STIRLING: When it comes to housing, does Carney know what he's talking about?

A recent video clip of Mark Carney features his saying “I have a simple rule. Spend less; invest more.”Canadians, drowning in national debt, find that appealing. The good-looking former banker who was once a hockey goalie seems sincere. With his banking track record, first as governor of the Bank of Canada, then Governor of the Bank of England, he seems the ideal replacement for the economic light-weight, Justin Trudeau, who famously said ‘the budget will balance itself.”Incredibly, in the video clip, Carney goes on to give the example of your house as an investment. He says that the upfront costs are heavy, but that’s okay because your house will increase in value, despite operational costs like heating and electricity.It’s almost like Mark Carney, who claims he safely ferried Canada through the 2008 recession, doesn’t know that millions of Americans lost their homes then because of the sudden drop in value. According to Investopedia: “The collapse of the housing market during the Great Recession displaced close to 10 million Americans as rising unemployment led to mass foreclosures. In 2008 alone, 3.1 million Americans filed for foreclosure, which at the time was one in every 54 homes, according to CNN Money.”Likewise, this “Money Under 30” article makes it clear that your house is not an investment; it’s where you live. Over the course of home ownership, the annual maintenance and replacement costs for things like furnaces, roofing, facilities and appliances will work out to be many times the cost of your mortgage. So, a house is not an investment."It is deeply concerning to me that Mark Carney uses this example of housing as an investment, as he is co-author of “Blueprint for More and Better Housing,” the March 2024 proposal to solve Canada’s housing problem and build 5.8 million homes by 2031, including directing the government to “Invest in factory built housing.” In it, he and his colleagues advocated for extensive government intervention in the housing market. This plan appears to be the origin of the much-hated Housing Accelerator Funding “blanket rezoning in return for infrastructure funding” rule that has property owners in many cities, like Calgary, enraged at the looming chaos in their neighbourhoods. And loss of property values! After the government issued its own housing strategy in December of 2024, Carney celebrated in various public statements that their plan closely allied with his “Blueprint…” So, that’s why I’m queasy about Mark Carney falsely using housing as an example of an investment, when he is talking to an audience of millions of unhoused or poorly housed Canadians. People will be easily led to believe that a government under Mark Carney, pumping money into the housing market, will be an ‘investment’ that will return benefits to Canadians. It is far more likely if done, it will return financial benefits to certain investors in certain home-related products, like heat pumps, prefab homes, 3D concrete start-ups, high-speed and light rail companies, low carbon concrete, and more. Like the government ‘investments’ in EV batteries, this will result in a pump-and-dump stock benefit for the savvy, and more misery for taxpayers. Or it will open the door for Canadian Infrastructure Bank financing for major housing projects, meaning people could be forced into peonage to pension funds?In the process, if the Carney-led government takes it upon themselves to ‘invest more’ — this time interfering in the housing market, it is likely that you’ll be buying a house for your new neighbours, while you remain in a sinking economy, trying to put food on the table and pay your own mortgage.Carney’s commercial associations include Brookfield Asset Management which has a huge Canadian real estate component. He claimed, on the day he announced his run for the federal Liberal party leadership, that he’d resigned from all such duties and boards. But that doesn’t mean he’s abandoned these big ideas that benefit someone with the right fingers in the pie.But aren’t his charitable Catholic ‘values’ to end homelessness driving his desire to ‘let’s build?’In fact, in “Blueprint…” the words ‘climate resilience’ are mentioned 48 times, ‘climate’ 193 times, ‘climate change’ 36 times, ‘funding’ 33 times. Homeless? Once. Homelessness? Twice.As President Trump dismantles the climate real estate, Mark Carney is the climate goalie, brought in to make the save as the climate house of cards collapses. “Let’s build,” Carney says.Cui bono?

STIRLING: When it comes to housing, does Carney know what he's talking about?

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