Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Why I'd rather watch the birdfeeder than the budget speech

I used to care, but things have changed. Mostly what’s changed is once you’ve heard a certain number of these, like a half-century’s worth, you begin to discern a pattern; nothing ever turns out! And it’s never the fault of anyone in Ottawa! This year’s budget was focused big time on housing. In 2015, the year Team Fluffy was first elected, there was a best seller out on the Canadian housing crisis. It was a real and visible thing in 2015. The Liberals spent the next eight years turbo-charging the crisis with the most counterproductive policies imaginable. Idiocies abound. Conestoga College over a few years went from having a few hundred foreign students to 30,000. The temporary foreign worker program expanded from it’s origins of bringing in cheap labour for Canadian farmers, to bringing in cheap labour to staff Tim Hortons franchises. And for years, Team Trudeau maintained a pathway to paradise open at Roxham Road for the convenience of anyone from anywhere with the initiative to make it that far. All these people have to live somewhere! Until about six months ago, making that observation got you branded a racist xenophobe. When the political consultants and pollsters suddenly realized three-quarters of voters now met that definition, the Liberal Party took notice. Hence the sudden compassion for the millions of Canadians priced out of the housing market, largely by government policy! I whole-heartedly applaud any initiative to build affordable housing, but if the last fifty budget speeches are anything to go by, don’t get your hopes up.

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