Ideas To Fix This Mess

I'd like to just go over a handful of solutions that could be used...

We need to make attempts to incentivize careers in the skilled trades. This will help to get more houses built overall. This can be done through the Government investing money into apprenticeship programs in and training for future trades workers. Some work can also be done socially to reduce some of the negative societal stigma towards blue-collar workers who are viewed by some as "lower class" or "uneducated just because they don't have university degrees." We should be supporting them as fellow Canadians that play a crucial role in keeping our infrastructure functioning. I cannot stress this point enough that ss Canadians, we are all in this together and if we want to solve this problem on our hands, we need to support one another and focus on out common need for housing.

To address this, the Trudeau government launched the National Housing Strategy (NHS) in an attempt to create more affordable housing. They spent over 100 billion dollars over ten years to try and end homelessness and fix the housing crisis. It was ultimately unsuccessful as housing is even less affordable than it was in the beginning. This attempt was based on the belief that the main issue was of supply and that if more houses were built, housing would become cheaper. It didn’t take into account other factors contributing to the issue. This actually contributed to the financialization of housing making it even less available for the average Canadian. Most of the housing created in this project had rent prices up to $2000 monthly meaning that it wasn’t actually a feasible option for low income families. Much of it became investment properties for the rich. We need to acknowledge that while supply is an issue, building more houses isn't enough when properties are being used purely as financial assets. We need to make it harder for rich multi-property home buyers to purchase homes as investments. One idea is to significantly increase taxes on investment properties and secondary/vacation homes. This will disincentivize the practice of home financialization and those that continue to do it, will be paying money that can be put used to help lower income Canadians have homes.

A final point is that the Canadian government should be focusing its efforts on Canadians. Canada has sent over 22 billion dollars to help support Ukraine which is not a problem in principle. The issue is that when Canadian citizens are struggling to make ends meet, there are much better uses for this money. As I have said, we need to work together as a Country to solve this, and I believe we need to clean up out own problems before we try to fix other ones.

In short, we need more homes. We need people to actually live in them, and we need out government to support it's citizens before getting involved with foreign conflicts in times of uncertainty.