The prime minister is meeting with his youth advisory board this week to hear its most ‘pressing concerns,’ with the aim of informing future policy decisions.
The prime minister is meeting with his youth advisory board this week to hear its most ‘pressing concerns,’ with the aim of informing future policy decisions.
Housing would be nice, but how about electoral reform?
Or, you know, fucking actually do something instead of endless committees, boards, surveys and studies. You know what you need to to:
I’m sick of this. This government didn’t need a study when they bought a pipeline for Alberta, and they didn’t need a study to buy fridges for Galen Weston. They only need studies when they don’t want to do something.
Want a model of what to do? Look at Doug Ford. That corrupt mobster-wannabee just straight up sold government land for pennies on the dollar and netted his daughter’s wedding guests billions. Did he have a committee or a study? Nope, just git’r’done.
Holy shit, you’re the goverment. You can print money. You can even claim all sorts of Keynesian multipliers as to why it’s worth doing. Just fucking do it.
Honestly (and unfortunately) our political leaders do not have the financial literacy or expertise to understand contemporary monetary policy or how our economy works. Frankly, most people do not understand this system because it is made to be intentionally complex and opaque. Nobody has the objective, overall view on all of the interrelated actors/factors that comprise this system. It’s hard for people to accept the fact that our own governments do not fully understand how our economies work, but it’s a fact. This is not just a Trudeau problem.
For example, in a process that is (maybe?) possible and maddeningly complicated (at least in my understanding, which is barely adequate enough to type out here), the Treasury can collaborate with the Bank of Canada to adjust its target reserve funds rate, mitigate the knock-on effects to its Tax and Loan accounts to protect its reserve positions, adopt a non-neutral monetary financing policy (and get the Feds to mitigate the consequences, if they can, to our foreign relations, which would be severe) or use other tricks, increase the monetary financing rate to pre-1982 rates (e.g., around 20-25%), get the BoC to ‘print’ what economists call ‘high-powered money’ and follow Canada’s somewhat unique process of indirectly funding government deficit spending (in this case to to build low-cost housing), all the while trying to balance out the liabilities and fighting like hell against run-away inflation.
Do you understand those steps, the benefits/risks of each, how they relate to one another, and how to implement them? Again, I only barely understand the approach I’ve tried to summarize above, each aspect of which economists of various ideological stripes may/will reject as totally unworkable. I’m certain that I’ve missed critical steps/considerations; I’m just not smart enough to know what I don’t yet know. You can bet Chrystia Freeland, our Minister of Finance, doesn’t understand this process. I bet there isn’t a single member of the Conservative Party of Canada caucus who understands this process. I doubt there’s more than a handful of MPs in Parliament who could even credibly describe the relationship and interrelations between the government and the Bank of Canada, much less how to accomplish the above scenario.
Our government simply does not have the technical expertise required to fix this problem.
Ignorance isnt nearly a credible argument for a government this size and 100% looks, smells n tastes like shit to me.
Then why didn’t doug for have to use some infinite knowledge to stick his dick in our environment? I can only image the size of the environmental models and studies he went through to gsurentee the safety and wellbeing of the Canadian people right?
Or did he want another boat.
I spent a lot of time writing this brief explanation of the complex dynamics surrounding this country’s fiscal and monetary policy, and why I think the Liberal government doesn’t have the expertise to “get 'er done.” That you think I was defending this government, and the general tone of your reply, shows that it was a complete waste of my time trying to share something I’ve learned.
I won’t make that mistake again.
I’d agree with you to a point, but I think the issue is partially technical expertise, but mostly a lack of will. Whether that’s cronyism, cowardice and/or a lack of political capital I’ll defer to insiders.
We’re into year eight of Liberals’ mandate, and they had at nearly five years unencumbered by COVID or interest-rate concerns to address an issue that economists had been red-flagging–for the GTA and GVA–since at least Martin’s government. They chose not to do anything except for some very modest controls because it wasn’t politically palatable.
Putting money back into the CMHC to build public housing at scale was always an option, it just wasn’t done. And again, it’s a matter of will; the government has shown they have the will to intervene when they want to, they just…don’t want to.
Trans-Mountain is a particularly good example of this: no one in the area wanted it, oil prices didn’t support it, the private sector wasn’t going to pony up for it (you’d think they would, if the business case was so solid), it ran directly counter to the government’s climate goals and it wasn’t going to win votes in western Canada anyway, but the government still bought it for five billion dollars. Five. Billion. Dollars.
Without particularly much in the way of committees or commissions; it took four months from announcement to completion.
Think about how much housing we could have built for five billion dollars in 2018, especially if it was done directly, instead of filtered through developers’ bank accounts. And TMX’s cost has ballooned well past that since then. Housing has been an issue for far longer, the solution isn’t nearly as controversial, and yet we have…studies.
Again, I agree with you that the government doesn’t really have the expertise to tackle the issue right now, but I do think they don’t *want * to: it’s all cost, there’s no upside (I mean, except for regular people…) and no way to make rich people richer. And I think that’s really the issue: our policymakers and bureaucrats are no longer psychologically equipped to do anything that doesn’t involve neoliberal, market-based incentivization of the wealthy. The idea of direct intervention at scale is something we can’t even conceive of.
I’m still very bitter about the broken electoral reform promise.