In order to bail out developers in Vancouver, Canada, the government is going to spend $3.2 billion to buy up all of Vancouver s empty condos and convert them into affordable housing. Is this a good or bad thing?
00:00:00.000Prime Minister Mark Carney and the federal liberals have made themselves popular through
00:00:05.220subsidy politics. Because they are willing to hand out a lot of money to individuals as well
00:00:11.440as favored industries, they end up getting the support of people in those areas or walks of life.
00:00:18.580But what happens when they push the subsidies too far and they start subsidizing things that
00:00:24.220nobody likes. That's what Mark Carney and the Liberals just did, and it was a huge political
00:00:30.400mistake. Check out this clip from a BC press conference that he gave just a couple days ago
00:00:36.640that everyone's talking about right now. Too many completed condos sitting empty.
00:00:42.140Metro Vancouver alone, around 2,500 finished units are standing vacant with no buyers.
00:00:48.600With higher interest rates, weaker investment demand, developers are stuck. They don't want
00:00:54.040to settle the loss, they can't afford to hold those empty units indefinitely. We will convert
00:00:59.320vacant condos into affordable housing, condos that have been built that are unoccupied that
00:01:04.980are going to sit there potentially for another couple of years. We're going to go use the right
00:01:10.300financing mechanisms, convert those into affordable housing so people can move in and use that.
00:01:16.680Do you know what the right financial mechanisms are in this case? It's taxpayer money, of course.
00:01:22.420We are going to give $3.2 billion to Lower Mainland developers to bail them out for 2,500 unoccupied units.
00:01:34.540Now, they probably invested a lot of money building these units.
00:01:38.240Immigration was so high that demand was extremely high for rental units or even purchasable units.
00:01:44.780And so developers could sell these things for like a million dollars.0.71
00:01:48.160Now, development costs are high in the Lower Mainland, but I do not buy the excuse that we're helping save developers from selling things below their cost.
00:01:58.920I think that we're really just helping friends of the Liberal Party.
00:02:03.120In fact, would you be shocked if I told you that Brookfield has heavy investments in the area of Vancouver real estate,
00:02:11.160and they have been recently building a lot of luxury and middle-class apartments in the city?
00:02:18.160and they might be part of this bailout. But again, think about that figure I told you about before.
00:02:24.680There are 2,500 units. Let's say two, three people can live in each one, or that's how it
00:02:30.620was going to go, although probably some of these are studios and they really only meant for one
00:02:33.940person. 2,500 units. We are going to bail out for $3.2 billion. We're just buying it off of them,
00:02:43.240And then we're ripping those units outside of the regular market to make them effectively like
00:02:50.040affordable housing, which is going to be now only subject to certain people being allowed to live
00:02:55.180there. And so what are we really doing here? We're giving $3.2 billion to developers to then also
00:03:02.980keep housing prices high. That's effectively what we're doing here. And nobody likes it.
00:03:09.580I just quickly want to show you what Kirk Lubomov said here,
00:03:13.180who was the original poster of the viral clip of Carney talking.
00:03:16.600He does a good job of editing out the fat of what he's saying and getting to the real point.
00:03:35.980They can't afford to hold those empty units indefinitely.
00:03:38.900We will convert vacant condos into affordable housing.
00:03:42.440So he goes into, like, he basically just transcribes what he said there.
00:03:47.780But he comes down to here, and Kirk says,
00:03:51.240greed and horrible municipal planning has led to building overpriced S-boxes that no one wants.
00:03:57.760Now Carney will reward that with taxpayer dollars instead of letting the market solve itself by bringing the prices down.
00:04:05.580Absurd intervention. I thought he was an economist.
00:04:08.900Now, yes, Carney's an economist, and he's also been in business as the chair of Brookfield Asset Management and working at Goldman Sachs at one point.
00:04:17.940But here's the secret. Mark Carney is not a very good economist. He's not a very good businessman.
00:04:23.100At Brookfield, he was really good at cornering the market on government subsidies.
00:04:29.900And look what he's doing for Brookfield and other developers in Vancouver right now.
00:04:34.400he's subsidizing their failure. He's subsidizing unproductive economic activity or at the very
00:04:41.560least counterproductive or not very profitable economic activity. We're just going to burn
00:04:47.760$3.2 billion to completely buy these units at the prices that the developers wanted to sell them at
00:04:53.940to then take a bunch off the market to convert into affordable housing, which I'm not necessarily
00:04:59.560against, but this is going to be the most overpriced affordable housing we've ever seen
00:05:03.860that taxpayers are probably going to throw a lot more money into to try and retrofit these units
00:05:08.960into more affordable housing. It's absolutely wild what we are doing here. I just want to jump
00:05:15.280over now to a question that was asked to Carney at this press conference by a journalist. It
00:05:20.140captures a little bit of what he said in that original clip, but the person point like asks,
00:05:24.660well are we really just you know buying overpriced units to like create a very small amount of
00:05:31.200affordable housing here comparatively as a follow-up i'd like to hear more about converting
00:05:36.080empty condos into homes for people does that involve the government buying extra stock from
00:05:41.200developers and then renting those out or reselling them is are there details you can give us on that
00:05:46.300uh you have two things i mean there's different models and we'll work through the modalities and
00:05:51.120bring it out in uh in the fall is just so you don't know i hate when he talks like this oh well
00:05:57.740we're going to look through different modalities and we're going to figure out what we're going
00:06:00.620to do in the fall just so you don't know what you're doing you don't you're going to figure
00:06:03.400it out by the fall that's all you had to say but he always talks in this grandiose way that makes
00:06:07.940his own confusion sound enlightened is what i said uh in french the um but but you can you can
00:06:17.340do both, and my view, experts will design it, but one would look to do both. Effectively, though,
00:06:25.240what you're doing is buying them at a price, spreading out the financing, because you can do
00:06:31.080that, the financing of the underlying condo at our financing rate, but targeting at a level that
00:06:39.380is affordable. And it is a way to clear off on the books of this overhang.
00:06:48.500Now, mark my words. He is going to pretend that he has created affordable housing. He is going to
00:06:54.440use this to try and backstop his own fake promise that the government was going to create all this
00:06:59.320housing. Oh, look, we've created all this housing by buying pre-existing housing to bail out
00:07:04.400developers to then put even more money into it, finishing the projects or retrofitting the
00:07:10.700projects for affordable housing. Look at all the affordable housing we created. No, they're actually
00:07:14.920not creating more housing. They're creating less of it over time because they are keeping prices
00:07:20.300absurdly high. We're not making it easier to build. We're not making it easier to buy.
00:07:25.480We are bailing out irresponsible developers rather than letting the market actually decide
00:07:32.600what the price of things should be. We are artificially inflating the price for friends
00:07:37.320of the Liberal Party, effectively. And you don't need to tell, you probably don't even need to be
00:07:41.940told, this is taking off a lot of people on the political right, on the political left. And it's
00:07:47.380because, like, and Carney thought this was going to be a big win. He's out there announcing it.
00:07:51.900He's standing at a podium. They thought this was going to be a great announcement. Now, that's not
00:07:56.220the only thing they talked about, but he brought it up voluntarily that they were doing this.
00:08:01.720he thought that this was going to be a win because subsidy politics and so many other areas
00:08:07.240have made Carney look good. And he thought, well, I'm going to go in there and talk about
00:08:11.040how I'm subsidizing housing too. Except people don't like the corrupt system that developers
00:08:18.180work in right now. And so Carney pushed it a little bit too far, just as Doug Ford pushed
00:08:23.420his own sort of internal corruption too far when he started just throwing a bunch of money at a
00:08:28.580new jet that he wanted. Now, we can have a conversation on whether or not the Ontario
00:08:33.560Premier should have his own private plane. Maybe. The whole point is he'd been pushing the envelope
00:08:39.520so hard that he imagistically did something that looks so stupid that it immediately crashed his0.97
00:08:45.920approval rating, and now Doug Ford is sitting with a 21% approval rating. Now, I don't think0.99
00:08:51.280that Carney's approval rating is going to crash overnight. In the recent Abacus data poll, it's
00:08:55.76055%. I could see him going sub 50 over stuff like this, because he's going to start getting ripped
00:09:01.440to pieces on both his left and his right over stuff like this. I actually now just want to
00:09:06.860quickly jump to Pierre Polyev's response that only came out a couple hours ago here. I'm going
00:09:11.600to skip a little bit into it because it's just kind of the whole, his whole statement, his whole
00:09:15.90011-minute statement he posted. I'm just going to get to the interesting part here. But he rightfully
00:09:21.960is seizing on this because it's a very, very obvious kind of chink in Mark Carney's armor0.63
00:09:27.540right now that his subsidy politics have gone too far and are now effectively just subsidizing
00:09:34.180rich people as most subsidies end up doing. And I'm not saying this as someone who hates rich
00:09:39.520people. I don't care. But this is the problem with complex government programs and systems
00:09:44.420that the people sophisticated enough oftentimes to manipulate them are already fairly well off.
00:09:50.300so often the people who get affordable housing are themselves fairly well off. Zoran Mamdani,
00:09:56.060the current New York City mayor, was living in rent-controlled apartment units despite him and
00:10:01.100his family being very well off. The costs have exploded due to liberal inflation. And here's
00:10:07.700my question to you today. Where's your bailout? You, the single mother who has to turn back items
00:10:17.140at the grocery checkout. Where is your bailout? The young couple who can't afford a home.1.00
00:10:23.420Where is your bailout? The auto worker in Windsor who's lost his job because Canada is the only0.53
00:10:31.180country in the G7 in a recession. Where is your bailout when you are lined up in a food bank that
00:10:38.500is run out of food because Mark Carney has given Canada the worst food price inflation in the G7?
00:10:44.380Where is your bailout as you fill up your tank with $1.70 or $1.80 a litre gas?
00:10:52.920Because Mark Carney has given us a weak dollar that cannot buy enough energy on the global stage.
00:11:03.040Because Mark Carney seems to have a bailout for anyone who's part of the liberal club of power brokers, corporate insiders, and lobbyists.
00:11:13.320They all get a bailout. The latest example is the bailout that Mark Carney announced for developers and banks here in Vancouver. Let's just be clear what he's promising.
00:11:25.940He came here and said he was going to transform 2,200 empty condos into affordable homes
00:11:39.240using what he called innovative financial tools.
00:12:23.300We can start chipping away at our terrible unemployment problem this way.
00:12:28.280But the one thing I would give him is that he was bringing down population.
00:12:34.580Now, that was going to be the remedy for overpriced things like housing.
00:12:40.240And we're not letting housing prices go down because that's really what it is, is that
00:12:44.900developers want to lock themselves in to a certain price for their units. But if he's setting a
00:12:52.340precedent, where is he now just going to come in swinging on a rope to the rescue of every single
00:12:57.260industry who doesn't think that it should have to sell this for that price? Well, I want $30 for my
00:13:03.940product. And now the market's saying I should be charging $27. I want $30. The government better
00:13:09.320come in and buy all my stock for 30. Everyone would know that that looks like taxpayer highway0.70
00:13:15.080robbery. But Carney, in the case of developers, because he can spin it as, oh, I'm trying to
00:13:20.440create affordable housing, is just giving a large portion of the current public deficit
00:13:26.420to these developers. And this isn't money that's going to slowly trickle out over like 10 years.
00:13:31.840The Alto train costs $90 billion and it will take like 15 years to complete or whatever,
00:13:36.500but that's $90 billion trickling out over many years. This is a $3.2 billion one-shot to purchase
00:13:44.260them all probably within the next year or two. It's absolutely absurd that the liberals thought
00:13:49.680that this was somehow going to make them look good, but I guess they had thought, well, every
00:13:53.620time we give money to the aluminum and steel companies because we refuse to negotiate with
00:13:57.780Trump and get to a zero-tariff situation, well, that always makes us popular because we look like
00:14:03.040we're supporting industry. But when we did the grocery rebate, that made us look good because
00:14:06.640look, we're supporting hungry people, even though we helped make them hungry. But now that he's
00:14:10.740gone, he's taken, he's gone one bridge too far by now subsidizing the developers because it kind
00:14:16.580of gives the game away a little bit. We are subsidizing a bad economy so that it never
00:14:22.000actually improves. We're not actually allowing the market to adjust. We're simply just paying
00:14:27.140that we are burning more money to keep the market crap. That is what we are doing here.0.97
00:14:32.320But anyways, so there's I'm actually kind of shocked.
00:14:36.000I actually checked around to see if the NDP had commented on this, if Avi Lewis had said anything.
00:14:40.740And so far, nothing when this should be a big issue for them to jump on board of the I've seen many NDP people online going after the Carney liberals.
00:14:51.320But so far, no NDP actual politicians have come out against it.
00:14:55.460They're tweeting about National Indigenous Peoples Day today instead of Father's Day.0.99
00:14:59.360So I guess good on them for that, whatever that means. But now I want to move on to another thing that was a massive mistake for the Carney liberals to do.
00:15:09.480This is an article from CTV News, but Peter McCaffrey here from the Alberta Institute is commenting on it.
00:15:16.200He says the liberals have gone from elbows up against Trump's tariffs to copying his entire economic theory in just 18 months.
00:15:22.740And this article from CTV News says, Canada imposes 10% tariff on canned vegetables excludes U.S.
00:15:31.000So now we're not including the U.S. because that would be a little bit more provocative.
00:15:35.680That would be kind of provocative during trade negotiations.
00:15:38.700So Carney's at least learned one thing from the previous few times he's tried to impose tariffs on the U.S. mid negotiations.0.74
00:15:47.100Well, we don't like Trump's steel, aluminum, and soft lumber tariffs and copper tariffs, but we are absolutely happy to tariff other countries' canned fruits and vegetables.
00:16:03.040I don't like tariffs at all, but if we don't like tariffs, we shouldn't be imposing them.
00:16:08.540In fact, this actually still gives a good talking point to the U.S. administration during trade talks of saying, well, you guys seem to understand the value of tariffs because you just imposed them to protect domestic fruit and vegetable growers who can their stuff.
00:16:24.840You just imposed a tariff to help protect them.