hahahha, developers gettin bailed out again. Surprise!
Carney's implementation of his various govt spending sprees has been pretty crap. Eby's prolly just going along with it hoping it'll increase his dropping poll numbers. They're both a disappointment these days.
Supply and demand are connected, sure, that I wouldn't contest. But we've had over-supply for an extended time now, resulting from cratering demand. Even the BC law change you reference, is something that cuts demand for 'income'/'investment' properties, which's why they got dumped onto the market in some areas. The change removed that 'demand' category from the market, stunting prices. But suppliers/developers kept on building at the high-cost of ownership rates.
On the market, there's been like 5000+ homes just sorta sittin there, with about 400 sold per month in Vancouver, with that imbalance growing for years. There's a ton of supply, but there's no demand at the prices they're being listed at. So on the supply/demand mix, especially seeing as its been a 'buyers' market for years now, it's demand that's missing / absent. Even if it's missing/absent, as a result of there being few locals who can afford the prices things are listed at -- that things are 'available', there's plenty of supply.
I mean, in some ways the core issue facing govts is that they need to have homes at a far lower price point, so that there's more local demand for it.... while also maintaining existing housing prices, so that current home owners don't all go bankrupt. They essentially need to freeze the housing prices, to allow local wages to catch up for a decade or so.
Rent/housing prices have generally been coming down ever since the fed changed its approach to immigration and capped things / international politics took a shit on immigration in general. Presales are tanking very publicly. All sales activity is significantly down, with large gluts of supply on the market. Supply has a role to play, sure, but the cut in demand has pretty explicitly changed the direction of the housing market for the past few years now. Claiming its primarily 'supply', is basically denying the data that says otherwise.
Sounds like you need a new job -- at $29/hour you're making about $55k/year, while the average Canadian income is $67k/year. Funnily, in 2022 you'd have been making average. The big spike upwards between 2022 and 2024 (where the $67k is from) was largely government and union workers getting significant bumps -- while in the past, public sector was lower pay in exchange for job security, it now beats private sector gigs in most ways. Under Trudeau/provincial NDP govt, more than 1/5 workers are public sector workers, skewing the salary averages. In Vancouver specifically, the average salary is closer to $72k if I recall right. Edit for context/evidence: bus drivers in Vancouver start at $29/hour, increasing to ~$40/hour (~80k/year) based on seniority, and require no specific educational background. So a 20 year old kid that becomes a bus driver is making as much as you today, and will be earning far more than you in a couple years.
So to your "I'm doing better than most", no, you're not -- you're earning about ~20% less than the average person. Also, most/many people who are buying properties are dual-income family units -- you're behind on that front as well, as a single-income person. Compared to other potential home buyers, you earn far less than half what they can put up for their income numbers ($120k-$150k for average dual income buyers). Also, as a single-income person, you're saying you have a two bedroom place -- so you're paying for more space than a single person theoretically needs.
My guess is that you haven't really tried to aggressively find other employment/work over the past 10-20 years, and you have an employer that gives you piddly increases that don't keep up with cpi. It's just a guess, obviously, since I don't know your specific situation -- but a statement like finding a better job has been impossible for you, is unlikely/improbable, especially without more context.
Kirk was 2025. It's 2026.
Lowan and the greens are an 'interesting' entrant into the mix, but I don't think they're realistically able/ready to lead a government. Lowan was elected with a 60% green party voter turn out, while the previous leadership election had 85% voter turn out -- even amongst green party members, she isn't drawing out the base. She signed up a bunch of new voters as part of her leadership campaign, which is great, but it was done by appealing to a tiny niche and flooding a tiny party with votes. She's young and energetic, but she's also inexperienced, being a purely political sort who's wanting to lead 'working class' people. The green party platform/approach also has inherent contradictions, especially with how the democracy vs reconciliation/'equity' debate has shaped up. The green party's support amongst FN demographics, strongly implies where they'd fall on that one. As a small no-chance of holding power party, they can contain that sort of contradiction -- sorta like how they can make any claim they want about a 'green new deal' economic benefits as a kind of 'hopeful ideal', because they don't need to actually price it out/implement it.
The greens're also traditionally further left than the NDP, meaning their existence / rise would generally erode NDP numbers, making it more plausible that the Conservatives may win -- as they represent a 'unified' right-wing. The broader intention of the BC Liberals when they folded and merged with the cons, was likely to set up the 2 party dynamic, where "eventually" the other guys get in due to people becoming frustrated with the status quo. If you want a third party option, you'd need one of the party's to be squarely centrist. The current NDP isn't that.
Honestly, I think it's likely we see a conservative govt next time. The length of the NDP reign, the decreasing approval of how they're handling major headline items such as the budget and FN issues, and the generally 'negative' view of the current status quo, make it likely people will want to vote for a change next time around.
Eh, I wouldn't say it's bringing tensions to the surface.
FIFA being a rich-person focused event isn't a new concept -- similar to most big international events, it gobbles public funds, and doesn't really benefit regular locals. I only know one local person who is, unenthusiastically, going to one of the FIFA games, in the nose bleeds. Even nosebleed seats were going for like $1500.
The structure of the current games, being split across 16 cities, makes it even more clear who the games are for -- people rich enough to fly from city to city to follow their country. Vancouver's seen, for example, luxury cars get delivered for some oil-country oligarch sorts, so that they can drive in luxury for the week they're in town. So the target audience for FIFA is generally the "Fly my cars to the next venue" crowd. FIFA was never that interested in trying to target the local population in 16 different venues, but rather the 1 demographic that has absurd levels of wealth. If people like Elon are the only ones with Money, then events are all designed to appeal to people like Elon.
But there's no mass protests. No potential violence simmering towards it. No tension / anger simmering just beneath the surface sorta thing. If anything, it's an ultra-wealthy victory-lap on the middle-class -- they're able to convince 3 countries, 16 cities, to spend huge amounts on their private party, while minimizing the public backlash by spreading it out.
Good.
Seeing how overwhelmed the Canadian government was by fraud in the Student Visa program -- where an auditor general report noted that they had over 75k alleged reports of fraud, to which they could only 'investigate' 2k per year -- I imagine they're also totally unable to properly review/vet these sorts of applications.
It seems like a bad idea, honestly, to allow Americans to 'claim' to be Canadians at this juncture, without vetting. I imagine there are a lot of "Americans" who want to claim to be Canadian, move to Alberta, to vote a certain way.
BC NDP have been in power for almost a decade now. The Liberals were terrible, but the NDP aren't much different on some fronts.
Arguably, the developer getting into a significant issue was triggered by the downturn in the market -- if all your financing is tied to housing assets, and all those assets are taking year over year declines for multiple years under NDP policies/immigration issues/international bullshit, then... yeah, your financing collapses, banks call the loans, you go bankrupt. Should be interesting to see what all goes for foreclosures, and how much they sell for in that auction process.
It's plausible that this person's issues are, as you note, just the start of it -- the developer in this case was seemingly a sole operator, but the financing structure where people leverage house/real estate property values as a security, in order to obtain financing, is pretty common -- most banks even at the federal level, require most loans to be 'secured' by real estate assets, even commercially. When those securities drop in value, it can be fairly easy to find yourself on the wrong side of a credit algorithm, with your financing disappearing as a result.
Could be a good time for buyers to just nope out of the 'regular' market, and just wait like vultures for court ordered sales. Underbid significantly on any offer, as it may be the only offer on file, and even with a low bid, if the bank/cu is able to be kept whole on the debt its owed, and/or if they want to cut their losses, there's a chance it'd get accepted I imagine.
History proves otherwise. Housing prices can come down significantly, and developers can go under, without it destroying the whole system.
What you generally need for that to happen, is high unemployment (leading to foreclosures), or developers going bankrupt on unsold, but constructed, condo stock piles (again, leading to foreclosures and forced sales).
You saw the start of it in Vancouver, with housing prices coming down the past few years -- and with developers finding increasingly 'creative' ways to bundle and sell their unsold stockpiles. Bailing out those developers just keeps housing unaffordable.
Like here, think of it this way: when you buy a home, you need 20% down payment these days. That means your property value could go down by as much as ~15% and the bank won't care. If you're in a forced sale position, the bank just needs to recoop its loan value -- so even on a new loan, they'd potentially accept 15% below market value if there were no other bids. All that can happen, with the bank/financial system being kept whole. So you "could" see real estate bagholders get fucked out of up to 15% yoy losses, basically, and the system would be fine.