[opendoor]

Originally Posted by jg13

Hello, I'm not going to go through the entire thread and I know the majority of CalgaryPuck posters are 45+ in age but 80% of the people I talk to and are within 5 years of my age (33) are all voting conservative without a second thought, myself included.

I'm not in the 45+ age range, but I do think you should think a bit more critically (as should everyone) because some of what you wrote seems to be incorrect, and it's hard to make an informed decision on that basis.

My question is:

I would like to know why those of you that are above 45 in age or older that own their own homes, think that Mark Carney will benefit us in our 30s over Pierre Polieivere. Pierre has stated he will cut immigration to the point where we're building more homes faster than we allow people into Canada and will allow first time home buyers to purchase their first homes without the 5% GST included in those homes.

That's the Liberal policy you're talking about. First-time homebuyers are given a tax break on purchases under $1M, and because it's narrowly focused, it won't impact the market price of new houses (i.e. sellers can't try to inflate the market price as a result of an increase in buying power because they have to be able to attract non-tax exempt buyers too).

Whereas the Conservative policy removes GST for all purchases under $1.3M. So first time buyers are no longer given preferential treatment, so they have to compete with everyone else just like they do now. And because all units under that threshold would be tax exempt, developers may be able to use most of that tax break to pad their margins. So if someone could spend $1M now, they'd buy a 950K place and pay $50K GST; after the new policy, they could afford a $1M selling price for the same unit.

It's not quite that simple, and even the Conservarive policy would likely would improve affordability slightly, but it also comes at a significant cost in tax revenue. Whereas the Liberal policy is more narrowly focused at the people who need it the most (younger first-time homebuyers).

The reason for the above question is because of 80% of the people I talk to in my age range (millenial) is because we're concerned about never being able to afford a home and if we're never able to afford a home, it affects many things specifically, like starting a family. From my understanding, Mark Carney wants to increase the Canadian population to 100 million by 2100 which is 800,000 a year when Canada has been known to build 200,000 places of living a year. He has publicly stated this.

Do you have a source for the bolded? I've never seen any public statements from him to that effect, though I could be wrong. And you don't even seem sure yourself, going from "From my understanding..." to a categorical statement of fact.

But really, as mentioned above, 100M population by 2100 isn't particularly noteworthy growth. It's 1.2% a year, which is roughly in line to what we've had for the last 40 or so years, and significantly below what we had before that.

As for 800K a year, that's not how compound growth works. If you invest $100K in the stock market and project it'll be worth $4M in 40 years, that doesn't mean it's growing by $100K in year one. Population growth is similar. 1.2% growth would mean an increase of about 500K a year for the next decade or so, and it'd take until 2065 until the population was growing by 800K in a year.

Given Canada's average household size of 2.4 people per household, 500K a year growth means that 208K housing units would be needed to absorb that growth. Last year Canada had 245K housing starts. That's not to say we don't have a current housing deficit (which means units need to be constructed faster than population growth), but a 1.2% growth rate is something that should be easily absorbed with reasonable housing policy even accounting for that.

And to me at least, of the two parties, the Liberals seem to have a more credible plan for increasing construction by bringing back some of the policies that existed in the 1950s-1970s, when housing starts were at an all-time high relative to the population.