this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
39 points (95.3% liked)
Canada
7307 readers
610 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Related Communities
π Meta
πΊοΈ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
ποΈ Cities / Local Communities
- Calgary (AB)
- Edmonton (AB)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Guelph (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
π Sports
Hockey
- Main: c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- MontrΓ©al Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
- Main: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
π» Schools / Universities
- BC | UBC (U of British Columbia)
- BC | SFU (Simon Fraser U)
- BC | VIU (Vancouver Island U)
- BC | TWU (Trinity Western U)
- ON | UofT (U of Toronto)
- ON | UWO (U of Western Ontario)
- ON | UWaterloo (U of Waterloo)
- ON | UofG (U of Guelph)
- ON | OTU (Ontario Tech U)
- QC | McGill (McGill U)
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
π΅ Finance, Shopping, Sales
- Personal Finance Canada
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Buy Canadian
- Quebec Finance
- Churning Canada
π£οΈ Politics
- General:
- Federal Parties (alphabetical):
- By Province (alphabetical):
π Social / Culture
Rules
- Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ah, another easy solution: raise taxes to pay for stuff.
It's amazing how that works for just about everything that's broken in our society: Doctors and nurses quitting in a droves? Raise taxes to pay for them. Education system failing? Raise taxes. Housing unaffordable? Raise taxes.
You'd think we'd just raise taxes to pay for stuff, especially since cutting taxes since 1980 is why we can't afford to pay for stuff. I thought right-wingers were "good with money", but they don't seem to understand that "you need money to pay for stuff".
Maybe if I talked about it like a family budget, the way right-wing politicians do: you make $100K a year, and have $90K in expenses. Do you try to get a raise, or do you decide to take a $30K pay cut so that your boss can buy an extra yatcht and...trickle down..mumble..mumble.
As simple as that sounds, some of these SFH neighborhoods cost as much or more to maintain than their owners bring in annually. You can't just tax someone their entire income. There is no simple solution to this as the problem has been slowly brewing since the initial development of the suburbs 70 years ago. Raising SFH taxes is a good idea but that alone will not dig the suburbs out of the hole they dug.
Oh, I agree, and I should have been clearer: this is why the tax rates should have gone up in general, not just property taxes on SFHs.
Of course, what we actually did--at least in Ontario--was eliminate the fees developers pay. Sounds great, right? It would mean markets would make low-density housing unprofitable, right? Nope, because it didn't come with any incentive to build higher-density housing at all, just a stick to beat municipalities with in hopes that they'd cut other services to make up the budget shortfall required to service these lands.
Again, this is a market failure, and we're continuing to look for market solutions for it.
We stopped building cities the way they were built for centuries in favor of rural style living with city amenities while simultaneously promoting car centric design to service that development. We started building cities for cars and not for people while ignoring the overall costs of that. There is no one single or simple solution to such a complex problem. Removing or reducing housing as a market force would be a step in the right direction. Housing isn't some luxury service someone can stop using if they can't afford it.