In this economic climate, people cannot work for less than it costs to live. Nurses are voting with their feet and taking work that makes economic sense. Ergo, if they cannot keep rural ER’s staffed, then the pay is just too low.
The employment landscape is a free market as well. If you cannot pay the wages it demands, you cannot complain about the lack of applicants.
The homeless “problem” is a direct outgrowth of the housing crisis.
The housing crisis is a direct outgrowth of housing “investors” jacking up prices and rents for 25+ consecutive years without a clear market crash.
The housing crisis can only be resolved with a return to affordability.
A return to affordability would see a housing crash of about 68% Canada-wide, with some markets (Vancouver, Kelowna, etc.) seeing valuation drops of 85% or more.
Remember: the one-third rule states that median housing payments (rent or mortgage) should not be more than one-third of median monthly income, but it also states that median home values should not be more than 3× median annual income.
The second half of that rule indicates that current home values in Kelowna alone - where median home values are just shy of $1M but median incomes as of the 2021 Statistics Canada poll are $35K - means that housing here is 28× that of annual income, or 9× more expensive than it should be.
So for a city like Kelowna to return to a sane and healthy housing market, values would have to crash by a MINIMUM of 89%.
This is what parasitical “investors” - mostly Greatest Generation and Boomers, but as of late no small number of GenX’ers - have done to the housing market.
This is why we are seeing a homeless crisis.
I mean it’s the whole tolerant paradox right.
When you view things in the context of a social agreement, there is no longer any paradox.
If these people have broken the social agreement to be tolerant, they have then intentionally and explicitly removed themselves from that agreement, thereby opening themselves up to intolerance thanks to their intentional and explicit rejection of said tolerance.
It’s much the same way as outlawing worked in the old days - in the absence of a police force, you willingly agreed to follow laws that had been laid down. If you openly broke those laws in clear defiance of them, you could be removed from their protections. Ergo, you became “outside the law”, allowing anyone to harm or even kill you without legal censure.
Because if you clearly don’t want to be a part of an agreement, why should you have any right to benefit from it’s protections?
Rick Mercer was Canadian Gold.
Nationalize healthcare, take it out of the control of the provinces, have its funding hard-set to population metrics and then insulate it completely from political meddling. Ensure that all upper-level execs in this crown corp have never nor will never be involved with a related free-market corp, in order to prevent corruption and service degradation in favour of Parasite-Class profit margins.
Set up turnkey operations for GPs such that new doctors are incentivized to service communities at the grassroots level without driving themselves into poverty. Set up national unions for all healthcare workers that ensure wages remain appropriate for each region’s CoL. Set up a watchdog that ensures hospitals and other institutions are being run decently well in relation to the funding they receive, with the ability to seize underperformers (as in, shareholders lose everything) in order to bring them back up to minimum thresholds of service.
Finally, make the government the only possible payer for any healthcare service for anything, from vision and dental to physio and anything science-based (too bad chiropracty, we don’t need your snake oil). As in, make it illegal for anyone to be charged anything out of pocket, including drugs. Use economies of scale to minimize costs to the taxpayer.
That’s how you resolve the current conditions: you utterly eviscerate the profit motive when dealing with healthcare.
Exactly. Nationalized industries care nothing about profit margins, only with serving the public good to the maximum of their abilities.
It’s why nationalized institutions - such as Canada Post and the CBC - could actually break even if they were just free of conservative defunding and leg-breaking. But they continue to exist because they serve a public need that would otherwise be far too expensive for the average Canadian.
NDP
They have always been in the corner of the average Canadian, which is why they are so poorly funded - millionaires and billionaires don’t control them, and so won’t donate to them.
The Liberals, in contrast, are strongly influenced by them, which is why they are small-c conservative and only moderately to the right. The CPC and their racist little brother the PPC are all about suckling at the teat of millionaires and billionaires, which is why all their policies pay only vapour-thin lip service to the average Canadian, and so much of their rhetoric is spin and alternative facts to distract their non-wealthy electorate away from the fact that they are voting very much against their own best interests.
That might come to a head within the next decade.
I have already heard rumours of a list (American, I believe, but maybe International) being compiled through debates on who could be taken out to produce the greatest narrowing of the wealth gap. As in, maximum impact with minimum effort.
Because when you hoard so much wealth that you impoverish millions, the question needs to be asked if you still meet the minimum requirements of being human, or if you are truly a parasite fit only to be eliminated. I strongly suspect that the inherent sociopathy of billionaires such as our own Galen Weston, and their abysmal disregard of basic humanity in the pursuit of unbridled greed, makes many to most of them fail to meet this very important threshold.
I may not be among those in the crowd when the torches and pitchforks come out, but imma gonna be holding the door open for them and looking the other way.
Some of the things that Costco sells is noticeably more expensive than Loblaw’s or elsewhere, but I still shop there because of how well they treat and pay their employees.
I avoid Wal-Mart at all costs.
Boomers lived through the greatest economic period in modern history, where a simple salesman - such as a shoe or VCR salesman - could make enough to own a home, two cars, have a SAH spouse and several children, all while taking decent vacations every year and having plenty of money left over to save for retirement.
Millennials have none of this. In my corner of this rock (Kelowna, BC) median home values have gone from 2.8× average annual income (1978) to 19.4× average annual income. Compare average home values to average annual income, and the 2024 spread increases to 22×.
There is absolutely no way a millennial can achieve the same life benchmarks at the same ages that boomers did without being a card-carrying member of the 1%, and supported by massive amounts of intergenerational wealth to enable these benchmarks.
No wonder so many have given up on home ownership of any kind, as well as (for many of them) even having children.
Prioritizing boomers over the current generations will be the worst possible decision for our future.
they just have a really hard time absorbing information in traditional ways taught at schools
Poke virtually any subject that tends to make the rounds in Western society, and I will be able to provide at least a layman’s understanding of it, if not deeper.
But aside from a really small amount of math, physics, chemistry and history, almost none of that came from formal education. I’m like a Hoover when it comes to random factoids… but only on my own terms. Try to intentionally cram data into me, and it’ll impotently leak out all over the floor.
Years later, I was finally able to accurately describe jobs I didn’t want to do as a child - such as homework - as grey lumps of goo piled up as a supremely undesirable blob on my desk, while everything else was a technicolour kaleidoscope of distractions.
At the time, however, I just didn’t have any way to pass on this impression to others, so they could understand.
What are we going to do if we have 30 per cent less food production?
Which is nothing more than a red herring, as pretty much 100% of the areas being earmarked for conservation Is not arable, and wouldn’t be under agriculture anyhow.
The man is a regressive, pandering to his moronic electorate.
I’m sure Palestinians in Gaza would protest Hamas if they weren’t busy trying to feed their families.
Looks over the last few DECADES of Gaza history
Mmmm… yes. I’m sure they would. /s
Israel is waging a genocidal war.
So is Hamas.
It’s just that before October 7th, Israel was only waging an apartheid war against a genocidal Hamas. Since then, Israel has done nothing more than step up to the same plate that Hamas was standing on all along, and since pretty much it’s inception.
It’s an ESH situation, with civilians caught in the middle.
Unfortunately, I have not seen any objections by Palestinians against Hamas, or by Israeli citizens against their government, which makes both civilian groups passively complicit in the two-way genocide in much the same way that German citizens in the 1930s were also complicit with Nazi atrocities.
They’re both responsible.
They’re both at fault for voting in such monstrous “leadership” willing to commit the most barbarous acts in order to destroy the opposing side at all costs.
Wow, that is one of the most bleedingly ignorant things I have read in a damn long time.
Wages are not a zero-sum issue. Raise the wages of GPs, and that gap narrows. With a narrower gap, fewer students will try to hop it, as the benefits are less. Or in other words, it becomes easier and more profitable to be a GP.
There is no reason why specialist wages need to be eviscerated. You can have high wages for both specialists and GPs. And in the end, we need plenty of people going into both.
Why not simply pay GPs a decent wage, thereby attracting more people into the industry?
Sounds like an ideal member of the Conservative electorate.
As long as we don’t buy used, because large-scale milspec equipment is sold as used for a reason. Good hardware is used until it is scrapped or boneyarded as a source of parts. Consistent lemons are sold off before their operational lifespans end, and are not boneyarded for parts.