sbv

It didn't work for me, either. Maybe it depends on the languages? I was trying French to English.

I agree with letting air out of the balloon slowly. That's what rezoning and densification shoots to do.

My experience with densification was seeing 600k houses (that I could almost afford) be replaced with 2-4 1.1m houses (that I could not afford).

We should pursue densification and rezoning are positive for many reasons, but price isn't one of them.

But limiting available capital (ie: competing for mortgages)? In what world does that make sense?

A world where prices are increasing faster than wages. We've had historically low interest rates since 2008, which has made borrowing large sums easier, meaning people can afford to pay more for houses.

That was great for people who got in early: they could get cheap money that wouldn't reduce their quality of life. But it means they could bid up the price of houses. Folks coming after had to pay higher and higher prices, until they did start to see a quality of life hit.

I've always enjoyed Bizarro, but I didn't know these were a thing. Thanks for the link.

I can't speak for Vancouver, but in Ottawa, I'm in a suburb that has a tonne of empty nesters living in 4 bedroom houses. There are young families that could use that space, but the current residents have no incentive to move. Housing is so expensive that selling off and moving to a smaller place would be hard. It's bizarre.

I heard somewhere that there are a few tens of Canadians in Chinese jails. When I see bullshit like this, it makes me wonder if any of them actually committed a crime.

In journalism there's a phrase: feed the goat. Journalists need to produce a certain number of articles a day to keep their job, regardless of quality or relevence. This is an example of that: someone did what they should, and searched up famous Canadians in the Epstein, found zilch, and posted their findings.

In this case, everyone is interested in the "Epstein" keyword, so I'm sure it's getting lots of traffic.

The goat is pleased.

Housing is seen as a huge part of Canadians' retirement planning. Politicians are afraid to do anything to lower the price of housing (remember Carney's housing minister saying they didn't want to reduce house prices?) because they think they'll be punished by voters. Because of that, house prices keep increasing.

It'd be great if there was a bi-partisan consensus to gently let the air out of the balloon by carefully lowering the amount of money available in mortgages, or the amount of money exempt from taxes on the sale of a primary residence. By all means, increase supply at the same time, but we also need to make homes less of an asset.

I believe the rebate is only available to vehicles sold from countries that have free trade agreements with Canada. That excludes China.

We're like 5 weeks into 2026! How often do these stats get updated?

The dude was on CBC this morning, saying that youth's initial psychotic episodes correlate heavily with cannabis use.

Aren't new mortgages still limited to a twenty five or thirty year amortization?

Seriously, who reads newspapers these days?

Thank you for creating telnet content

Agreed. I thought that was the goal of the OAS/GIS system. It sounds like the cost of living has outpaced the floor the system provides for poor seniors.

WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD WHERE FOOD

To address the problem, the report recommends raising the amount seniors can earn before GIS benefits are clawed back to $30,000. That threshold was chosen because it’s around Statistics Canada’s poverty line for individuals in urban areas, Mr. Giguère said.

Alternatively, maybe they could reduce benefits to affluent seniors and increase benefits for folks who have less. 🤷‍♂️

Holy crap! 400 is wild. I'm glad the builder is covering the cost of the fan.

I always enjoy images projected onto the offenders buildings.

It seems like every Canadian housing story will quote Mike Moffat.

I kinda gave up and embraced the whole "acceptable amounts" thing. Like, we couldn't even detect most of this stuff a couple of generations ago - levels probably are fairly acceptable (even if gross).