Anton Okmyanskiy @antonoki

The idiotic “harm reduction” policy of supplying addicts with drugs, injection sites, and congregated housing instead of recovery and mental hospitals was insane. Not to mention it was fully corrupt - experts / advocates making money as NGOs and drug users association vetting it.

Susan Khazaeli @susankhazaeli

6 days ago

Well done @globeandmail editorial board. I’m buying subscription again. theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editor… And the amazing @somerspsych

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This is data showing that Vancouver has already added to its housing units by 200 percent since the sixties. No other centre city has done the same. Our reward are the highest home prices by far when measured against median wages.

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Draft 2 of letter to Vancouver Council on the "Villages Plan" Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan Dear Mayor and Council, I write to challenge key elements of the Villages Plan. Combined with the Official Development Plan and the Broadway Plan, the City, with this and the other plans, entitles privately owned city parcels to build around 700,000 new units to accommodate an additional 1.4 million people to our city of 670,000. This massive oversupply of pre zoned land is promoted as the path to housing affordability. Yet there is no historical evidence to support this claim. Vancouver has already approved, and has in the development pipeline, approximately 25,000 housing units, mostly along the Broadway corridor where they are best located. This is already a 30- to 50-year supply based on trend rates of city population increase. There is therefore no real purpose served by the Villages Plan. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that restrictive zoning stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t. The claim is false. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock through infill housing additions since the 1960s - more than any other major North American centre city - yet our prices remain North America’s highest, not the lowest. If adding hundreds of thousands of units truly lowered prices, our housing would be the cheapest in North America. It is the most expensive. It defies logic to expect an "unleashing of the housing market" - the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan - to produce affordable housing when it has utterly failed us before. Our housing market, driven by globe-wide speculative inflation, has failed us. Our plans are feeding this speculative beast rather than taming it. True affordability requires mandating that most new housing be affordable to average wage earners, primarily through non-market housing development. Our lack is a lack of affordable housing, not housing itself. Don’t simply zone for affordability - insist on it by radically increasing inclusionary zoning requirements. This plan eliminates them entirely, while at the same time the City has further weakened these requirements elsewhere in the city to the point of irrelevance. I urge you to revise these plans by insisting on a much deeper inclusionary housing requirement and by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in planning organic collaborative development. The people of Vancouver would rally behind such a plan — one that ensures their sons and daughters, and the service workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home. Let's turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here. Thank you, Patrick M. Condon, Vancouver

The Chiefs want this law so badly. They want the big red button for the trap door that Mr. Burns uses to disappear anybody who displeases.

CTV News @CTVNews

5 days ago

Chiefs call on feds to criminalize residential school denialism as hate speech ctvnews.ca/politics/artic…

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@CoryBMorgan We are paying for those costumes too…

Peak wokeness… good oldie… and remember people were banned on old twitter for sharing this because you know laughing at this absurdity is unacceptable.

Seth Dillon @SethDillon

5 days ago

Wokeness is everyone acting like it's normal or impressive when an obvious imposter makes a fool out of himself.

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It's not a "tanker ban." It's an NDP economic blockade. Foreign ships still sail freely along B.C.'s northern coast. The only thing being blocked is our prosperity, while doing absolutely nothing to protect the environment.

This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They're against certain types of people being crazy rich. Artists and athletes make sense to them because they've played music and sports and because their success can be explained by "luck" and "talent". Messi's wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are. But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist leftist has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, business or service that was of value to other people. They've never taken entrepreneurial risk. They've never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They've never pick up a business and given it a play in the way they've picked up a ball or a guitar. They *literally* don't understand wealth creation. They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly. It's why they rage at Elon and other successful business leaders. Because they genuinely don't understand why they're wealthy. Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, "diverse", left wing etc. Business leaders are "evil" middle aged white men whose success offends the average anti-capitalist leftist because they don't understand a) what it is they do and b) that Elon Musk has the same talent advantage on them as Messi does, it's just harder to measure.

Rob Henderson @robkhenderson

3 weeks ago

It’s criminal the CEO makes 400X what the average worker makes but it’s perfectly fine that Taylor Swift makes 100000X more than the people who clean the arena after her concerts. A just society is one that rewards the exceptional qualities of the musician but not the executive.

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Chief made $4.77 million (tax-free) in 2019. This is why chiefs defend the Indian Act.

Behind closed doors, with no public announcement, the Province under NDP is transferring the Wharf Street parking lot to the Songhees. British Columbians deserve a vote. Governments should not give away iconic public land without public consent, no vote, nothing. @westernstandard

The Bigger Bailout: Cutting Development Charges and Inclusionary Zoning Protects Developers and Land Speculators By Patrick M. Condon While headlines fixate on the British Columbia “condo bailout” - government purchases of unsold condominium units to turn them into affordable housing - a far larger and more damaging giveaway has slipped through with remarkably little scrutiny. Provincial and federal governments have halved development charges and effectively reduced inclusionary zoning agreements to zero. These moves are presented as essential medicine to restart construction and deliver affordability. They are nothing of the sort. They constitute a direct subsidy to developers and a protective shield for land speculators who locked in elevated gains when the market was white-hot. Development charges exist for a simple reason: new residents require new roads, sewers, water systems, parks and transit. Those who profit from building should help pay for the infrastructure their projects demand. Cutting these charges in half shifts the cost onto existing taxpayers or forces municipalities to defer maintenance and expansion. Importantly, development charges do not add to final home prices. They are paid out of the “land price residual” - the amount left after construction costs and a reasonable developer profit are subtracted from what the market will bear. Reducing or eliminating them simply increases what developers can bid for land, delivering a direct subsidy to whoever sold the parcel to the development corporation. Inclusionary zoning (requiring some percentage of below market units within projects) , imperfect as it has been, was one of the few mechanisms that required new market projects to deliver a share of somewhat more affordable units. Removing that obligation means every new tower or subdivision can be built with no requirement to house anyone but those who can pay top dollar. Proponents insist these reductions will lower the cost of building and therefore the price of housing. This claim collapses under even modest examination of how urban land markets actually work. Land does not behave like other commodities. It absorbs nearly every increase in permitted density, every reduction in fees, and every relaxation of public obligations into its price. When governments lower the financial hurdles for developers, those savings do not flow downstream to buyers or renters. They flow upstream into higher bids for land. Speculators who bought parcels years ago, when prices already reflected the expectation of maximum profit under boom-era conditions, now see their positions secured. The windfall they captured when the market was hot remains protected—paid for, in effect, by the public. This pattern is familiar. Every time we have relaxed rules without simultaneously capturing a substantial portion of the resulting land-value uplift for public purposes, the same result has followed: land prices rise to neutralize the supposed cost savings, new units remain expensive, and the gap between housing costs and local incomes widens. The structure itself, not the building on it, continues to command the lion’s share of value. Developers still make their margins; land speculators still collect their elevated returns. Ordinary households see little relief. The condo inventory problem itself is largely a symptom of the same speculative dynamic. Too many units were financed and marketed on the assumption that prices would keep climbing forever. Buying up some of that inventory may provide short-term relief for a few thousand households, but it does nothing to change the underlying rules that reward speculation over stable, affordable supply. Meanwhile, the structural changes to development charges and inclusionary zoning lock in the advantages for those who already hold the land. If the goal were genuinely more affordable housing, the policy would run in the opposite direction. Increased density or reduced charges would be granted only in exchange for substantial, permanent affordability - through strong inclusionary requirements, public land trusts, or direct capture of land lift to fund non-market housing. Without such conditions, every concession simply capitalizes into higher land values and higher developer returns. The public gives; the few who trade in land and development rights receive. We have tried the supply-only, deregulation-first approach for years. It has produced record construction in some periods and record unaffordability in the same places. The dirt under the building continues to inflate faster than incomes. Halving development charges and gutting inclusionary zoning will not break that cycle. It will merely subsidize and protect the participants who have profited most from it. True progress requires confronting the land market directly. Until we do, every new concession framed as “helping affordability” will continue to function as a transfer from the public to those who already own the most valuable asset in our cities: the land itself.

World’s most famous living chief—who dreamed up the Kamloops “mass grave” hoax—pays herself $800,000 (tax-free). Her band wants 1.25 million hectares in the Kamloops/Sun Peaks area of BC that is worth hundreds of billions. Every Casimir Matters

@danielfoch … and your point?

@AmosA9127 @SteveSaretsky 💯

@pmcondon2 Same for consensus about evil government fees, or AirBnBs or investors / “speculators”. The cause is all about the zoning of land which allows everyone to profit off its limited supply in desirable growing locations. 2/3rd of Canadians benefitted from it. Just went too far.

Ultimately this is proof that the consensus narrative, coming from both government and industry (and from much of the public too), that housing would be affordable if we just got rid of "restrictive zoning" was false. Now there is furious backfilling to escape showing they were wrong.

CTV News Vancouver @CTVVancouver

3 weeks ago

Carney says B.C. condo buyout proposal is about affordability, not bailouts ctvnews.ca/vancouver/arti…

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I have no words