No — the current housing troubles go back a long way. Back to at least the early 90s. A housing crisis like we’re seeing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been going on for a long, long time. But just like climate change people ignored it when it was a more superficial problem until we got to a point where it is close to intractable.

The early 90s was about when the NIMBYs took over in full force. Construction companies had by this time stopped building starter homes, and virtually nobody was building apartment buildings. Condos were suddenly where all of the vertical construction was going in Canada’s biggest cities.

The big problem here is that big projects like these take time — and the lack of focus in the 90s on these types of housing really started to manifest itself around 10 years later. If you lived in one of Canada’s big cities at the time complaints about how hard it was getting to buy a home weren’t a lot different than today (smaller centres didn’t quite have the same problem, although it slowly started to spill over into them as people moved to the peripheries to avoid the soaring costs in the major centres). Projects that can take 10 years from start to finish in the “missing middle” had been ignored, and you can’t go back in time to correct that.

It isn’t as if we didn’t have immigration before. In fact, the previous record number of immigrants into Canada was in 1921, at 22.3%. And the record highest per capita immigration rate Canada ever saw was in 1913, when Canada (with a population of only 7.6 million people) let in 400 900 newcomers — or nearly 5.3% of our population. It didn’t cause Canada to collapse.

It may feel like the Feds just decided to bring in all these people and dump the problem on the Provinces to deal with, but that’s not how the system works. Here is what Chris Alexander, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration under Prime Minister Steven Harper says about the process:

Under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), as adopted in 2001 and amended and updated regularly by successive governments ever since, the federal government must consult with its provincial counterparts on three issues: the number of permanent residents to be admitted in a given year; their “distribution in Canada taking into account regional economic and demographic requirements”; and what we call settlement issues, namely “the measures to be undertaken to facilitate their integration into Canadian society.”

In concrete terms, this means federal and provincial officials are in touch constantly, with the minister meeting his or her provincial and territorial counterparts regularly, as well as many other groups with an abiding interest in immigration.

So it isn’t as if the Provinces didn’t know and weren’t part of the conversation, and didn’t help come up with the numbers. The Feds numbers are typically the summation of what the Provinces want/need (all except Quebec have their own Provincial Nomination Programmes). But by and large, the Provinces still did fuck all about housing, even after asking for all these new immigrants (including international students).

You shouldn’t blame the immigrants or the Feds for that cockup. That is ENTIRELY on the Provinces.

We need more people, especially young, working professionals who produce high-value products. We have an aging population that is barely having babies at replacement level, and we need younger taxpayers coming into the system to help keep it propped up. We’re currently top-heavy in terms of demographics (thanks to the Boomer generation being the largest generation in at least the last two centuries), so we need those people otherwise the shit is going to hit the fan WAY worse than a housing crisis.

The Provinces knew the Feds were going to bring in more people. They knew we needed more housing. But many of them listened to the NIMBY’s of this world (or thought they could stick it to the Feds and make them look bad) and so did little to nothing to improve the housing situation.

Housing is nearly 100% a Provincial affair in Canada. You should absolutely be angry about the situation — but the bad guys here aren’t the Federal Government, and it isn’t the immigrants themselves. It’s the Provinces (and through their jurisdiction the Municipalities) who have been ham-stringing housing development.

Oddly enough, the situation will eventually work itself out as more of the Boomer generation die off (or downsize). Although I suspect it’s going to be a long, slow ramp-up with a smaller cliff at the end (unless immigration is raised again to match the death rate).

As far as the DST. I find it interesting that a tax we never collected is being framed as a loss we deserve compensation for.

I can explain that. While on the one hand I don’t really have a problem with attempting to level the playing field between international tech companies that don’t pay any corporate taxes in Canada and local Canadian companies who do, the big problem is that ultimately the pocket that those taxes will come from is “all of us” (at least those of us who use American online services). The companies weren’t going to take a loss — they were just going to jack up the prices they charge to Canadians.

And because the payment was intended to be retroactive to 2022, we’ve likely already been paying it. Again, big tech companies weren’t going to take a loss, and they’ve known about the payment date for years now, so they’ve been collecting it from us in the form of higher subscription fees and rates. And now that the DST is cancelled — they get to keep it. Oh, and as we’re now all used to paying the higher rates, they get to keep that too.

So that’s where the loss is. IMO the DST wasn’t all that great an idea to start with (taxing those companies sounds great until you realize they’re just jacking their prices up on us to pay for it), but having told companies to plan for it all these years and then yank it back has just put a ton of Canadian dollars into their coffers they don’t have to give back. And they’ll keep charging us the jacked-up rates we’re now used to and keep that as well.

The main browser to use WebKit these days is Safari. You’ll find that on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I’m guessing that would be why someone downvoted me (some people have strong feelings about Apple, even though WebKit is Open Source and is very highly privacy focussed).

I had thought there were more options out there outside the Apple ecosystem, but it seems many of the browsers I once knew were using WebKit moved at some point to Blink (like Maxthon and Slepnir). The Gnome Epiphany browser for Linux however is built atop WebKit.

There are others, but you’re not likely (or able) to use them on desktop systems. PlayStation’s Orbis OS for the PS4 and PS5 uses WebKit as its underlying browser engine, for example. And there is WPE that is intended for use in embedded system environments (like for digital signage).

I did think there were more options out there (there once was!), but it seems a bunch of them moved to Blink when I wasn’t looking!

You could always use a WebKit-based browser. They’re still out there, and as they aren’t owned by a company that also sells web ads they are significantly more privacy focussed.

There are people who write about Hermione feeling uncomfortable as her physical gender after taking the polyjuice potion to become Harry and wanting to transition back to her perceived gender — and who somehow can’t extend that to trans people in real life.

[:Looks vaguely in the direction of Jo Rowling:]

I truly hope Prime Minister Carney doesn’t drop the mandate.

There are two very important parts of the enabling legislation that too many people just don’t seem to know, and it’s skewing the online discussions everywhere:

1. PHEV’s are still going to be allowed after 2035. So if you are so enamoured with giving your hard earned money to the oil and gas companies you’ll still be able to do so for decades to come;
2. The mandate doesn’t affect used vehicles at all;
3. Companies that miss the legislated targets can instead get credits by building out EVSE (charging) infrastructure. So for all those online pundits who think we should drop the mandate because we don’t have enough charging infrastructure, we get that infrastructure by keeping the mandates, and it gets paid for by the companies selling too many gas powered cars (and not taxpayers).

PM Carney needs to tell the automotive executives who say they can’t sell enough EVs/PHEVs to start building out infrastructure. It may be worthwhile to re-balance some of the timelines and how much the infrastructure credits are worth, but dumping them entirely is bad for Canada as a whole.