Carney said he’s propose “some big changes and some bold new ideas” in the coming weeks to address those economic issues. He vowed the Liberals “are going to win the (next) general election” despite the party’s months-long polling slump under Trudeau.
Bold. Let’s see what these new ideas will be. If he focuses on strengthening labour and mass building public housing he may as well be right about winning the election. I highly doubt that’s the direction he’ll go though.
E: And I watched his speech and while most of it didn’t raise red flags, I did hear “far left” and “we can’t redistribute what we don’t have” which are generally neolib red flags. 😂 On the other hand he did say that wages are too low and have to go up.
I have trouble imagining any politician will do anything substantial about housing. If housing becomes affordable, everyone who owns loses some huge percentage of their life’s equity. (Imagine being stuck paying a mortage for a 700k condo that is now worth 400k.)
Not saying we shouldn’t fix housing but any politician who does fix it knows they will have a substantial proportion of the populace furious at how much they’ve lost. To make it worse, the losses would be concentrated among the elderly who outvote those who would most benefit, younger voters, by a depressingly large margin.
If housing becomes affordable, everyone who owns loses some huge percentage of their life’s equity.
Yes but if we’re bold, there’s a known solution to this that isn’t obvious to us people who’ve been brought up in the neolib era. Introduce strong public pensions while building / devaluing housing. Most of those people count on this equity as their retirement. They have to sell and downsize or reverse mortgage to access it. A strong public pension would allow these folks to stay in place. Heck you could even offer government reverse mortgages that serve as / pad their pensions for people with housing equity. As they pass away, redevelop the properties into affordable housing. The prices of people’s homes going up only matter if they need to profit from them. I think for the vast majority of Canadian home owners this is only the case because they don’t have a decent pension. Remove that problem and people’s homes become places to live and their prices cease to matter. Just like the price of the microwave oven they have.
I can’t imagine some scheme like this wouldn’t be popular with enough people to get a broad majority support.
There are probably other bold schemes too.
Now do I think Carney would propose anything like this? Hell no. :D
