Canada

I forgot how much of an echo chamber Lemmy is.

All the posts are rephrasing (1) why not more housing investments (2) AI is already doing well enough, why give American companies more money.

Zero discussions of the nuances of investing, the timing of the investment, HOW it should have been spent. Instead, it's all "WE SHOULD BE INVESTING IN HOUSING".

This is only a fraction of what they announced this week in housing funds, which is 7.9B in funding and 15B in loan:

This week, we announced a $15 billion top-up to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, a new $6 billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund, a new $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund, and a $400 million top-up to the Housing Accelerator Fund.

The problem with housing isn't solely how much is invested at the federal level, but really the laws (at all 3 levels) that need to be completely rewritten from scratch for the 21st century. What's the point of giving more money to provinces if it ends up subsidizing luxury real estate developers selling to rich foreigners? Does a 20M invested in building Drake's Toronto downtown vacation house end up helping most Canadians?

What we really need is aggressive development of not just housing, but high-quality-low-margin housing, and all the infrastructure (water/electricity/hospital/schools) and public transport that goes with it.

We shouldn't take 20 years to decide if we should buy a new train line - we should build now and think later. In fact, we should be giving contracts to Canadian companies (something that Europe/Japan/Korea/China tend to do), or at least force PSP/CDPQ to gain a majority stake in Alstom (sorry Macron) so they can consistently offer the cheapest price. Hell, go ahead and nationalize CN while at it, take over the freight rails and force cargos to wait. What are they gonna do, take the congested roads?

We shouldn't be talking about millions, but billions, when it comes to housing. If we want 4M houses, which might cost something around 300K per unit and 100K of other infra upgrade costs, that'd take 1.6 trillions. The 20B allocated is literally a bandaid to cover a gunshot wound, and their 2B investment in AI would not change anything at the even the research level (considering 200M over 5 years to maybe 10 schools, that's 40M a year which is less than 4% of the budget of a research university in Canada).

What we need is a 500B fund, half coming from federal/provincial/municipal (the latter who are collecting all those taxes and should be reinvesting a lot more on education and utilities), the other half from industry, spent over 10 years, with a clear, unpoliticizable, efficient, and unstoppable plan (apart from environmental and indigenous issues, nothing should stand in the way).

So really, people here are getting angry that "AI" is getting the crumbs of the pie instead of "housing", not one is thinking about who's eating the rest of the pie (private sectors owned by Americans like Bill Gates who's the major shareholder of CN).