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

[Altair]

You just described my childhood. Single family homes were less than 1700 sqft, siblings shared rooms, meat and potatoes for dinner, and a beat up Chrysler van for transport.

Yeah, that was my childhood. And many others like me as well. Growing up in apartments with no yards, playing on side streets. Going to the park 2 kms away until you hear your mother yelling from a million kms away.

And you know what happened? In my experience anyways. I made friends with people in the middle income strata. I went to their houses. I saw their yards. And you know what happens? At least for me? I want better for my kids than I had for myself. I at zero point was in a small dinky apartment thinking ya, time for kids.

Thankfully the CAF helped push me up into the middle class pretty fast and I had my first and only at 28, but if it were not for the CAF I might still not have a child.

 

[lenaitch]

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.

Not only that, at the management and executive level, big banks don't exist in a vacuum; they exist with other big banks, major accounting, advertising and law firms. You might be able to get the worker bees to live in Walkerton or Wawa, but not the high rollers. A large urban area is the centre of mass for commerce. As far as I know, there is not a single operating mine in any large city in Canada, but the head office for Agnico-Eagle is in Toronto and Teck Resources is in Vancouver. I wonder why that is.