If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars): Book 1: $2.99 Book 2: $3.89 Book 3: $3.89 Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLII–Housing ‘Crisis’: Real or Contrived?
September 28, 2023 (original posting date)
Mexico (1988). Photo by author.
Housing ‘Crisis’: Real or Contrived?
Some morning thoughts (prompted by the attached article; and a version of which I posted on my Town’s Facebook ‘Politics’ Group) that focus on my own province’s (Ontario, Canada) context regarding the issue of a housing ‘crisis’ and their attempts to ‘juice’ development/construction — well, really, to create an environment where well-connected developers can flip relatively cheaply-purchased lands. That this has been ‘outed’ and stopped for the moment is perhaps good for the ecologically-sensitive lands that were under consideration for development[1], but does little to impact the ‘growth forever’ fever running rampant amongst Ontario’s populace.
With the recent shenanigans surrounding the Greenbelt (see these previous Contemplations: September 21, January 29, March 19, June 15), I have to wonder how much impact questionable practices and behind-closed-door deal-making/influence-peddling adds to the issue of our housing ‘crisis’, and/or is this all part and parcel of manipulation/leveraging of perceptions and beliefs — narrative management for want of a better term — to help market expanding growth that benefits a few at the expense of the many.
Is this ‘crisis’ truly the result of inadequate supply (as our developers, financiers, real estate industry, politicians, etc. would like us to believe — a very ‘convenient’ narrative for those profiting from a greatly expanding housing market and the fear of missing out that the perception of ‘shortages’ creates) or is currency devaluation via credit expansion, ‘speculation’, and ‘short-term rental investments’ a more significant contributor to skyrocketing prices?
And, of course, the exponential increase in housing prices (and rents) is not simply an Ontario or Canada phenomenon; it is taking placing in many nations, particularly where currency/credit expansion has increased dramatically.
Much of this ‘new money’ seeks a place to exist (and hopefully grow, but not always) and a not non-significant portion has flowed into housing leading to the price increases we have witnessed the past decade+ (one need only look at the gargantuan increase in debt held globally to see this — it is in the hundreds of trillions of US dollars[2] — with a very dramatic increase in the rate of growth in just the last couple of years, growing some 50% in less than a decade; and this has occurred, not coincidentally I would argue, when we have witnessed housing costs jump dramatically). It has also led to an increasing concentration of housing in the hands of the ‘wealthy’ — as they can more easily access credit and/or have funds to ‘shelter’ — leading to the less ‘advantaged’ being shut out of the market.
Not only have we witnessed a huge flow of money into AirBnB and the like (there are literally over a thousand of such dwellings in York Region alone), but the ownership of multiple dwellings by quite a number of people also removes supply from the market (I recently heard a radio interview with a real estate agent who claimed to have 100+ homes in his personal portfolio — homes that he ‘owned’).
None of these contributing factors are considered in the mainstream narratives surrounding housing. All we hear, repeatedly, is that supply is inadequate and demand ‘demands’ that we build hundreds of thousands, no millions, more. Only such an ‘investment’ (and the opening up of ‘locked’ lands as a recent government advertisement asserts) can address the crisis (and don’t even get me started on the resource/energy constraints/limits and/or ecological systems destruction aspects of this growth forever insanity).
The narrative about supply and demand on its surface makes sense, but only in a world where all the other contributing factors are ignored. Few if any of these other variables penetrate the Overton Window that the profit-makers/-takers/-extractors have created: our housing ‘crisis’ and ‘affordability’ can ONLY be addressed by way of rapid and significant expansion of supply!
Complex issues are, well, complex and we have allowed a less-than-complete (I’d argue convenient to the profiteers) narrative to steer the conversation and thus most people’s beliefs. The ‘experts’ keep saying it’s supply and demand that requires ongoing and ramped up construction of homes, so it must be true.
But ‘truth’ is a funny thing. The recent propaganda, er, I mean marketing by the provincial government (at taxpayer expense, no less) in Ontario about housing supply/demand makes the assertion that Ontario has become home to ½ million new residents in the past year so we absolutely have to build a million and a half more homes as quickly as possible. The problem with this ‘truth’ is that this number of immigrants taking up residence in Ontario is actually more than the official immigration number for all of Canada and, of course, not all of these immigrants remain in Ontario. A lot do, but certainly not 115%.
And if this relatively minor ‘mistake’ is being asserted widely in part of the narrative management around the housing ‘crisis’, what else is not being accurately disseminated/reported? (NOTE: while a teacher several decades ago, I uncovered a similar marketing falsehood in a document the provincial government of the time was distributing where they asserted that research demonstrated that student results had been steadily declining. In my attempt to see the research that supported this — I spoke to a dozen+ ‘officials’ in the Ministry of Education and Education Quality and Accountability Office — it became clear that the statement in the document was unsupported: there was no such research and those I spoke to eventually admitted this, stating “there is no supporting documentation, little long-term comparable assessment data, and no systematic study has been carried out by the Ministry.” The assertion in the document was pure fabrication to steer perceptions/beliefs in order to justify/rationalise government policy/actions. In other words, the government was lying and depending upon people’s tendency to defer to authority/experts in order to ‘manage’ beliefs.).
Questions about so many aspects of this issue of a housing ‘crisis’ have been left unanswered or rather conveniently ignored as the whole growth machine carries on and the folks steering things continue to make money hand-over-fist… what could possibly go wrong?
But how typical of government to highlight a societal ‘problem’ and then, conveniently, offer a ‘solution’ that just happens to address the primary motivation of our ruling caste: the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. More for the ‘advantaged’ as the ‘disadvantaged’ pay the price.
If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars): Book 1: $2.99 Book 2: $3.89 Book 3: $3.89 Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.
If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars): Book 1: $2.99 Book 2: $3.89 Book 3: $3.89 Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.
If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars): Book 1: $2.99 Book 2: $3.89 Book 3: $3.89 Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.
The Trans Mountain Expansion Project, now finally completed and operational after years of delays, is changing the fortunes of the oil sands.
Canada’s oil sands producers have started ramping up production last year in anticipation of the start-up of exports through the TMX pipeline.
The production increases in the oil sands are the result of the expansion of operational projects with existing infrastructure.
Canada’s oil output is booming as producers ramp up projects and extraction amid expanded market access and narrowing discounts of the Canadian heavy crude to the U.S. benchmark.
The Trans Mountain Expansion Project, now finally completed and operational after years of delays, is changing the fortunes of the oil sands producers in Alberta, giving them access to markets in Asia and the U.S. West Coast.
Constrained for years due to insufficient egress, Canada’s oil now has nearly 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of additional market access. The expanded Trans Mountain pipeline is tripling the capacity of the original pipeline to 890,000 bpd from 300,000 bpd to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to British Columbia on the Pacific Coast.
And producers are taking advantage of this. They began ramping up production at the end of last year in anticipation of the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) start in the first half of this year. Canadian oil firms now get more bang for their buck as the discount of Western Canada Select (WCS), the benchmark for Canadian heavy crude sold at Hardisty in Alberta, has narrowed relative to the U.S. crude oil benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) in recent weeks.
Moreover, the production increases in the oil sands are the result of the expansion of operational projects with existing infrastructure, so the capital expenditure – which is very high for this type of crude extraction – has been lower than for building projects from scratch.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Smoke rises from Alberta wildfire near TeePee Creek
Thousands of Canadians have been ordered to leave their homes in Fort Nelson, British Columbia due to the threat of a wildfire.
The blaze began on Friday night and was described by officials as “exhibiting extreme fire behaviour”.
Wildfires have also led to evacuation alerts and orders in the neighbouring province of Alberta.
The Canadian government has warned this year’s weather conditions would mean a greater wildfire risk in the country.
The Parker Lake fire, as it’s been called by the British Columbia Wildfire Service (BCWS), was 8sq km (3 sq miles) in size as of Saturday morning after growing rapidly overnight.
Some 3,000 people in Fort Nelson – located in northeast BC about 1,600km (1,000 miles) from Vancouver – were ordered to evacuate.
Rob Fraser, mayor of the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality, told CBC News the fire began after high winds knocked a tree over and it crashed onto a power line and caught fire.
“And then by the time our firefighters were able to get down there, the wind had whipped this up into a fire that they weren’t able to handle with the apparatus that we had,” Mr Fraser said.
Strong winds and dry conditions are making the fire more difficult to fight, according to the BCWS.
As of Saturday, the fire was being fought by nine helicopters, as well as ground crews and a structure protection specialist, whose job it is to protect structures affected by wildfires.
In Alberta, people in the Grande Prairie region are under evacuation alerts and some have been asked to leave due to a blaze burning 4km east of the hamlet of TeePee Creek in the province’s northwest.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bill C-63, otherwise known as the Online Harms Act, is the most dangerous piece of legislation ever foisted on Canadians, and possibly the most dangerous piece of legislation currently on the books anywhere in the world.
The Online Harms Act is a counter-intel propaganda offensive orchestrated by Canada’s Zionist Deep State, specifically the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). If this bill is passed, this article will be considered hate speech, punishable by a maximum sentence of life imprisonment in a federal penitentiary.
This bill does not threaten to punish criminals, but those guilty of thought crime.
If Bill C-63 passes, it will empower the Canadian Human Rights Commission to prosecute Canadians for non-criminal hate speech.
The punishment for an offence is up to LIFE IN PRISON:
Hate Is the New Political Heresy
Hate has become the buzzword of our times. But hate has taken on entirely new political significance. Hate is now being used as a political weapon by lobby groups to silence, smear and attack their opponents and critics.
As a political and social phenomenon, hate speech is often defined as any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin colour, sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin.
Bill C-63 amends the Criminal Code to define hatred as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification” that is “stronger than disdain or dislike.”
Any enlightened individual or society is opposed to hate, but hate is a subjective emotional reaction and it cannot be measured or quantified. We cannot measure the amount of hate in pounds or inches.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
No one wants EVs, but governments keep subsidizing them; Canada’s economy is being zombified; Education — higher and otherwise — is still woke, but not awake; and, cursive as cure.
TRUTH IN ADVERTISING: Even Ford’s own marketing materials admit that EVs are a product “drivers really want… but just don’t know it yet.”
Last week Ford announced its electric vehicle (EV) division, known as Model e, lost $1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2024. That translates to a loss of $132,000 per vehicle for the 10,000 units the company managed to sell. Ford anticipates the losses will continue to mount for the rest of the year, with a projected annual loss of $5 billion.
The world’s largest EV maker, Tesla, is also hemorrhaging profits. The company’s adjusted earnings for the first quarter fell by 48%, underperforming even the lowered expectations set by most Wall Street analysts.
But governments are still pouring in massive amounts of taxpayer dollars to subsidize a product that consumers don’t want to buy.
On Thursday, Canada announced a $5 billion corporate welfare package for Honda to build an EV battery plant and manufacture EVs in Ontario. When Justin Trudeau released a video about the new deal on X over the weekend, the comments were not kind:
DeTocqueville14: You bribing Honda with money stolen from taxpayers isn’t them betting on you.
govt_corrupt: Justin Trudeau bribes Honda. Buys 1k jobs for $5B and bets on an industry with declining sales and rising inventories. Govt ‘investing’ at its finest…
jpkiekens: 5 million $ per job subsidy for an industry plagued with a huge oversupply of vehicles and with insufficient electric energy supply in most provinces. Bravo. It’s genuine theatre. But a very bad play.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Max Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, says the new federal budget will send the country deeper into debt than it already is.
Our latest episode of the Collapse Life podcast features a returning guest — Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada. He says the new federal budget is anti-growth and will send the country deeper into debt than it already is. He tells host Zahra Sethna there is no way Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can win the October 2025 election given the inflationary economic crisis people are experiencing. But he argues that Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, is ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’ Find out what Bernier says this anti-growth budget means for Canada, and how policies in Canada might start to affect people in other countries, too.
Watch on YouTube:
Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v4rnttc-canadas-anti-growth-budget-is-an-indicator-of-financial-crisis.html
Canada’s justice minister, Arif Virani, proposes speech-restrictive legislation at an event backed by corporate sponsorship from Meta and AWS.
Canada’s government, represented by “captain of censorship” Arif Virani – the country’s justice minister and attorney general, will use an upcoming event as the opportunity to once again push for more speech-restrictive legislation, allegedly solely in order to deal with online “harm and hate speech.”
No surprise there, but the list of the sponsors of the event – dubbed, “Where Online Harms Have Real World Consequences: The Case for Legislating Against Harm and Hate” – is interesting. It includes Meta, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
There could be different interpretations of this, one being that the giants want online speech regulated “to entrench their positions and keep out dissenting views” – as Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski put it.
Or it could be that Canada’s relentless policies damaging these companies’ business interests in the process of restricting speech are motivating the likes of Meta and Amazon to try to stay on the authorities’ good side, including through sponsorships.
And, two wrong things get to be true at the same time, so we may be witnessing some combination thereof.
In any case, the Empire Club, where the gathering is to be held, announced it by saying participants will be able to learn about the government’s plans to “tame some of the worst excesses of life online, and protect the rights of all Canadians who wish to express themselves without fear.”
All Canadians, that is, except those Virani would like to be put under house arrest or cut off their internet access as a kind of dystopian “preventive measure” – namely, when there is “fear” they might commit whatever’s designated as hate propaganda or crime, at some point in the future.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The 2024 wildfire season roared to life across Western Canada this weekend as crews battled multiple out-of-control blazes
Multiple fires broke out across Western Canada this weekend amid a persistent and severe drought affecting British Columbia and Alberta.
B.C. fire crews are working to extinguish several out-of-control fires in the Cariboo Fire Centre, while officials issued an evacuation alert for some neighbourhoods in northern Alberta amid a new out-of-control blaze that sparked near Fort McMurray on Sunday.
CANADA’S WILDFIRES: Visit The Weather Network’s wildfire hub to keep up with the latest on the active start to wildfire season across Canada.
Several B.C. fires burning out of control
The B.C. Wildfire Service reported an out-of-control wildfire on Saturday about 45 km south of Quesnel.
The fire quickly spread from 50 hectares on Saturday to more than 1,600 hectares by Sunday evening. Officials suspect the blaze, named the Burgess Creek Fire, was sparked by human activities.
Provincial fire officials reported more than 120 active wildfires across B.C. by Sunday evening, the vast majority of which are considered ‘holdover’ fires still smouldering from the previous season.
Seven of the ongoing fires are considered out of control, while three more are being held by crews.
Evacuation alert issued for community in Alberta
Crews in neighbouring Alberta responded to a wildfire spreading near Fort McMurray late Sunday afternoon. The out-of-control blaze southeast of the city is one of more than a dozen active wildfires in the province that crews are working to extinguish.
Local officials issued an evacuation alert for the Saprae Creek Estates “due to the potential of the nearby wildfire spreading towards the community,” the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo posted on its website Sunday.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
