but we can go somewhere else This is where you logic breaks down.

A) People tend to like to stay in the city they’re already in, and B) With the current system we have right now nobody who doesn’t already have a home can afford to do that

If the government owns the land, and you vote in some fucking nazis, then the people have decided that’s what they wanted. That’s how democracy works. It’s not some sort of Utopian system of government, it’s a popularity contest.

No small private group of people can “own” a piece of land and demand those on it to pay for it.

Yes they can, that’s literally what a landlord is. If the only options are Landlord A, Landlord B, or Landlord C… you have no options. At least with the government you can vote.

BC.

Rent controls don’t work, I agree. As do most economists.

The rents in Calgary haven’t dropped because of new rental supply though, you have that idea wrong, the rents have dropped because the economy is down. Rents are down in Vancouver too by almost 7%. The supply has barely changed in either location.

Everyone keeps talking about supply solving the issue, but the market keeps actually changing because of demand, it’s impossible to build enough supply fast enough to impact the markets significantly, only by changing the demand can you have a significant impact.

Which is where the government owning the property comes in, the demand for housing isn’t actually coming from people needing places to live. It’s from investors who are buying up properties because they know that people HAVE to live somewhere. If the government owned the land, that speculation goes away almost entirely because it’s no longer profitable. The land values all drop off a cliff, and housing becomes affordable again.

If there’s one thing we don’t lack in Canada, it’s space. The problem is the allocation of it, when Bob and Jane own 3/4 of an acre downtown, and live in their 5 bedroom place by themselves now that the kids all left. That’s the problem. Fuck them, force them to either pay to have that privledge or give up the property so it can be redeveloped to fit 8 families. If they want 3/4 of an acre they can live outside the city.

I’ve said this like a dozen times in the comments. A dictatorship can ALREADY take away your land if they wanted to. The Canadian government expropriates land from private citizens all the time.

Nope. Its not the economy. Its supply. There are charts that track available units for each type (apartment, main floor, basement suite, whole house, etc) on the landlord menu of Rentfaster.com. I can look at almost every category and see that the supply is up from what it was a year ago.

eg. Last year on Sept 1 there were **1066 **two bedroom apartments available This year on Sept 1 there were **1468 **two bed room apartments available

Therefore, average rent for those apartments last year was 2335. This year its **2251 **and dropping. Currently the average has now dropped to **2137 **as of last week. Thats down 8.4%

The rental market is pretty simple. When there’s more supply prices drop. When there’s more demand, prices go up.

Calgary and Edmonton are the two main centers but not everyone wants to pay the price for living in a big city. There are lots of jobs in smaller centers.

But here’s the thing. You can move to Calgary but you’re going to need to buy a house for at least 600,000. OR you can move to a smaller center and get a house for one tenth of that price.

Now look at the difference in mortgage payments at 5.25%. The Calgary house is going to be 3400. The small town mortgage is going to be $340.

Which means in the small town, you can buy a house paying your mortgage working a minimum wage job and still have money to spare, but in Calgary you better be making over 100k if you hope to qualify for that 600k house.

Sometimes small town living just makes far more financial sense. Especially when youre in driving distance to a bigger city.

Oh you know that people will vote for Nazi’s on a long enough timescale. The fact that we have fascists becoming governments around the world right now, and the fact that there’s some far right multinational organization working on all sorts of disinformation campaigns around the world, is already showing us the limits of democracy: if there’s a large enough group of people with that will (however small they are relative to the whole population), they will exercise everything they can to get into power; start small, underfund education and public welfare, create the environment for public anger, and then feed on that anger to make themselves government.

Anytime anyone tells me that “the people have decided”, I wince, cause people can be gullible, simply overwhelmed by (dis)information or just keeping themselves afloat, be pressured into following suit, etc. Democracy relies on the fact that people can be rational at the voting ballot, but that basis is being undermined.

And sorry, but you’ve misread that paragraph and sentence that you quoted, mostly cause of my wording (now that I look at that), and I apologize for that. I said that in the context of an anarchic society, not our current one.

You’re right about disinformation and stupid voters.

However, you are not proving that’s worse than the current capitalists which are literally bleeding everyone dry right now.

I just looked for property in Alberta under 100k, and could only find a handful of places under 100k that were not inside mobile home parks (where you don’t own the land) most of them are court ordered sales and are also mobile homes(on private lots) that essentially need to be replaced entirely.

The only reasonable one I found in the entire province which wasn’t in terrible shape, had it’s own land, and was drivable to what I consider a city was in Elnora, which is about an hour outside red deer. Unfortunately it’s unlikely you could get even a minimum wage job there, because the population is only 288 people and they have only 18 total businesses in the town, and that includes some public places like the post office and library.

The thing to remember about this though, is that it can’t support a larger population choosing this option. A few people could move there, but the moment you get more than a few moving in the prices go way up since there isn’t just a million houses sitting empty in these small towns. There’s maybe hundreds, total in the province.

You clearly don’t understand how demand works. If demand drops, it looks like there’s more supply.

If you look at the change in population (it increased) and total units in the province(it increased, but not as much) total units per capita has gone down (a decrease in supply)

I see a lot of comments are proposing for the nationalization of whole industries, which is somewhat concerning. There needs to be some balance, not to fatten the checks of those billionaires, and not to make the government too powerful.

For example, instead of (re-)nationalizing CN, nationalize the tracks themselves. The government can lay down tracks for places that need to be reached, and companies can then run their trains on them. It’s no different from how roads are public really. Companies can then focus on serving section of the tracks for areas that they understand best. Of course, there will be cases where there’s a need to consider if the investment from the government is worth it, cause what if they laid the tracks but no one’s willing to take advantage of that? Well, they can let companies bid, and there’s no bidder, they can choose to not take on the project. Of course, there’s always the option for the government to have its own train company to serve certain areas.

For telcos, instead of nationalizing the entire vertical, nationalize cell towers and cable paths. Allow companies to build their own towers if they so desire, but the main draw is that different providers can rely on shared infrastructure, and none of this Robelus bullshit that we have right now. Cable paths is probably odd, but these sorts of technology get changed quite often. The government can still own some cables, allowing smaller players to take advantage of those, but it would level out the playing field by a lot.

For the Internet and whole businesses within it, having our own cloud infrastructure, or AWS alternative, would be best. People can then run whatever on those. There is, of course, a concern of the government not respecting people’s privacies, and so it needs to be run somewhat independent of the government, allowing the government to set directions but not what exactly to do; sort of Crown-corp-y if you will.

In all my examples, the idea is simply this: nationalize the stuff that serve as the basis for a particular service. Think roads instead of cars.

Oh you won’t be bleed dry by a malicious government. You’d just have literally nowhere legal for you to go. It’d make what ICE is doing down south look tame; there’d be a lot more people who believe or is made to believe that you should gtfo.

And capitalists aren’t just bleeding us dry through land and land alone. Just look at, and I’m waving my hand violently, everything else.

Your proposition is to trade one extreme for another, and all I’m telling you is that it doesn’t work. Why are we trying to jump from one pit into another?

I thin as soon as you let private companies into critical infrastructures, you run te risk of having abuses. Freight trains are critical for economic sovereingty. Even by having public rails but private train companies, you still run the risk of having a foreign company overcharging or simply stopping service during a trade, economic, or actual war. Same with transportation. It’s such an essential service to have in a geographically large country like Canada, it shouldn’t be left solely to private companies or risk geeting gouged.

And that’s just for rail, trains, transport, etc.

For internet, make the infrastructure public and let companies use it to sell services. That’s fine. But still offer a public alternative just in case.

As for cloud services, the government should definitely have its own cloud system, but it shouldn’t be for public use. I would never store my personal files and information on a government cloud. That would definitely be a huge privacy risk.

If you’re running an infrastructure that many need, you could just say no to abusers, just like a healthy business would do.

And I know the times we’re in, but it’s just so odd to assume that businesses that serve the country are all owned and controlled by foreign companies. Why can’t a local player be in that place?

Public alternatives are fine, but they’ve generally stagnated in terms of improving their services and offerings, because, and I absolutely hate that I agree with the capitalists here even though I’m looking at it differently, at some point in their lifetime, the stability that a government-funded company offers will attract people who seek that stability without understanding how to achieve long term stability (which is to constantly improvement, instead of preserving the status quo). Income for these companies eventually drop, and we end up having to keep them afloat with tax money. That’s not necessarily a bad thing cause not all public services need to be profitable, but it’s still desirable to have them fund most of their activities on their own.

For cloud, it’s why mentioned that the government should be as removed as possible from its operations. These sorts of services can easily contain a lot of sensitive information, and the government should be kept at a healthy gap away from that data. Government-funded, yes, but let there also be a more direct mechanism from more grassroots and local organizations as well.

Look at the grocery business. They’re mostly local players. Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, etc. They’re all gouging the fuck out of Canadians.

And as for public companies, good example is Air Canada. When it was a public crown company it was one of the best airlines there was until it was privatized. Now they’re cutting everywhere and overcharging on every detail, leading to pricy services and bad quality of service.

Another example is the hydro electric companies in Québec. Before the private companies were nationalized, they would avoid investing in their infrastructure, avoid expanding their network and avoid maintenance as much as possible leading to frequent black outs. As soon as it was nationalized it became the pride of Québec because they not only expanded all over the province, they upgraded their infrastructure and ensured everyone would have world class services at a low cost.

Bixi, the Rent-a-bike service was going bankrupt until the city of Montreal acquired it and now they’re expanding all over the globe.

So I don’t know where you got this idea that public companies or services at stagnant.

I get it. The grocery businesses and telco business that we know of exist and are local players. That has more to say about our policies for businesses, that it allows for oligopolies to fester, but it’s a weak reason to go to the extent of full nationalization imo. IMO government should not allow a singular group of people to fully control almost every facet of an industry. But governments should not have the power to stamp out its own competitors, lest it becomes the very thing we don’t like seeing now in these private companies.

And while those are examples, there are also some that’s for the other side. While not a national company, the TTC is one such example at the city + provincial level: service degradation has continued on, disruptions have become increasingly frequent, the Eglinton Crosstown is still under construction after more than 10 years (though the private sector is also to blame on this end), Line 6 is only finally here after 10+ years as well, and even with these two lines, Toronto is nowhere near the level of accessibility you’d expect of a city it’s size outside of downtown core, and it literally hasn’t changed much for the last 100 years. While the TTC isn’t to be fully blamed for these woes (because of car-centric developments that have taken over the national psyche), if you listen to transit advocates talk about the TTC, you’ll hear a lot of frustrating episodes, e.g. having outdated, error-prone rail infrastructure and repeatedly refusing to upgrade them.

And then there’s Canada Post with all its episodes, sagas even, in recent years. They’ve repeatedly refused to both improve services and pay better wages, even as the CUPW continually suggested to the management to better use their abilities.

I think this should tell us that you can’t rely on either nationalization or privatization alone. Either way has a possibility of slipping into stagnation once they’ve reached some kind of steady state.

I don’t see how you think the current system is better. Plenty of people already have “nowhere legal” to go.

When someone who can’t afford a mortgage or rental right now, they really only have two options. Homeless shelters, if there is space that will take them, and then specific public parks at night (as allowed by the Supreme court of Canada when enough shelter space is not available). They can and are regularly locked up temporarily for trespassing on private property.

You act like the government would just start instantly kicking out everyone if they owned the land. Why would they do that? What’s the motive? How do the politicians benefit from such an action? I know and can explain exactly how capitalists benefit from owning the land.

The worst situation you’re going to see is specific people being displaced more easily for development, but that’s literally the point of this. Oh no, grandma and grandpa can’t keep living in a half acre lot 3 minutes from the downtown core anymore, they have to move into a condo or move further out to have a giant house. That’s not a problem, that’s a solution.

You bring up a boogeyman like ICE in the US, but how would that even apply to government ownership of land in Canada? We don’t have a large illegal immigrant population, and even the racial tensions we do have are mild as toast compared to what has existed in the US for a long time. Even if we took the current far-right conservatives, I don’t see any indication that this policy would be used to do… anything.

Explain to me against who, and how, a nazi government would use the government ownership of land in Canada against Canadians, that they couldn’t already do today if they were voted in.

A lot of the problems you are mentioning is because of government cuts. In Montréal, the STM is also facing budget problems leading to strikes and projects taking longer and becoming more costly over time. But that’s because the provincial gouvernent are a bunch of corrupt idiots with no ethics who are giving away are tax dollars to their business friends.

And as for Canada Post, the main ceo guy at Canada Post is also on the board of Purolator, a private courier company. He’s been accused of conflict of interest and probably trying to sabotage Canada Post for his own corporate profits.

So… yeah.

This is going absolutely nowhere. I don’t know why you’re thinking that I think the current system is better. I’ve said that I don’t believe so. What I’m also saying is that I don’t believe that governments can make sure that we won’t be on the streets either.

And you’re throwing away my arguments and conveniently forgetting about them and essentially putting me up as some kind of convenient strawman for whatever you’re trying to say. Why wouldn’t a government kick a bunch of people out so that they can build that resort for people that they know would vote for them? A “large illegal immigrant population” is simply a convenient target down south for the fascists Republicunts to channel national anger at so that the people would vote for them. While Canada isn’t as polarized as the States is, and racial tensions aren’t as high, it does exist and isn’t something to dismiss, and given the right events, it could fan the flames. And it doesn’t have to be racial. It can be on nationalistic lines, and I can guarantee you that that sentiment is definitely on the rise.

But isn’t that the point? If governments would cut public services to feed their own beast now, why wouldn’t they do that if we nationalize these services, so that they can then sell to people something better?

That said, I actually did not know that the CEO at CP is also on the Purolator board. Why the hell was that even allowed in the first place?

No those supply numbers are hard numbers. There were 402 MORE two bedroom apartments this year than last year, a 38% increase over last year. Calgary’s population has gone up but only about 5%.

Thats an EXCESS SUPPLY of apartments because the number keeps rising. If people were snapping them up as fast as they were coming available that number would be steady or dropping and rents would be rising. They’re NOT rising because there is excess supply and renters can shop around and negotiate on rent prices. which is why rents are 8 to 10% LESS than last year at this time even though there were still 100,000 people moving to Calgary.

Many out of province investors have flooded into Calgary in the last couple of years, which means many more rentals on the market as they snap up any housing they can find and turn them into rentals.

So your last statement is incorrect. Population has increased but rental supply has increased even more than the demand.

I have been a landlord in Calgary for over 40 years now and we’ve been through several excess demand and excess supply cycles because of our variable economy. We are obviously in an excess supply cycle.