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opendoor · 01-03-2025, 02:44 PM

It'll be interesting to see how long the honeymoon for the Conservatives lasts if (or more like when) they can't deliver on their biggest promises.

One of the pitfalls of blaming every problem under the sun (high housing costs, income inequality, etc.) on the federal government and promising easy solutions that you're setting yourself up for failure when you can't fix those things.

And there's not a lot of reason to think that they'll actually be able to deliver on the major stuff, particularly when they can't even identify the problem. Poilivere blames rising costs on "money printing" and promises to curb that when he comes to power, despite growth in money supply being pretty moderate by historical standards (even including the COVID years). Unless he wants to induce deflation or something, there really isn't much they can do there.

He also blames high housing costs on regulations, arguing that 60% of the cost of a new residence in Vancouver (about $1.3M) is due to government regulations. Which is absurd on the face of it, but even more ridiculous when you dig into the details. To arrive that that number, they have estimated the cost of construction based on the building permit value reported by the municipality, which normally has little to no basis in reality; it's just a value to determine the cost of the permit. So if the permit value is based on $200/sq ft and actual costs are $500/sq ft, then they claim that 60% of the construction cost was inflated due to the government.

For instance, the study he references on that (from the CD Howe Institute) notes that Regina has a huge gap between cost to build and market price, while Saskatoon does not. They posit that that's because Regina has tons of regulation that Saskatoon does not. But the more simple (and correct) explanation is that Saskatoon's permit values are based on actual construction values submitted by the applicant, whereas Regina just uses a flat $96/sq ft for its permit values, which has no relevance to actual costs; it's just a value used to calculate the fee. So obviously Regina's permit values are far more out of whack from the actual selling price than Saskatoon's, but it has nothing to do with regulation.

01-03-2025, 02:44 PM	#16645
opendoor Franchise Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Exp:	It'll be interesting to see how long the honeymoon for the Conservatives lasts if (or more like when) they can't deliver on their biggest promises. One of the pitfalls of blaming every problem under the sun (high housing costs, income inequality, etc.) on the federal government and promising easy solutions that you're setting yourself up for failure when you can't fix those things. And there's not a lot of reason to think that they'll actually be able to deliver on the major stuff, particularly when they can't even identify the problem. Poilivere blames rising costs on "money printing" and promises to curb that when he comes to power, despite growth in money supply being pretty moderate by historical standards (even including the COVID years). Unless he wants to induce deflation or something, there really isn't much they can do there. He also blames high housing costs on regulations, arguing that 60% of the cost of a new residence in Vancouver (about $1.3M) is due to government regulations. Which is absurd on the face of it, but even more ridiculous when you dig into the details. To arrive that that number, they have estimated the cost of construction based on the building permit value reported by the municipality, which normally has little to no basis in reality; it's just a value to determine the cost of the permit. So if the permit value is based on $200/sq ft and actual costs are $500/sq ft, then they claim that 60% of the construction cost was inflated due to the government. For instance, the study he references on that (from the CD Howe Institute) notes that Regina has a huge gap between cost to build and market price, while Saskatoon does not. They posit that that's because Regina has tons of regulation that Saskatoon does not. But the more simple (and correct) explanation is that Saskatoon's permit values are based on actual construction values submitted by the applicant, whereas Regina just uses a flat $96/sq ft for its permit values, which has no relevance to actual costs; it's just a value used to calculate the fee. So obviously Regina's permit values are far more out of whack from the actual selling price than Saskatoon's, but it has nothing to do with regulation.