In a perfect world we would be divesting from car dependency as quickly as possible. Every policy move we make should be made with the intent that less people need to own a car. But no lawmakers actually agree with that position. They are content for us to pave the world and watch it boil.

In fact one of the main points of the article is that Montreal has been building faster than population growth and housing is still drastically going up in price.

That’s because Montreal doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s maybe the only city in Canada with a remotely good approach to urbanism, and as a result one of the most affordable cities to buy housing in Canada. So there is added demand for Montreal real estate from the rest of the country, which contributes to rising prices.

Building more density in well-designed, walkable neighbourhoods is absolutely part of the answer.

We need to make it so that there are about as many homes as people who need homes. Right now the numbers are wildly out of wack. The reason prices won’t go down is because the government is resistant to opening the floodgates of density (as you said, because too many of their constituents are homeowners).

If we just abolished single family zoning and said anyone can build dense housing anywhere that is residentially zoned, we’d have affordable housing within a few years. Zoning is an artificial bottleneck on the supply of housing. Imagine if every shitty carbrained suburb suddenly could house 2x or 3x as many people! But then of course we would need to make them a bit less carbrained by introducing more walkability, better public transit, and more mixed use. That can all be done gradually by relaxing zoning restrictions.

That’s still good though. If there are people willing to move into those luxury places, they are probably freeing up some other capacity, and so on. More supply is never bad. As long as they are building in density, it will help with housing affordability.

I mean, my first thought was basically verbatim what the comment you’re responding to said. But I was thinking about whether the collision would have killed the passengers of the car, not just “is the car okay?”

IIRC, She has said that she thinks 9/11 was an inside job, and that wifi and cell towers can cause cancer.

Yeah anyone who even can afford a secondary residence absolutely deserves any and all tax hikes coming their way.

I’m really not a fan of May, but I agree with you. She’s a bit of a conspiracy theorist nutter. So if she of all people thinks there’s nothing substantial in there, there probably isn’t.

Yeah but none of that is realistically possible. The cost of enforcing those rules and ensuring that companies aren’t finding loopholes to skirt the law is untenable. A carbon tax is simple, easy to track, and if companies try to get around it, then it’s tax evasion (and not the kind that can be mitigated by moving to Panama or Ireland), which the government usually takes pretty seriously.

No, it’s not. Any economist will tell you that the best way of making companies care about the environment is to make them have to pay for every bit of pollution they generate. It’s called taxing an externality, and it’s basically the best solution we have to the tragedy of the commons.

moving us backwards in climate change action. Thing are already worse in terms of weather

The entire rest of the world is destroying the environment too. Carbon tax is a good step we can take in the right direction, but don’t expect to see any change to the climate disasters affecting us just because our country enacts a good climate policy.

Yeah a journalist. I’m asking if anyone who matters is suggesting it.

Source? I’m no fan of PP, but I haven’t heard that he would actually support this.

Yeah the article mentions that. And it mentions some conservative newspapers here are supporting the UK tories. But is anybody seriously talking about it for here?

Nobody is seriously talking about mandatory service in Canada are they? The draft and conscription have been political suicide in Canada for basically the country’s entire history as an independent nation. To my knowledge, the only countries where national service has any political traction are countries with a threatening neighbour right on their doorstep like Korea and Israel

I live in Ottawa, specifically in the Centretown area near Little Italy

Yeah I’m well aware. Loblaws and the other big box places are the beneficiaries of the downfall of our cities and productive urban places (a downfall which was engineered by big oil). I’m just surprised that people who are desperate to boycott places they disagree with are only able to go to other evil corpos.

Do y’all not have small business options? I buy 90% of my groceries from the corner shop across the street from my apartment building. They sell milk, bread, noodles, coffee, eggs, sauces, and a handful of different kinds of produce. I only need to shop at Loblaws once every few months to pick up the stuff I can’t get across the street. I know the owner, he’s a cool dude. He resists raising prices until the wholesalers raise their prices on him and he has no choice but to do it.

In this economy?

Same here. They’ve been great. And they never shaft me with hidden fees. I pay the exact same thing every month while my dad needs to call Rogers a couple times a year, threaten to switch to Bell, and spend literally an entire day on the phone just to keep his prices from going up.