Originally Posted by Richard Eade
When one of your main campaign slogans is “Boots not Suits” is it any wonder that a riding with a large percentage of ‘suits’ rejects you?
I do worry about the discontent that the CPC was stoking the fire under. I think that it has heightened the feelings that people are hard done by because they have to work hard for their future. It reinforces the idea that the government should be providing much more – while being much less intrusive. It says that you are ‘owed’ something, and that you don’t have to work for it.
When my father bought his small, 3-bedroom house, it cost about 10 times his annual salary. He had a 30-year mortgage at 3.5%. He eventually died in that house, about 65 years later, having never found the need to move. This, it seems is unacceptable these days. The average house in Ottawa is (apparently) about $650,000, and the average family income is more than $65,000, yet homes are now considered unaffordable. Absolutely, there are places where house prices are outrageously high – but that is because people are still willing to pay those prices.
I read the articles where the home builders say that they NEED the governments to give them all manner of concessions if smaller, cheaper, houses are to be built. The real problem is that the mark-up is not as high for smaller homes. It is just like the auto manufacturers dropping small, low profit, cars, in favour of higher margin big SUVs. If something is going to take a space in the assembly line (house or vehicle), then the builder wants to make it something that has the highest profit. Ergo, house builders NEED governments to ‘top up’ any loss of profit, if the governments want cheaper houses built.
A big problem is that if the selling price of houses is initially low, then the price will get bid up. It wasn’t too many years ago that houses were routinely selling for thousands (or even tens of thousands) OVER the list price. I would expect that to occur again. The builder gets a concession from the governments to build homes that sell for less, but the price then gets bid up past the point of ‘affordability’ that those governments desired. I doubt very much that a ‘first-time buyer’ who gets their house at a reduced price (because of a subsidy) will not want to sell that house with a subsidy.
There are market forces in play that were not accounted for in the CPC platform, yet over and over again we heard that the government was going to make everything affordable. That taxes were going to be cut, but billions of extra dollars were going into forcing cheap houses to be built.
And how were they going to ‘encourage’ municipalities to reduce development fees? By reimbursing the municipality 50% of what it was losing. Yes, cash-strapped municipalities were expected to happily give up 50% of their development fees. BUT, if they didn’t, then there would be limits on other (unrelated) payments from the Federal government – yes, blackmail.
Honestly though, being told that the government was going to make life easy – that you would be able to get what you want without extra effort – has a certain allure. The problem is that the seed of discontent has now been planted.
PS The CPC was not the only party that preached that everyone was being hard-done-by, and that their government would make life easy.
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