Daryl
Interesting. Can the Canadian Conservative Party investigate a worker in an American republican bot farm?
It really begs the issue as to whether China has the right idea about religious faith groups. All religions are welcome in China, as long as they do not infringe on the right of the people to preserve the dominant Chinese cultural values, nor threaten the ability of the people themselves to determine their governance. The Catholic church (not the Roman Catholic Empire-Church) is welcome in China, as long as all of the church ‘leaders’ (bishops and such) are loyal to China and the Chinese people, not a foreign ‘pope’ that has no connection to the thousands of years old cultural traditions of China.
This group clearly wants authoritarian fascist control over all people, disguised as some authority given by a ‘supreme beyond-human power’ or ‘supreme divinity’. The Divine Right of Kings. There is absolutely no difference between what this group wants and the government in Iran. Only the name of the ‘religion’ is changed. The goal is the same.
As soon as the home prices hit rock bottom, far below the supply-demand level, people will buy cheap, then raise the price way back up because there will be a bidding war and those with money will still bid the prices way up. House prices are where they should be. The market decides. Only way around this is a pure socialist country where the ‘government’ owns all the land, and rents it out on a perpetual basis to those who want it. They can never sell it, so land prices can never go stratosphere. The government is always owns it. The rent is in lieu of property taxes.
They are trying to solve the wrong problem.
Mainstream big developers will never build ‘affordable housing’ when they can sell every single ‘non-affordable house’ they can build, at huge profits. They have no competition. There are just too many people who CAN afford the expensive houses on the market. That is why the housing prices are so high - the demand is there.
The ‘affordable housing’ crisis will never go away until huge amounts of pre-development money are made available to not-for-profit housing developers. Big developers have absolutely no problem coming up with the initial development start-up money needed to get the housing developments through the land acquisition, planning, and pre-construction phases, but this money just isn’t available to affordable housing developers.
Unless the initial funding bottleneck is solved, all of the downstream measures (subsidized mortgages, help with initial payments, and such) are fruitless, The units are not going to be built in the first place, so making it easier to purchase a non-existent unit is just meaningless.
One potential solution would be for the various levels of governments to introduce a new type of ‘government-backed’ bond, that people could buy like they used to be able to buy Canada Savings Bonds or War Bonds. The government would guarantee the interest, and the payout, like they guarantee bank deposits. The money would be made available to not-for-profit developers like Habitat for Humanity and community housing co-ops, as seed money to pay for the initial pre-construction costs of building affordable housing. Since they are government-backed, they could be included in tax free and RRSP plans. At the same time, it is not government money or a government hand-out, so it would not affect government budgets or taxes. It would all still be private money that bought the bonds. The bonds, along with interest, would be repaid when the units sold.
I really do not think the population as depicted in the movie would really care. Nutrition is nutrition. Protein is protein. Only someone who has never suffered long-term food insecurity would ever be moved to action, and in the movie, they were a small minority that was quite happy with the way things were going.
