Seniors Benefits Discussion- split from Liberal (Minority/Majority) Government 2025 - ???

[ytz]

There are lots of homes where I grew up that have been bought by retirees or online workers from Ontario and BC. They sell a home for over a million out West, buy a home for $300+, spend another $100-200 renovating, and still come out of it with lots of money left over.

Great for them, but bad for the locals not making big city money, or selling big city homes, who have to compete in the same housing market.

This has been a massive problem in Halifax. Go on viewpoint.ca and look at the housing prices in the HRM.

There's a real problem with "Just go rural."

First, it's a non-scalable solution that is quite condescending. No different than, "Just make more money," Or, "Learn to code."

Next, the second and third order effects are significant. If even a single digit percentage of downtown Toronto or Vancouver did this, the impact on those rural communities would be insane. There's condos in downtown Toronto that have more people living in them than some small towns. And they each of those units is probably worth more than most homes in said small towns.

Ultimately, this problem can't be fixed unless you fix it at the source. Every other suggestion is just displacement or can-kicking.

 

[Brad Sallows]

This is the direction the Halifax City council wants to move the city.

Whether the kinds of housing that produce high-density promote or hinder birth rates is probably not understood well enough to be making these kinds of decisions and then in another silo worrying about demographic threats to social spending.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Not looking to sell all and move completely out of the country, simply 3-4 months of the year when is dark, cold and depressing.

Consuming a dwelling in each of two countries?

 

[Brad Sallows]

There was a guy who for a bit was comparing average Canadian home prices to literal castles in Europe… the castles were usually cheaper.

Conversely I know of a Brit who claims he could never have aspired to the kind of house he has in Canada if he had remained in Britain.

 

[Czech_pivo]

Consuming a dwelling in each of two countries?

Possibly, depends if we can find a place that we'd want to stay in for 3-4months every winter year in and year out. Along with that, the ability to have the place 'cared for' for the remaining 8-9months of the year.

Otherwise, becomes a process of researching/finding a place each and every year for as long as we are healthy and can manage it.

 

[ytz]

Going back a few years, when I was still young and keen and riding a cruiser to calls, work by its nature took me to where people and their problems are, and I was seeing the families. And yeah - four kids might not be common, but I did see it. Or even five. Lots of families with three. And they sure as hell weren’t making $95k or even close to it. What they did make was probably from working multiple jobs.

So there are a lot of people doing it, you and I just don’t see them much because our paths tend not to cross in settings where family size is obvious. They’ve grown up with that being a norm.

Anecdotally/observationally? I think a lot are generationally recent immigrant families. They haven’t grown up in a norm of one bedroom per kid or all the other luxuries we have. Food is scratch cooked. The family car is a best up Toyota Sienna that just refused to die. They don’t see dad much because of work. But they get by. And sure as hell for them that CCB kicks in and makes a difference.

It would interesting to see Canadian fertility data that drills down beyond just live births per woman, but also gave granular stats for things like ethnicity, whether they’re immigrants or first generation, and also the mean age at first, second, and subsequent births. I suspect even our domestic birth rate is boosted by immigration.

This is kind of my point though. "Live like a new immigrant" is really not a generalizable solution. Even most of those immigrants hope that their kids don't have to live like that. That's why they moved here. We're not going to get the birth rate up by telling an entire generation that they and their kids should live worse lives. And heck, if you go to some cities, you'll see parents raising kids in shoebox condos already. I don't know how much lower we can go.

BTW on my personal side, I have always lived fairly small and frugal. Not in the least because my spouse had an unstable career not helped by the postings. Right now, I am in the biggest home I have ever owned. A two bedroom town.

 

[ytz]

Conversely I know of a Brit who claims he could never have aspired to the kind of house he has in Canada if he had remained in Britain.

Every Brit I know who came on exchange to Canada, ended up staying. One took a rank reduction to Maj and said his QoL was still higher than the UK. Ironically, his wife (Canadian) was the one who wanted to return to the UK. He bought a house with a pool in Carp and was working in Gatineau. His exact words were, "Do you know what it would take to have a detached house with a pool 40 mins from work in our capital?"

 

[ytz]

This is the direction the Halifax City council wants to move the city.

15-minute cities: walkable urban centres are open-air prisons, apparently - Halifax Examiner

I am completely baffled by people who seem to think that the way they live now is somehow not the result of social engineering, but that any attempt to change those structures is.

www.halifaxexaminer.ca

I am actually ok with this, its just not for me so I will/would be pushed out of the city.

This is literally what neighbourhoods were like till the 80s. Don't know why it's so controversial to be able to walk to a corner store. If you live in a neighbourhoods with one of those strip mall plazas that has a convenience store and a dental clinic, you live in this fancy thing called a "15 min city". Having to drive just to get milk or eggs sucks. And it also means that you usually now need two cars.

 

[Halifax Tar]

This is literally what neighbourhoods were like till the 80s. Don't know why it's so controversial to be able to walk to a corner store. If you live in a neighbourhoods with one of those strip mall plazas that has a convenience store and a dental clinic, you live in this fancy thing called a "15 min city". Having to drive just to get milk or eggs sucks. And it also means that you usually now need two cars.

I didn't say I was against it. Its just not for me.

 

[brihard]

This is kind of my point though. "Live like a new immigrant" is really not a generalizable solution. Even most of those immigrants hope that their kids don't have to live like that. That's why they moved here. We're not going to get the birth rate by telling an entire generation that they and their kids should live worse lives. And heck, if you go to some cities, you'll see parents raising kids in shoebox condos already. I don't know how much lower we can go.

BTW on my personal side, I have always lived fairly small and frugal. Not in the least because my spouse had an unstable career not helped by the postings. Right now, I am in the biggest home I have ever owned. A two bedroom town.

Yup, fair- I wasn’t trying to suggest that’s a solution, just addressing the ‘nobody’s getting CCB for four kids’ remark.

The larger question of fertility rated goes to so many different issues, both social and economic. Our metric is flawed too in the sense that it doesn’t account for how long before a woman has kids. Demographically and in terms of population growth there’s a huge different for society and the economy if those kids happen around Age 25 versus age 35.

Most of my classmates are early to mid 20s. The group I’m in school with will do well; solid graduate degree with good professional paths. They’ll be relatively high income on average. And they’re still fucked. It’s like the door on home ownership slammed shut a decade ago.

 

[Halifax Tar]

Yup, fair- I wasn’t trying to suggest that’s a solution, just addressing the ‘nobody’s getting CCB for four kids’ remark.

The larger question of fertility rated goes to so many different issues, both social and economic. Our metric is flawed too in the sense that it doesn’t account for how long before a woman has kids. Demographically and in terms of population growth there’s a huge different for society and the economy if those kids happen around Age 25 versus age 35.

Most of my classmates are early to mid 20s. The group I’m in school with will do well; solid graduate degree with good professional paths. They’ll be relatively high income on average. And they’re still fucked. It’s like the door on home ownership slammed shut a decade ago.

I mean the family unit has been under indirect attack for some time, both socially and economically.

Not only has it become very expensive to create a family, but we don't always do motherhood the favors we should by way of promoting it in comparison with careers and education.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I think it is possible in some rural areas of Canada.

It's possible in a lot more places than that. A "dirty secret" is that the housing cost problem is primarily one for the handful of large metro areas in Canada. It's bearable elsewhere, and recent changes at least show promise to put year-over-year price jumps back into reasonable bounds if not small declines.

A lot of ink is spilled arguing about the "unsustainability" of suburbs and low-density cities, but it's really the big cities that are strapped for cash and desperate to hang onto their business and residential tax bases. Increasingly it is possible to move concentrations of people working in major city centres away from where they are now to smaller population centres. There is a "first mover" problem for private enterprises (access to potential work force), but which will probably be overcome by federal and provincial governments distributing more of their footprints.

Relocation, like work-from-home or other schemes that allow people to work from less expensive locations, is a way of pumping up people's financial circumstances - by a lot - without trying to find non-existent new money for compensation increases or government transfers. At one point over a couple of decades ago, switching office location gave what I calculated to be a lift of several thousand dollars to the people whose commutes would be substantially reduced (there were many more people closer to the new office than the original, and the company cut costs on the change as well), or an approximate halving of house cost for anyone who chose to move (lower prices, larger lots, larger and newer homes). (Basically most people would keep the same amount of money sunk into their home and enjoy a really big upgrade.) At another point, switching from mostly in-office to WFH gave me what I calculated to be a $8K salary lift - at a minimum, using very conservative estimates. What is the value of moving work from a location where a given house costs $X to one where it costs, say, six-tenths of $X?

Major centres will politically fight back against the erosion of their tax bases. If the major urban areas hollow out a little, property values will fall. Municipal and district councils will have to be a lot more fiscally disciplined.

 

[Halifax Tar]

It's possible in a lot more places than that. A "dirty secret" is that the housing cost problem is primarily one for the handful of large metro areas in Canada. It's bearable elsewhere, and recent changes at least show promise to put year-over-year price jumps back into reasonable bounds if not small declines.

A lot of ink is spilled arguing about the "unsustainability" of suburbs and low-density cities, but it's really the big cities that are strapped for cash and desperate to hang onto their business and residential tax bases. Increasingly it is possible to move concentrations of people working in major city centres away from where they are now to smaller population centres. There is a "first mover" problem for private enterprises (access to potential work force), but which will probably be overcome by federal and provincial governments distributing more of their footprints.

Relocation, like work-from-home or other schemes that allow people to work from less expensive locations, is a way of pumping up people's financial circumstances - by a lot - without trying to find non-existent new money for compensation increases or government transfers. At one point over a couple of decades ago, switching office location gave what I calculated to be a lift of several thousand dollars to the people whose commutes would be substantially reduced (there were many more people closer to the new office than the original, and the company cut costs on the change as well), or an approximate halving of house cost for anyone who chose to move (lower prices, larger lots, larger and newer homes). (Basically most people would keep the same amount of money sunk into their home and enjoy a really big upgrade.) At another point, switching from mostly in-office to WFH gave me what I calculated to be a $8K salary lift - at a minimum, using very conservative estimates. What is the value of moving work from a location where a given house costs $X to one where it costs, say, six-tenths of $X?

Major centres will politically fight back against the erosion of their tax bases. If the major urban areas hollow out a little, property values will fall. Municipal and district councils will have to be a lot more fiscally disciplined.

Working from home and remote working should have been embraced.

In the HRM it was the camber of commerce and the downtown business associations that really pushed back against it.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Focus on housing costs continues to miss the real problem(s) affecting population growth.

Here is the Stats Can page that has the chart earlier linked. The big drop is 1960 to 1975; there is one obvious causal candidate. Whatever happened then is what has to be undone or mitigated. Everything else people are talking about - some of which requires improbably massive government interference - is just wiggling the line a little and still sitting under replacement rate.

Canada's policies are not promoting enough growth, and are militating too much against it.

 

[Eaglelord17]

Working from home and remote working should have been embraced.

In the HRM it was the camber of commerce and the downtown business associations that really pushed back against it.

Working from home gives worse results except in a few specific fields (coding and computer related fields generally). Employees do less and do worse quality work. Yes there is some people who are more productive as a individual, but generally those people even if they don't realize it often help out others at work bringing their coworkers standards higher and resulting in a greater productivity for the collective.

It also puts even more pressure on housing as part of the reason why everyone wants more space is the fact we spend more and more time indoors and as such need more space to make that work. If you need to have a office in your home too that is less space for other things or more home required.

 

[ytz]

Increasingly it is possible to move concentrations of people working in major city centres away from where they are now to smaller population centres.

This is like asking why so many tech companies set up in Silicon Valley. The reality is that certain things work best in concentration. And rare is the business that wants to build entirely outside the ecosystem. Success often builds on success and clusters develop into self-sustaining ecosystems.

Also, for why businesses (or at least the white collar parts) are in downtown areas and not burbs? Simple. Catchment. Put your bank HQ on Bay Street and the catchment that you can draw employees from, is the 5 million people who can take GO Transit to Union. Put that same facility in Mississauga and your talent pool reduces substantially. Probably closer to maybe the 3M that can drive there in an hour. I never understand why people think businesses are clueless about stuff like this. You really think businesses are ignoring potential savings of suburban offices because they have no clue? Or is it that they look at the savings and the tradeoff against the talent pool and decide the high cost of urban offices is worthwhile.

You could argue that they can go online. And sure why not. But at that point why even bother hiring expensive Canadians? If a job can be done fully remotely, absent some regulatory reason, it becomes entirely possible for that job to be done by a non-Canadian for less. Not a trend I would want to push.

 

[Brad Sallows]

This is like asking why so many tech companies set up in Silicon Valley. The reality is that certain things work best in concentration.

There are some things that need to work that way, and many more that don't. If the talent pool has to be the top 1% of the top 1%, options are limited. If not, options are enormous. Very few enterprises are so limited, and long tail case aren't really of much interest in this matter.

You really think businesses are ignoring potential savings of suburban offices because they have no clue?

In some cases, yes. Conventional wisdom and institutional inertia; "it's always been this way". Personally held prejudices of the people who make decisions. Fear of the unknown. Lack of imagination. Inability to execute. Qualitative versus quantitative thinking about the requirements of being where they currently are. Not really understanding what employees would prefer.

Office space costs money. Premium office space costs more money. Even without WFH or remote sites, moving work places to lower CoL areas is equivalent to giving employees a raise. Even without giving employees a benefit, it cuts real estate costs. WFH, remote, and relocation are three different options.

Although "first mover" takes the risk, "first mover" also reaps competitive advantage. Peers either yield that advantage, or follow suit.

If a job can be done fully remotely, absent some regulatory reason, it becomes entirely possible for that job to be done by a non-Canadian for less. Not a trend I would want to push.

It can, but if your "concern" is supposed to scare people away, forget it; that threshold was crossed long ago. It depends on the nature of the work. Social capital has value. Some businesses depend on knowledge of Canadian cultural context, even if they don't consciously think about it. Canadians living in Canada have that context; foreigners do not.