Mark Carney’s $13 billion housing initiative highlights everything that’s wrong with the Canadian system and why things won’t be improving under the Carney government.To begin with, it proves Carney’s claims that he will streamline the government and reduce the bureaucracy to be hollow. The Trudeau government nearly doubled the civil service over 10 years. Carney has implied the growth was unsustainable and that he will get the bloat under control. Then he announces a new agency which will employ hundreds if not thousands of new civil servants. Not one of which will swing a hammer to help build a home.Speaking of efficiency, the estimated cost per housing unit under Carney’s plan will be over $3 million each.Carney dared to use the term austerity when referring to the upcoming budget, but if he keeps spawning new spending initiatives of the scope of the housing plan, he will surely blow by the record $100 billion deficit some are predicting. He’s making Trudeau look downright miserly in comparison.The housing initiative lands 100% outside of federal jurisdiction. It’s not the role of the federal government to build homes. It has never been, nor should it ever be. The provinces are responsible for housing and even then, the government should only be creating the environment to facilitate home construction. Not building homes directly. The federal government is pushing ever more deeply into jurisdictions where it doesn’t belong which only creates more regional conflicts and inefficiency in program delivery..The federal government spent over $6 billion to develop a website to make government services easier to access. They have been trying to build this site for 8 years now and estimate it may be fully available by 2030. The same government took a pipeline that should have cost $4.5 billion to build and ballooned the cost to $34 billion while delaying construction for years. Do we really want them to take over housing too?I posted an image of a sea of decrepit housing projects from the Soviet era on X along with a comment on how this is what putting the state in charge of housing will lead to. It was distressing how many young fools got upset and made the case that such housing was wonderful and how the communists ended homelessness. They also ended over 100 million lives but who’s counting? It's frightening to think we have an up-and-coming generation who are truly clueless about the horrors of communism and think losing general prosperity and freedom is worth it if it came with what they think is free housing.Also lost upon them is the rationing and misery that came with state housing. Waiting lists were part of the game in getting a home and to get repairs, bribery was usually the order of the day. These modern-day Marxists kept making the case that government-built ghettos are still superior to the tent cities that grace every city in North America. People risked their lives to escape the hell of communist nations but that’s been forgotten. If it was so damn great, communist countries wouldn’t have had to lock their citizens in..Also ignored is that those tent cities are due to leftist policies that led to the closure of mental health asylums and permissive drug use enablement policies that fed an opioid addiction epidemic. If we took all the people from the tent encampments and put them into housing without treatment, the housing complexes would become drug dens and crime hubs. Kawartha Lakes in Ontario proved that with a catastrophic experiment in putting addicts into subsidized housing.That’s not to say the people living on the streets don’t need housing. We can’t pretend that lack of housing is what put them there though. Most of them are addicts and have mental health issues that need treatment in secured facilities. They aren’t folks who just fell through the cracks and missed a couple rent payments. Treatment first. Housing second. Assuming they successfully recover that is. If not, then long-term institutionalization may be required.North American projects weren’t much better. They are crime-ridden slums today which can be seen in most major cities.Creeping communism is just as insidious and damaging as the communism that came quickly through revolutions. If we let the government incrementally take control of housing as it has with healthcare, we can look forward to the rationed, substandard delivery of housing we already enjoy in with hospitals. We mustn’t let the government get there.We need smaller government, lower taxes and fewer regulations if we want affordable housing. In letting governments take it over, we are trying to cure the disease with what caused it in the first place. If looking back at communism doesn’t offer a stark enough example of what happens when the government takes control of housing, Indian reserves offer a more contemporary one and right in our own country. If we want good quality, affordable housing in Canada, then housing must be kept as far from government control as possible.
