Canadian Leftist has no clue how housing works
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
181.92879
Summary
In this episode, I cover another video from our least favourite leftist, Steve Boots, who thinks that he's an expert on pretty much everything. In fact, he doesn't even know what he's talking about, and he thinks that government is the solution to affordable housing.
Transcript
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Today, I want to wade into the incredibly frustrating and depressing world of Canadian
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political videos on TikTok, because I think that you should all know what kind of poor
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quality content many young Canadians are consuming about Canadian politics.
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And today, I'm going to be covering another video from our least favorite leftist, Steve
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Boots, who thinks that he's an expert on pretty much everything.
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I think the most frustrating thing when dealing with a specific person in politics, especially
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when they're a content creator, is just the level of smugness that people get from talking
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about issues, because apparently talking about issues means that you know a lot about them.
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That's the kind of attitude many of these people put on.
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And you notice that they literally don't even have basic concepts, right?
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And there's no exception today when it comes to this video.
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So if you guys want to go follow Steve Boots, if you're super interested in what his content
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looks like, I want to break down this video he has here today about housing, where he doesn't
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understand anything, he doesn't understand the market at all, and he thinks that government
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But before I get into that, I just quickly want to plug my legal fund in the description
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If you can contribute anything to it, it really helps me out.
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We got sued, specifically myself and the National Telegraph, got sued by a Chinese billionaire
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And in over two and a half years, he hasn't actually provided any evidence that we defamed
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him, said anything wrong, or even caused him any damage.
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But we are $32,000 down the road in paying for legal costs.
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So anything you can do there helps us out a lot.
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And then if you live in BC, there's also a donation link if you guys want to contribute
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We're trying to beat the NDP and put in a conservative government provincially.
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So if you live in BC, make sure to donate $100.
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It only costs you $25 after your 75% tax credit.
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But without further ado, here is Steve Booth trying to educate us on how housing works.
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I'm just going to keep it zoomed in like this, because for some reason, when these guys on
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TikTok upload their videos to X, it puts it up like a small postage stamp.
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I have a quick question for Canadian governments.
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If you're not a Canadian government, you can keep scrolling.
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Because Canadian governments have insisted that they're going to do everything they can
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There are literally only two provinces in Canada where housing prices fell.
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And in Ontario, they fell from impossibly high to unreasonably high.
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But I will point out, and I hope he would notice, that one of the places that housing prices
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have fallen has been Ontario, where they do a lot of the things that Steve Booth likes.
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They have done a lot of bloated government programs.
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And he even is pointing out the fact that housing prices have not really come down that much.
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And that with inflation, they are still going up.
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But all these provinces also have extremely restrictive building codes still.
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But he's going to miss that and then try and blame capitalism for the fact that more homes
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But in most provinces, the real estate prices went up at least 3%.
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Prices have just peaked in the most expensive markets.
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As long as we keep expecting the free market to fix the housing problems, it's not going to happen.
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Because why would they devalue their own assets?
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Does this man not think that governments in these different jurisdictions have not done anything?
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It's like socialists don't believe that governments intervened until they do the exact thing they want them to do.
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There's literally a debate going on that he has covered over opening up the green belt in Ontario to build more homes.
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And he has attacked the Ford government for being deeply corrupt.
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And I would actually say they had to act in corrupt fashion when it came to trying to sell parts of the green belt.
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I think they should in order to build more homes.
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That he backs the idea that we need more houses.
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But we can't build where Steve Boots doesn't want it to be built.
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So he also backs other housing restrictions in places like BC where certain places to protect green space you can't build on or at very least you have to go through seven layers of environmental, you know, like there's seven like environmental surveys you have to do on the land before you can build anything.
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But he's going to say that, well, simply the government just didn't start putting up affordable housing.
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For a housing developer, why would you build more houses?
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The profit margins are way better if you keep the number of houses down and the costs of those houses high.
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No housing developer doesn't want to build houses because, well, if we build a house, the last house we built is relatively less, you know, it was worth less relatively.
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They want to make a raw profit, a higher profit.
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They don't care that by building one house, the last one you built is technically relatively lower in value.
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They don't care if they have a 50% profit margin on a single unit's sale, if they could sell 10,000 units of something at 2% profit, but the profit is more at the end of the day.
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It's like he doesn't understand the economy of scale.
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And also, who are these shadowy capitalists that Steve Boots is referring to that want to keep the housing price, who wants to restrict housing, house building in order to boost up their own profits?
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Yes, there are some people who have enjoyed the benefits of restrictions on new developments through high immigration because now their assets are worth more.
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But that's usually the individual who owns a house, who don't control developers unless Steve is now going to blame the government, which he never would.
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Obviously, spoiler alert, he never blames the government.
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If he's going to blame the government and people who are preventing new houses from being built, if he was to do that, that's not the free market doing that.
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Housing developers are in the business of developing housing.
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They'd make less money when they build less units because, again, economies of scale matter.
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You make more money by selling more, even if, per unit, you make a lower percentage profit.
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And the Canadian governments are doing nothing to deal with it at federal, municipal, or provincial levels.
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Like, yeah, the federal government's using their housing accelerator fund, and that is helping.
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All the provinces have different housing prices on average.
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Or all the, as he said, all the provinces, their house costs are going up.
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I can bring it up on screen right here to prove it.
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When you actually look at the different provinces, and this was somebody trying to prove me wrong,
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the amount of houses being built in different provinces, some provinces, new starts are going up.
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So even this chart, the one he's showing, showing that Ontario prices are going down,
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I really doubt it, considering that this year, in 2024, the amount of new houses started has gone down by 14%.
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But the reason that these are not uniform numbers, it's not uniformly going up or uniformly going down across the country,
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is because the National Housing Accelerator Fund doesn't work.
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Because it has inconsistent results because provincial housing policy matters more than federal policy.
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The biggest effect that the federal government has on the housing market is through immigration.
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That is the big kahuna when it comes to the federal government's responsibility.
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Make sure not to inject artificial demand into the housing market as well as the jobs market.
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Till we tackle the financialization of housing, how does this get better?
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But more than that, I think this makes it very clear just how much we need the provinces to step up.
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Like, look at the massive range of average home prices across provinces.
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How can any one national policy address that diverse of a problem?
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Does your province restrict house building or not?
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Does your province have a massive immigration influx or not?
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It's more so that government has to get out of the way.
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And it doesn't have to go the way in terms of blanket rezoning.
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Just build whatever you want, wherever you want.
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That's a Band-Aid solution to the real problem, which doesn't matter what you build.
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So what the government did, because it doesn't want to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy,
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because its interest is having being as big as possible.
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They merely are trying to bribe developers by saying, OK, it will still take an entire year and a half
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to get a single home built because of all the waiting for inspections,
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all the different ridiculous regulations you have to follow.
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But you can at least get a sixplex out of it, not just a single family detached house.
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The federal government is doing some work, yes.
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And they need to be doing much, much more, in particular when it comes to public housing.
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But how can any level of Canadian government look at this chart and think that they have
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any degree of credibility when it comes to housing prices?
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I haven't said, but why is it that BC has the highest prices?
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BC has had the most interventionist government when it comes to housing on the planet, both
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British Columbia provincially as well as on the municipal level.
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They have been the most restrictive on house building.
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It takes three years to get a housing permit, building permit approved.
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But really, what Steve just wants is the government to open up its wallet.
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The government should just be merely paying for people's houses, putting up more affordable
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housing, even though government affordable housing is not actually affordable, because
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whenever the government and its layer of contractors builds housing, it's always more expensive
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than a developer just independently building it itself.
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We have the ridiculous situation now here in the Metro Vancouver area.
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The BC NDP out here built an affordable apartment building with just like pure affordable units.
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And those affordable units cost more than the market average, because after the government
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put up the building, they realized that they spent so much money and it went so over budget
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and over time that they had to, because even they have to face some market realities at some
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point, that they had to up the cost of the units to recoup the way overspending that they did.
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You can't make it up that this is actually how bad the government is at doing things.
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But Steve, like you saw in that video, legitimately thinks that housing developers themselves are
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the ones who are preventing the rise in supply of housing.
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This is why the left can't function properly in government.
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Their solutions don't work because they can't see reality.
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Capitalists like producing products to be sold.
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Socialists like controlling what has already been made in order so that they can use it for
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He doesn't understand that other people actually want to create things because he comes from a
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So when he sees not a lot of buildings are going up, his bias is, well, capitalists must have
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Not the fact that we have to struggle and jump through all the hoops that he endorses and it
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makes it take longer and cost more to build something.
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In British Columbia right now, 40% of a house's cost when it's first built is government costs.
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It is the building codes, environmental surveys that you have to do where you're basically
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paying workers to sit around a site doing nothing while the government surveys a piece
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40% of a new house's cost has nothing to do with the actual cost to buy the land, buy the
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All things incurred by the government or from the government.
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But it's capitalism's fault still because socialists are inherently conspiracy theorists and everything
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must be a dirty, shadowy capitalist behind the scenes pulling the strings to hurt other
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Even though we used to be a more free market country 30, 40 years ago and houses cost less
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to build, they cost less to buy, everything was better.
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But for some reason in our more socialistic times where everything is more government controlled,
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I know back in the day there were certain provinces that everything was technically government
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run, but outside of services, it was much more free market.
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But everything is much more government involved these days.
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Somehow when the government basically incentivizes a ton of extra immigrants to move to this country,
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1.3 million in the year 2023, everything became higher priced.
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But if you challenge that, somebody like Steve Boots will put his finger in your chest and
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Even though literally I've been at several meetings this week with a lot of South Asian
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Canadians who are wondering when the federal government is finally going to put restrictions
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on immigration because it has nothing to do with where you came from.
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There are not enough houses for the people coming into the country.
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If you want to contribute to the legal fund, it's in the description of the video below.
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Hopefully you don't mind these response videos.
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They're a little bit more rough, but they're also a lot of fun for me to do.