest goes to the back burner or is scorched out right.

Neoliberalism at work

The Western world is in a state of war and chaos and will remain so until war is repudiated, new legitimate leadership takes over and democracy is restored.

Countries of the West like to see ourselves as sovereign nation states which is no longer true. The aftermath of WW II saw the new war on nation states as ideologies rose up to strip away their sovereignty incrementally.

These ideologies range from capitalism, to imperialism, militarism, fascism, neoliberalism. These and more are interlocking and interdependent ideologies working in the background behind the false facade of so called democratic governments. The facade is also maintained by a propagandist media.

Neoliberalism is the ideology entrenched in all Western governments. It can be defined in many different ways, ranging from the free market economy, to predatory corporate capitalism. It can also be defined as socialism for the very rich and raw capitalism for everybody else.

The modus operandi of neoliberalism is to socialize debt and risk and privatize wealth, in other words, we have the neoliberal parasitic pickpockets preying on our societies. While whole societies suffer austerity elites indulge themselves in unlimited wealth, privilege and endless wars. The gap between rich and poor only widens.

Neoliberalism is all about the very rich having free lunches and sticking us with the bill every time.

We wonder why the world has an abundance of billionaires: the answer is neoliberalism— the greatest get rich quick scheme ever. It can also be seen as a form of economic fascism.

The greatest irony of neoliberalism is they vilified socialism, driving a stake through its heart and proceeded to create their own socialist enclave where they parasitically pick the public purse. Where the cost of socialism for the populace was modest in comparison, socialism for the 1% is endless war and fiscal wreck and ruin.

The market crash of 2008 was supposed to have killed off neoliberalism, but this is just propaganda. It thrives under the cover of wars, fake democracies, the duplicity of rancorous politicians and the complicity of corporate owned media. Here in Canada the media are receiving government subsidies in our corporate welfare state.

  We must never take government policy at face value. We must know the ideology that underpins it, asking who are the actual beneficiaries.    

The Crisis

Canada’s neoliberal housing crisis is actually forty years running and far from over.

In the 1980’s thousands of Canadians lost their homes due to inflated mortgage rates . This was soon followed by the arrival of the Mulroney government in 1984 as our first neoliberal government and Canada’s housing starts dropped rapidly. When Liberal PM Chretien took power in 1993 housing flat-lined under him and his successor Conservative Stephen Harper.

All Canadian prime ministers since Mulroney have been de facto neoliberals.

It was in the 1980’s the Mulroney Conservatives became our first neoliberal government which resulted in a precipitous drop in housing starts from which we have never recovered. Under successive governments housing starts have flat lined from 1994-2018 which is a fundamental cause of the crisis.

In the chart below we see that even though immigration numbers have been rising steadily there has been no commensurate rise in available housing as renters are impoverished with high rents, home buyers are stuck with very high prices and crushing interest rates, reminiscent of the 1980’s.

The misappropriation of public wealth and well being

Here are four examples of how neoliberalism pilfers the public purse in terms of wealth and our well being.

• During the recent COVID pandemic the quality of care in private nursing homes came under scrutiny as there were unusually high death rates (even allowing for the fact that seniors are most vulnerable to it). Was senior care compromised for “higher profits” which is the mantra neoliberalism? Prior to the arrival of neoliberalism most all nursing home were largely government run with no profit motive. Under neoliberalism, everything is privatized where there is a profit to be made, in an environment of deregulation and zero accountability.

• “Debt traps” are a well known treachery of neoliberalism. Poor countries are loaned vast sums of money they have no hope of paying back. The loan is foreclosed , national assets are sold off to investors, oligarchs get richer and the country’s standard of living drops out of sight. This can easily be seen as economic imperialism- if you own a country’s economy you control its politics.

• The infamous Site C power dam under construction in northern British Columbia was born out greed not need. It is a multi-billion dollar white elephant proceeding to completion over budget and ignoring serious environmental concerns. Even though there is strong authoritative and statistical evidence it is not needed, it went ahead as a sweetheart deal providing contractors with lush profits.

• Canada has just purchased 88 F 35 jet fighters at a cost of 78 billion dollars (inc. a life time maintenance contract with the supplier). The first of these will not be delivered until 2026 and the last in 2032. At over a 100 million dollars a copy they are a “trophy jet” that will spend most of its time hangered and most likely never used. As we are seeing in living color these 100 million dollar babies can be shot out of the sky with missiles costing a few hundred thousand dollars. This jet is all about profits, politics as government collusion.

Trillions of dollars are being misappropriated by woebegone governments that cannot even manage affordable housing for their populations or intelligently manage immigration flows.

Needless to say high housing costs rob families of any discretionary income they may have and limit younger generations ability to leave home, enter the housing market and pursue higher education, that should be tuition free.

Our leaders threaten war against China out of spite because it refused to submit to its conversion to a neoliberal slave state, supplying cheap labor for greedy corporations, and allowing Western investors to run wild just as they have hijacked what is left of Ukraine.

They are posers playing their stupid game of brinkmanship knowing in their crippled minds war against China is not possible when they even can’t win one in Ukraine.

After a hundred years of perpetual war they have not learned high school history— to go to war against another country on its home turf half way around the world is a fools errand. Yet they and they do it over and over. The twenty year occupation of Afghanistan cost the US taxpayer 2.3 trillion dollars.

The West is suffering death by multiple ideologies all racing out of control where no leadership or accountability is in force. Our elites have been shitting in their own sand boxes for too long.

You might say we are suffering a civilizational “housing” crisis. Like war, Canada’s housing crisis will be perpetual as it is not a neoliberal priority where war, profiteering, privatization and megalomania are.

Note to readers: When following the Canadian media you will notice any reference to neoliberalism is scarce. The powers that prevail cannot let it become part of an open democratic dialogue. Once the public connects the dots they will understand the hideous betrayal of our quisling elites. Media and government collude to insure the public neoliberalism never gets the full scrutiny it should. Like so many other issues it is kept on the margins.

Neoliberalism is the ideology nobody wants to talk about and it is killing us. We are dancing in the ruins.

Governments of the West have been reduced to historian Tony Judt’s “useful idiots”.

For further reading, two articles on Canada’s neoliberal housing crisis.

• The Liberal government’s

  unshakable support for private

  housing markets

• Are we addicted to debt