03-04-2025, 01:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-04-2025, 01:35 PM by danbrotherston.)
(03-04-2025, 12:55 PM)bravado Wrote: I think we should certainly actually change our thinking in this country towards growth = good - but to go for any kind of autarky in the current global market is a suicide plan.
You can't have low taxes and strong, protected local industries. The reason why our own industry isn't overwhelmingly strong isn't because we uniquely hate industry, it's because it's just been cheaper to buy abroad than build here for a very long time. That won't be changing any time soon, even with an orange tyrant in the White House. I don't see how we can convince Canadian capital to invest at home when there will always be a cheaper option available for import. That's a really hard hurdle to get over. Forcing them to do it via protectionist legislation means higher prices - people really hate that.
If the US relationship is truly dead, our geography means we are in a fucking monster of a pickle. There's no way around the insane land border we share. There are no meaningful examples of what to do from Europe or Australia, because they have oceans between them and the US.
As for the costs of building new in taxes, I'm 100% with you there - but the average municipal voter isn't. Those fees exist because land-owning voters don't want to pay the extra in property taxes. They will, and have been, gladly selling the next generation up the creek to keep their property taxes low. If decades of suffering from young people trying to start their lives haven't done it yet, then nothing can change people's minds on this. Any politician that proposes actually building new housing on every lot in the city and funding the infrastructure equally will lose elections tomorrow.
People blame our inability to build things on environmental legislation and "red tape" like that, but deep down that legislation is used to protect property values and enforce sprawl more than it is used to protect endangered frogs. Other countries can build because they don't let any local voter have a veto on new apartments. Are we willing to get rid of that "democratic input" and let growth happen?
The problem is not "democratic input"...the problem is in fact anti-democratic. People don't get an equal say, people get more or less say depending on whether they're older, wealthier, property owningier than others.
If council weighed the individual value of 300 people who would live in an a new development over the 30 or so wealthy homeowners complaining about that development then there would be no question of it getting built.
The problem is that some people count more than others, and that is a very uncomfortable fact in our society--a lot of energy is spent denying it.
And yes, the "rules and regulations" do enable this, but they don't have to, it isn't intrinsic to regulations...the EU has far more regulation and it is far more egalitarian than the regulations Canada has.