Why can't you afford a home?
A look at Pierre Poilievre's "documentary" and the financialization of housing
Pierre’s “Documentary”:
It’s not a secret that housing is unaffordable, especially in Canada. Long gone are the days of working class couples buying two-bedroom fixer uppers that they may or may not raise their family in. Now anyone who makes less than $100,000 a year are forced to scrounge, scam, squeeze and sneak their way to a roof over their head.
The latest politician to try and win some points in the polls via the housing crisis is Pierre Poilievre. He recently released a “documentary” detailing how the crisis began and what he is going to do about it.
This “documentary” begins with a greyed out 2D angled map of Canada with an image of Trudeau and big bold letters that write out “Canada”. Pierre’s voice cuts in with a concerning tone, “Something new, and, strange is happening in Canada”, all this is taking place while choppy, alerting piano music plays in the background. Hell if I didn’t see who posted it I would think it was some lib’ed up Johnny Harris or Vox video, but at last it was not.
Pierre in his oh so dramatic voice goes on to fairly accurately describe the current effects of the housing crisis on the Canadian population. Despite being at the beginning of the video, this 45 second clip of him listing off problems related to the housing crisis is the money shot for Pierre. A majority of the people coming across this “documentary” are not watching the full thing, so having the problems that Trudeau solely caused (according to Pierre) at the beginning gets the message across that Pierre needs. Trudeau bad and Pierre is not Trudeau, well Pierre Poilievre is not Trudeau.
Pierre goes on to really overplay his hand and states that the housing crisis started exactly eight years ago when Trudeau came into office. Which is pretty funny considered housing costs in all forms have been rapidly rising compared to the previous standard in Canada since the late 1990’s.
The next 8 minutes or so of the video is spent blaming Trudeau for overspending causing inflation, and too much red tape causing a lack of homes being built. Which is what every single politician in any neo-liberal state has been saying since the pandemic. Pierre of course tries to say this problem is unique to Canada whilst showing a chart that shows the US, Netherlands, Portugal, and other developed countries having the same issues.
Pierre follows this all up with his “common sense plan” to fixing the housing crisis which included and is limited to:
Requiring big cities to complete 15% more homebuilding per year as a condition of getting federal infrastructure money.
Give building bonuses to cities that exceed the 15% target, based on housing completions not promises.
Require every federally-funded transit station be permitted for high-density apartments around it and withhold the federal transit grants until apartments are built and occupied.
Sell of 15% of federal buildings and thousand of acres of surplus federal land suitable for housing.
This 15% bullshit will literally do nothing considering we need an estimated 22 million new homes built by 2030 to alleviate the unaffordability crisis. Considering we are not even close to this I don’t think a small change of 15% is going to do much.
As I said before the most important part of this video was Pierre listing of the issues, because they are on Trudeau not him, and by presenting to have a plan he looks like he knows what he is doing. In reality when he gets elected he will continue to blame immigrants for the crisis (even though they are arguably keeping the economy afloat) and also continue to change laws to allow developers to make even more money off the working class.
To truly understand why this documentary is so wrong we have to go back to the peak decade of neo-liberalism and the conservative party’s provincial antics.
Canada and the Neo-Liberal 90’s:
To find the beginnings of Canada’s current housing crisis we have to go back to the 80’s/90’s when Canada began to be taken over by neo-liberalism, or in other words the “free” market.
This move to neo-liberalism resulted in the federal government completely halting the funding of any new social housing projects. On top of this, provinces across Canada began loosening tenant laws, taking away tenants rights and benefiting the landlord. Per usual the province leading the way in the Neo-liberal takeover was Ontario.
As the Harries-Eves government took hold in 1995, they began defunding provincial housing spending by 25% and ultimately shifted the burden of housing onto municipalities. What really makes Ernest Eves a true douchebag (besides his name) is him introducing the 1997 Tenant Protection Act (TPA). Despite the TPA’s name it shifted power further to the owner class. Changes included unlimited rent increase upon turn-over of a unit, a loophole for “above-guideline increases” which allowed for landlords to shift costs of tax increases, security improvements and capital repairs to the tenants.
Essentially this bill lessened regulations for landlords, moving the housing market further towards a neo-liberal “free market”. The thing is “free markets” are only fair if all parties are equal. Unfortunately the landlord and tenant relationship is already inherently unequal. One party only has capital to lose, the other party can lose a roof over their head, in other words one party is risking an extra vacation that year and the other is risking their livelihood.
These new found benefits for landlords along with the creation of Real Estate Investment Trusts or REITs really set the housing market ablaze. REITs are exactly what they sound like, a big old private equity fund that allows investors to invest in real estate without doing any actual leg work. But what it really did was kick-start the complete finalization of housing in Canada. And if you think these laws changes weren’t bad, Ernest Eve shortly after his tenure is government took a board member job at an REIT.
Financialization is the problem
At the core of the housing problem is the fundamental issue that a vast majority of the housing being built is done so with the intention of making lots and lots of money. For these people housing is a money making opportunity, or in their words an “investment”. For us housing is a basic need, a requirement to live, a human right.
This dynamic immediately puts us, the working class, at a severe disadvantage. When trying to find a home we have little room to negotiate, we need a roof over our head. The developer, owner, or whoever is selling the home is in no rush, they have plenty of time to wait and suck out as much profit as possible. In the end we have to accept whatever we can get and they can wait to get whatever they want.
This broken dynamic is made even worse by the many other factors preventing affordable housing from being built. Whether it is developers maximizing profit, investors buying homes to use as short-term rentals, a complete lack of social housing in Canada, no significant affordable housing initiatives, and so on, all of this would not be an issue if housing wasn’t looked at as a way to make money before it is looked at as an actual home for somebody.
Now if one were to actually try and change this they would be attacked by every single person who has any stake in a property at all. Quite frankly I am not too worried if some upper middle class people who own property lose their vacation home or have to cancel their man-cave renovation, because at least more people will have a place to call home.
(Neighborhood zoning is limited to single family housing in the GTA)
In the end
Landlords, corporations, financiers, real estate investment trusts, homeowners, and politicians alike do not care if there is a housing crisis. Actually that is a lie, they do care because they want there to be a housing crisis, hell they made the housing crisis.
Sure a couple lower level landlords and some politician vying for a future consultant gig will tumble to the upper lower class. But in the end they face no risk when they continue to exploit peoples most basic needs.
They will continue raising there rents to and squeezing the maximum amount of profit out of every human interaction they participate in. The bastards already scrape out every last extra percentile while playing fast and loose with the place you call home. Then they will turn around and complain about homeless people, it really all is a joke to them.
Of course none of them will give this cash cow away easily. They must be harshly regulated and ultimately stripped of the right to do this, because housing availability should not rely on somebody who is willing to put a family out on the street for a couple hundred bucks in their pockets.
What is the cost of taking away the ability to gamble on peoples homes? Ultimately the landlords just end up like us, working. Worst case scenario the people currently extorting us every month will be in the same situation we are all in now, scrounging, scamming, squeezing and sneaking into whatever little hole we can call home. So fuck it, let’s do some land reform and kick those bitch ass landlords down to our level, and free Palestine while were at it.
To end:
If you want to learn more about the housing crisis in Canada I recommend some of these resources below, as I did not even get close to fully exploring how fucked we are, cheers!
Financialization of housing in Canada old