Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death | Hacker News Reader

Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

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79 pointsmamama3143 comments

Whats wild about affordable housing in Canada is that for every newly built unit we lose 15. Yet almost nobody is talking about that part. You cant build your way out of the problem before you plug the leak. But there are obvious misaligned incentives to do that. The value system of our economy and culture seems to be obsessed with making basic needs a profit center, at all costs, regardless of the consequence.

I’m not attacking you, your heart is in the right place, but your comment illustrates the problem.

Housing absolutely should be a profit center. Home and multifamily builders should be unleashed to build as much housing as they can. Let them be greedy; let them get rich. It’ll make housing more affordable for everyone.

High housing costs aren’t a failure of the free market - they’re a failure of central planning at every level of government.

The problem with encouraging builders to go hard with few restrictions is you end up with a low-density urban sprawl that introduces a ton of its own issues. You end up with massively long commutes and a ton of infrastructure that now needs to be maintained, and none of that cost falls on the builder so they happily build fields of new homes miles away from work places or services.

> The problem with encouraging builders to go hard with few restrictions is you end up with a low-density urban sprawl that introduces a ton of its own issues.

You only end up with that if that is what sells, i.e. that is what homebuyers want. If the average Canadian didn't want that, the developers would build something else.

Your real problem here is with the preferences of the people who buy new homes, and you aren't going to change those preferences by regulating housing developers.

People hold those preferences because when you live in the burbs you bear less of the cost of the externalities of urban sprawl. Basically, you get more bang for your buck.

The property tax rate is the same for a whole municipality whether you are downtown in high density housing or in the burbs.

You need more roads/public transportation/water mains/gas mains/buried cables etc to serve fewer people in the suburbs.

Make property taxes proportional to the infrastructure required to support a neighbourhood.

If in Canada they get gas, water, sewer and electricity paid by taxes then why not just charge the users instead? And yes, the payment for utility includes the maintenance cost. Roads wear depends on the amount of traffic so if you really wanted to be fair you might end up with the dense urbanites paying more (also we supposed to pay for this with the fuel and registration taxes in the US).

Public transportation in suburbia? Does it really happen in Canada? In the US suburbia subsidizes public transportation without using it.

This is a terrible argument. The costs associated with building wide, rather than building tall are hidden in future taxes and not disclosed to the homebuyer. Pretending there's some 'all costs' calculator over the useful life of the asset which is presented to homebuyers is incorrect.

Not only that, but tax funds are typically funneled from denser, more sensibly planned areas of cities to the more well-off sprawled suburbs. So people who aren't even involved in the process of participating in the market for sprawl built houses will pay for the resultant externalities created by the need for maintenance.

That’s true, but take a look at the zoning laws as well. Some places have better zoning laws than the US and Canada. I think that Japan is frequently mentioned here, because there are only a dozen types of zones and all of the ones that allow housing allow the property owner to rebuild at a higher density. (There are several types of industrial–only zones that give them a way to prevent homes from being built too near heavy industry.)

That's true, but it's also the case that most Canadians (and Americans) would be very dissatisfied with the quality of Japanese housing. Frankly it's crap -- thin walls, single-pane windows even today, no garages, tiny kitchens with two burners and no ovens...

In Japan people are far more reliant on the conscientiousness of their neighbors to maintain a peaceful and quiet environment than people in Canada and the United States are. They also have a low crime rate and safer, cleaner inner cities.

Obviously an entire population lives this way, and it works well for them, but that kind of housing situation would be a hard sell in North America.

That may be true, and it would be nice if people here were so considerate as well... yeah that's not happening.

However the ZONING codes could be adopted to much benefit. The BUILDING codes, I still maintain we need to spec even higher, so that I can have a refuge of solitude from the sounds, smells, and presence of Wheaton's Law failing humans.

Is Japan really what unusual? From what I hear the building codes are uniform so the spec for high density housing is similar to that of a single family home.

If builders in Canada have to build high density housing to a more costly specification then it’s justified that they won’t find it cost effective even if given the chance to do so.

In effect, the low cost of Japanese housing could be from both the zoning code and the building code. (As for culture, those two affect culture and are affected by culture so it’s hard to distinguish.)

The quality of the buildings that get built is unrelated to the type of buildings that are allowed.

What a current buyer wants in a Nash equilibrium of weird incentives and zoning laws, is the Just the Way Things Are?

Zoning laws don't come out of nowhere. People like living in suburbs, so their governments pass zoning laws that keep the area suburban.

Zoning laws are an expression of preferences by the existing homeowners who want their neighborhoods to retain their current characteristics.

Look at the history of how this happened. The suburbs did not magically appear out of nowhere after WWII against the wishes of the population, and they were not legalized into existence with zoning laws. They were built, people liked them and bought houses in them, and then they passed zoning laws to keep them.

Ban commuter cars from cities and watch the demand for high density urban housing explode.

Basically replicate the pre-car environment that the world's greatest cities were designed and developed during.

Many large city centers in Europe already restrict or outright ban commuter cars.

I was speaking more as a solution for American cities. :)

Yes. So, this is tried and known to work.

In that case it seems like the developers having more or less rules doesn't actually matter, no?

It does matter because most of the city of Toronto is zoned to prevent apartment buildings, low-rises, duplex, etc. Only a single family home is permitted.

The only things being built in Toronto are either single family homes, or giant 50 floors condos. It takes YEARS of consultations to build anything in Toronto so developers only bother going through that process for very very high buildings. It's not worth it for the type of higher density apartment of 3-4 stories.

It's called the missing middle, there's a good podcast/article here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-missing-middle/

If 10% of people have the means to be willing to pay 20x for a home constructed in a way that 90% of people can't afford, that is what your average homebuyer wants.

> The problem with encouraging builders to go hard with few restrictions is you end up with a low-density urban sprawl

Low-density sprawl is a result of local governments banning medium and high density building, not the free market. 80% of Austin is still single family homes despite a massive influx to the area. This is not because single-family homes are the most profitable to build, but because they are the only thing that you can legally build.

So you are of the belief that, if it weren't for the regulations, the suburbs would be full of high density housing?

...yes? If I can buy four adjacent $1,000,000 homes and put up a mid-rise with 25 units at $400,000/each, I've just made $9,000,000 minus construction expenses.

Then why aren't they taking the time and energy to get those areas rezoned? It's possible, and I'm sure it's less expensive than the potential profit, especially if they choose an area far enough out that there are few neighbors to complain.

>Then why aren't they taking the time and energy to get those areas rezoned?

Because of well-organized opposition from busy body homeowners. City governments aren't captured by business-interests the way state governments and the federal government are.

>especially if they choose an area far enough out that there are few neighbors to complain.

There are always enough people to complain about anything to kill it. A lot of people oppose anything new in their city entirely- not just in their neighborhood.

Why do you think those areas are restrictive with their zoning? Because people wrongfully want it that way. A developper is focused on making people and equipment work, not on being a provider of good zoning laws, and so won't fight against those tides.

In Canada, exclusionary zoning rules prohibited the construction of mid-rise housing in most cities. Developers would build it if the system wasn’t set up to stop them from doing so. They want to sell more units of housing per acre of land.

As I asked another user - so you belief that the suburban sprawl would be high density housing instead? We'd have giant apartment buildings on the edge of the city?

No, they would be in the center of the city where it is currently illegal to do it.

Listen to this recent podcast from 99% invisible (or read the summary), it explains it very well. Most of the territory of Toronto excludes apartment buildings.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-missing-middle/

> We'd have giant apartment buildings on the edge of the city?

Not necessarily high rises, but certainly apartment buildings, yes. This is the development pattern you see in places like Austin, Texas.

Yes, you see that in a lot of places. The city zoning laws mandate single–family homes, but then you get to the city boundary and revert to the county rules and a bunch of apartment complexes suddenly appear as if by magic.

Actually we already see apartments going up at the edges of some cities, because of a combo of these factors making it tough to do otherwise. However, I also found that in Winnipeg, condo owners pay the same property taxes as a detached homeowner in a brand new cul-de-sac. For a $330k cad condo (probably not going to get much higher in price later) you pay $4k in annual property taxes on top of your condo fees and mortgage. That's an entire month of food if you ate out every single day. Meanwhile in Vancouver, the same type of place literally costs $1m in a less desirable area, but you pay only ~2k in property taxes, which contributes to fund 58% of the city's operating budget, and the city is able to improve over time.

Same zoning problems though

Yes, this is a common sight outside many major cities. You end up with mid rise or high rise buildings randomly dotted around the burbs. It’s good that this housing exists, but because it’s not concentrated in the core, it doesn’t lead to the best possible outcomes. It’s hard to make the transit system work when housing and jobs are scattered around. You end up with lower-income workers commuting from an apartment over an hour away.

The vision of nice urban high density housing is a myth aside from very few exceptions that also happen to be quite expensive. Most people would want to escape that if their finances allow it. Pollution, noise, too much proximity to others are factors that makes this just plainly not attractive. Proximity to the work place is nice, but not the only factor that needs to be considered. This is primarily a problem of transport infrastructure.

look at the far outer suburbs of Dallas or most of the large cities in Arizona for some terrible examples of unconstrained urban sprawl.

By the free market alone, letting everyone get a home sounds like a terrible decision. There's a finite number of people that need a home and by the point everyone gets their own home, your business is doomed.

On the other side, letting housing to be crazy expensive, with few people capable of getting a new house, will always be profitable.

If the free market were one entity that could coordinate and say "nobody build more housing, let's squeeze as much money from what we have already", sure, that would be pretty profitable. But if there are enough participants in the marketplace (which depends on the barriers to entry to homebuilding, like regulatory capture, knowledge, capital, and permits) one will want to undercut the others and build houses marginally cheaper than the competition until their marginal profit is zero. Having everyone agree not to build houses and keep prices high is like the "nobody snitch" outcome of a prisoner's dilemma: it's not a stable state/Nash equilibrium. At least this is what I heard in Econ 101, I'm sure I'm missing much nuance here.

>At least this is what I heard in Econ 101

Yeah, and you probably also learned a laundry list of caveats which lead to the principle you're describing being non-applicable. Real estate is not a fully commodifiable good because it is non-fungible. A house in the middle of a city is not the same thing as a house 2 hours out of the city core. There is a limited amount of under-developed land to repurpose, and a limited amount of construction crews and machinery available at any given time to perform the work in question, so building production does not scale linearly with capital investment.

Construction has ALWAYS prioritized high-margin upscale dense construction where possible - if you own a block of rundown downtown shacks, you put a tower on it the moment you can. This isn't the issue - no one's complaining about Canadian Real Estate's ability to build a Class 1 commercial building or a high-end condominium complex. Toronto has been literally the number one city by crane count by a MASSIVE margin for years. The issue is how we can get widespread construction of low margin projects, Low-rise residential complexes, affordable housing, etc.

Why does a giant condo building have to be high-end? Wouldn't that be the most efficient way to house people even if they weren't focused on profit?

>Why does a giant condo building have to be high-end?

Because the margins are higher and you can't put up infinite towers.

>if they weren't focused on profit

They are.

>By the free market alone, letting everyone get a home sounds like a terrible decision

Ah, but that's the thing about the free market. It doesn't care, for better or worse. If the barriers to building new houses are low and demand is high, new houses will get built and prices will drop until an equilibrium is reached.

>On the other side, letting housing to be crazy expensive, with few people capable of getting a new house, will always be profitable.

You seem to have conflated a free market with one consisting of too few people with a great deal of regulatory capture, where the criticisms you've mentioned here apply.

Notably housing shortages are a new phenomenon, we weren't having this problem earlier in the century. The only difference between now and then is we have far, far more regulations and zoning rules in the way.

Technically houses are cheaper to build than in the past, knowledge and building materials are more plentiful, and capital markets are more efficient with more banks offering mortgages. So by multiple measures housing should be less of a problem, not worse.

This is the reality we've built by choice, people act like they don't know how we got here. If you go on Reddit they think if we all just became unionized and have more $$ we'd go back to the 1960s and all have houses again. But that problem with housing supply won't go away until we fix the root cause, throwing more wages (or gov money) at it without expanding supply will just increase prices further.

>the only difference between now and then is we have far, far more regulations and zoning rules in the way.

Some places have more or less run out of land. For example Vancouver is limited in it's north, west and south expansion by mountains, ocean, and an international border respectively. I believe there are similar issues in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, etc.

Indeed, higher density is the answer... I'm just pointing out that the increase in regulations is not the "only" thing that's changed.

>The only difference between now and then is we have far, far more regulations and zoning rules in the way.

No, the only difference is that a metric fuckton of money which used to be parked in productive equity investments ran out of productive uses because the taps were never turned off and started to slush into the real estate market via REITs.

The price of Toronto RE, for instance, has not tracked with regulatory costs - it has shot up shortly after the aftermath of 2008, when global capital watched Canada have one of the most stable real estate markets skip the fallout of the subprime mortgage crisis. Paired with the rock bottom cost of money, Canadian Real Estate was viewed as a particularly stable investment class, prompting both Foreign Investors and REITs to dump capital into the market. The value in the market is the fact that it WAS better regulated that the competition, but it's now a toxic asset class. No study that I can find indicates that the volume of regulatory costs associated with the Toronto or Vancouver housing markets can be attributed to the specific inflection points associated with our current pricing environment.

Wages cannot support the volume of leverage in the Canadian housing market. The numbers on display as reported by RBC yearly indicate that the average house in Vancouver costs more than 100% of the gross wages of the average worker in the city. This number is typically 30-40% in most functioning RE markets. So if consumer demand literally cannot create the numbers we're seeing, then we need to look at other systemic changes in the demand profile for the asset.

And it's pretty easy to see what's going on if you spend 2 hours calling brokers. Toronto condos aren't sold to people to live there; they're pre-marketed to block investors aiming to purchase groups of units for rentals and finance their purchases with rental cashflows - condominium sales come with rental guarantees for 3-5 years - even if the rental market crashes, even the speculative investors won't feel it until developers start to display counterparty risk issues to increasingly large groups of block investors. So why not leverage yourself to the tits? The entire market has to crater for your investment to fail to produce a return. The underlying cashflow supporting development of these units, rental dollars, don't actually need to exist for the investments to pay off (which makes sense, because they literally cannot as per the income/financing ratio described above).

Beyond this, REITs have a tax advantaged position in respect of other cashflow positive investment classes

The idea that regulatory burden is the cause of cost increases of this magnitude is lunacy.

Keep in mind that corporations are extremely focused on short term profits. Home builders would love to build every single person a home and make tons of money, even if it wasn’t a long term business. Add in the potential for convincing people to buy a new house every 20 years like cars and you’ve got a major profit center.

Why aren’t they building these homes? How are they being stopped? Typically the thing that is stopping homes from being built is governmental restrictions on how many homes can be built (ie zoning laws).

In a free market, no actor has the ability to 'let housing be crazy expensive'. If you don't build, someone else will and they capture whatever profit is there. This is the core of how the free market works.

People can only 'let housing be crazy expensive' when they can prevent others from supplying the market, which is only possible by wielding power, usually through the government. Which is what we have now.

Builders aren't monoliths, and they're not part of any cartel. They are competitors. It is always advantageous for a builder to be the only one creating new housing; they benefit from supply restrictions that drive prices up, while selling new supply. It is always best for them to build as much as they possibly can, because no one builder can build enough to affect the market by very much.

Only maybe if you imagine developers as one person. It would always make sense for some new greedy developer to build a bunch of extra housing to drive down the cost because they still make more money that way

You could ensure that very-basic shacks are affordable without destroying demand for superior products.

The market has no telos other than to perform price discovery. I'm not sure where people get the idea that a market will do anything beyond that. Price discovery of housing has no bearing on being able to provide all people with a place to live. It's akin to saying that a market of Fabergé eggs will ensure everyone gets an egg. The problem is simple, there isn't enough housing irrespective of market or planning. Plainly, market-panaceaism is exhausting.

I think the challenge is that people assume there’s a free market but in housing that doesnt seem to be the case. Restrictions on height, location, design, building standards, as well as zoning are all constraints that the market operates within. Additionally, many of the affordable units were built with government capital then privatized later only to be torn down or renovicted into different classes of dwelling.

If we had a truly free market up and down the supply chain then perhaps that would alleviate the problem. But that scenario simply does not exist today. Additionally, the market may even correct itself; but not withhout a day on the order of years or decades. Long after those affected will have made decisions as abrupt as perhaps ending their own life.

Not attacking you, your heart is in the right place. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, learning to make businesses more efficient doesn't actually result in a better outcome for consumers. Take Nabisco for example, churned out record sales, didn't pay their burnt out employees more and Oreos cost more than ever before...

> Home and multifamily builders should be unleashed to build as much housing as they can. Let them be greedy; let them get rich. It’ll make housing more affordable for everyone.

Yep. This is pretty much how all the existing housing stock got built. It was a gold rush for housing developers building entire subdivisions at a time. People seemed pretty happy about it at the time, too -- and now that it's harder to build, housing gets more expensive and it's the youngest generation that suffers most.

I feel like the best counterexamples to this are Singapore(82% of the population lives in public housing which makes it affordable for local residents) and Vienna(25% of the city lives in publicly funded social housing which decreases costs for everyone).

Wouldn't this drop housing prices for existing home owners?

As much as I agree with you, I don't think people who are left with expensive mortgage payments for a house worth 1/2 the original purchase price are gonna consider that policy to be the affordable option.

Trickle down economics, housing edition?

OP is flagged so I haven't read that.

The thing about Canada is that we have basically pushed all our industry and manufacturing out of the country. To get EV cars built in Ontario we basically had to pay significant money to bring them here. Which is the opposite of what government should be doing. You want to collect $ not give $ to corporations.

So what we have left is oil industry, the government is actively trying to destroy, and real estate. The government's actions are all about keeping housing from blowing up and that means less and less supply, more and more demand by mass immigration, and meddling with regulations that will certainly make the situation worse.

So if you think the housing market is bad, the government is not your friend.

How do these 15 units get destroyed/lost?

If it's anything like what's happening in Chicago, what happens is a mix of existing multi-unit buildings being torn down and replaced with single-family homes or 2-3 unit luxury condos, and whole swaths of existing 2- and 3-flat buildings comprising maybe 15 or 20 affordable units being torn down to make room for apartment/condo developments with 20 luxury apartments, but only two of them designated as affordable housing.

Where do the 15 go? Destroyed?

I'm not the original commentor, but I tracked this claim back to the reporting of a paper by Steve Pomeroy, who tracked the number of housing units with rent under $750 CAD a month between 2011 and 2016.

So I expect the answer to your question to be "they are still available, but at a rent higher than $750".

They get bought by investment firms and such, then flipped for profits.

We have a real issue since the federal funding of affordable housing got cut by the federal government many years ago. Thus current owners/landlords are having issues keeping the prices affordable, then when they can't sustain the building anymore, they end up having to sell, and agencies with lots of money gets to scoop them up. So we are losing 15 affordable housing units for each one we build to real estates sharks.

Two (2) cases of people with a very rare and badly understood disease (severe reaction to pollution) chose assisted suicide because couldn't find a place to accommodate their very special needs.

Hence, "Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death"...

This click baiting is just grotesque.

One could say this is clickbait, however the number 2 as you I am sure know is equal to, well, one plus one... So. How expensive would it have been to ensure these two Canadians could live? Two expensive I guess? ... I will walk myself right out (and live!) Thank You.

But the law that enabled those people to commit suicide also helps many others. And even if that law didn't exist there wouldn't have suddenly magically been more housing or help available for these two. Helping people who have excellent reasons for no longer wanting to live in no way means that life is worthless and we shouldn't also be helping people live. Obviously, in cases like these, we as a society should try to help give them a better option of life as well.

To be more specific, one person choose assisted suicide and the other contemplated suicide.

in many major canadian cities right now the minimum required income to meet the income ratio tests to afford a new mortgage for the cheapest, smallest 1BD condo on the market is now $150,000/year.

the real estate value bubble has expanded beyond all reasonable limits.

entirely aside from the assisted death issue, something has gone fundamentally wrong in the economy if it looks like there's going to be a permanent sub-class of rental wage slaves for life. compare this to the ratio of annual gross or net wages to mortgage carrying costs for a person from the baby-boomer generation buying a house in canada in the 1970s or 1980s.

> the real estate value bubble has expanded beyond all reasonable limits.

I'm very interested to find out how this ends...

It will end in either a correction of the price of housing, or a correction on the currency those houses are priced in to bring it back in line with the rest of the world, because from my understanding the economics when adjusted for wages in Canada is the number that is way out of whack. Place your bets!

Or feudalism. No guarantee that the majority of the population will be able to afford houses at all; in many societies, you have a small landowning class (< 10% of the population) that owns literally all the land, and then a large number of serfs who must work for survival.

People can still vote in both the US and Canada, and if the supermajority couldn't afford homes the taxes on homeowners could go much higher.

I’m curious where exactly in the rest of the world you think these cheap homes are in major metropolitan areas? https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/12/hong-kong-average-house-pric...

Canada doesn’t even make it to the top 3

Edit: I got a bit more curious so found a more up to date article and Van makes it to 3rd: https://www.bosshunting.com.au/lifestyle/real-estate/most-ex...

However, you can see that expensive housing is not something unique to Canadian cities.

From my reading online, Canada is in the top spots for the most expensive housing when adjusted for income. https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-r...

Even that chart puts Canada just ahead of the US and Europe for that ratio... I think we maybe just missed the boat on cheap land...

I don't see a "correction" anytime soon.

There are no vacant units and Canada is rapidly filling in with immigrants.

Areas like Toronto are booming. Demand is good, supply lags. This could be the state of affairs for decades.

There already was a correction. People only care about the monthly cost, and rates going up 0.5% has just shaved a large chunk off the cost of the property which is not yet realized in the sales due to extremely low sales volume. Any failure to keep up with USA's rate hikes will result in CAD going down vs. USD in my opinion. If Canada's central bank does keep up with QT coming from USA, it will attack the cost of property via large monthly payments. I don't see any way around that. In comment to supply, the number of new housing units being finished in 2021/2022 is at record highs. Immigration has stopped due to covid, yet the price keeps going up. I don't buy the tight supply hypothesis. I think its just due to hoarding and speculation. Why sell when your asset goes up 20%/yr. Many people I know have 2+ properties here (don't forget cottages)

> to bring it back in line with the rest of the world

Can you explain what you mean by this? The USA and Canada are both quite low when comparing median home price to median income[0]

0: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...

I see here showing Canada as #7 on the list (House-price-to-income ratio) https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-r... I live in Canada and have a very high wage and I feel like it is not affordable, but maybe I'm just too cheap!

That seems to be rate of change since 2015?

Inflation is the only way it can end without another financial crisis.

A married couple both making 150k will be seen as middle class soon. It’s already true in a few cities.

I’m more curious how it started.

I think it started with mostly foreigners buying up property, not to live in but as investment to keep the value of their money, like using housing as an alternate currency to dollars

I have been venturing to Vancover BC for the better part of the last 30 years. In that time, there were waves of hippies selling in Kits and moving to the Okanagan, etc. Prices went up. What has happened in the last 15+ years is a noticable vacancy when you look at housing as you walk around. An influx of foreing money has been buying up and keeping properties vacant. This is happening all up and down the west coast. Some of that money may not be foreign, but a lot is.

BC has attempted a lack of occupancy tax and it seems like it's not working.

But if we were able to build to keep up with demand, in theory the price would not increase so sharply...

AirBnB investors, flippers, and other speculative purchasers.

Mortgage rates of 1.x% probably didn't help.

Yearly 1% is very cheap, we have around 6% in Hungary :)

And that's at your lower bound.

Here's why:

Edit putting this here as intended

Viktor Orban's Bank" Financial Times feature of this morning. https://archive.ph/tINOK

This won't help "Hungary Loses the trust of its European neighbours"https://archive.ph/rXucw. Also FT earlier .

I contrast these articles because Orban ended foreign currency and foreign banks mortgage loan supply and nationalized the risks, now linking domestic mortgages to the political situation which is for everyone now a reckoning but any reckoning Orban isn't the best prepared for.

We are now up to ~4.5% for fixed interest mortgages and ~2.5% for variable rate mortgage. But in the depths of the pandemic, the rates went near 0.

Banking oligopoly is my guess. You see similar problems in Australia which has a similar banking setup. New Zealand I don't know how their banks work, but I do know they are up there in the clouds as well. Same deal?

Societal breakdown and balkanization in Canada? Seems it is already approaching that point.

Having lived my whole life in many different parts of Canada I think it's quite unlikely. It's seemingly easy to romanticize apocalyptic scenarios like that when consuming news/media but I have found very low tolerance for them when interacting with real people across many different communities here.

Rent was extremely low in Québec for a long time after the referendum.

MAID is a huge bummer. MAID is one of those things that doctors can't really discuss, because you'll get attacked for it. A lot of Canadian doctors are silenced about this topic. It bears similarity to the avoidance doctors have with speaking (anything at all) about COVID - they're worried about their jobs.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-troubling-debate-ov...

The government is being quite clear about this. They'd rather you just die than waste tax dollars.

I don't even like calling it MAID. It's more accurate to call it government sanctioned suicide/homicide

It seems you missed the point of the OG article? It's not about MAiD or the ethicality of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms but about systemic, community-wide failures to help those in need across Canada. The MAiD anecdotes just show how bad it can get.

What is the difference between MAID and government sanctioned suicide? As someone who doesn't follow the topic, government sanctioned suicide is how I've thought of it and I've never encountered the acronym MAID before this.

Government sanctioned homicide is weird phrasing because the patient has agency and is the one making the decision.

I couldn't read beyond the first few paragraphs. What a horrible situation for that poor man whose family wouldn't let him die. Bastards!

The way they talk about his "baseline" depression getting substantially worse. Then they talk about how they should be making the decisions after taking care of him for 50 years. So he's been suffering since he was 12 and his support system doesn't seem to treat him as an adult who can make his own choices? It's nothing acute. It's something he's been struggling with for half a century that sometimes gets better for a while at best. I don't know the full story, but the quotes from the family make me really uncomfortable. And apparently this is the best argument the author can find against the practice.

I think it is important to note that the story is of 1 person that completed MAID and 2 that contemplated it. The headline perhaps implies more cases.

Not only that, but the one person who did complete MAID, as well as one of the two contemplating it, were MCS sufferers, a topic of significant controversy on its own.

There is plenty to be said about the Canadian housing crisis, but this article doesn’t really offer anything beyond a couple of extreme corner cases.

My thoughts exactly. I have enough outrage already. Before I get outraged about this, I'd like to know how prevalent the problem is.

> “The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the a*," the woman said in a video filmed on February 14th, eight days before her death.

HN would be wise to keep in mind that, as a general rule, governments think this about majority of their citizenry (those who are not in power). You might think someone in there is looking out for your best interests because you're an upstanding citizen working a tie-and-suit job making revenue for IRS, CRA or whoever, but don't be fooled, you're one foot in the grave from their perspective and they will not give it a second's worth of thought to push the other one in there for you.

The rising costs/inflation, real estate, and a multitude of other problems that are coming to fore serve as examples. But it's what isn't being said, or talked about, that you should be on the look out for.

This deeply cynical and distrustful view of govt. is very US-centric. Perhaps it's driven by the fact that govt. frankly stopped working for the average US citizen a long time ago. It doesn't hold true elsewhere in the world.

Edited: OP is not the top-voted comment any more, thank goodness.

I've lived in Canada and abroad; I've vacationed a few times in the US so I'm amused my commentary is US-centric. The US and Canadian governments are far, far better in terms of hiding corruption than a lot of other ones. But corruption still exists.

There's way more cynicism out there than my commentary. And it would be close to the truth of things.

Edit: you probably haven't heard about the bodies they recently exhumed of native school children that the government poisoned, after they took them away from their parents, abused them, and ultimately killed them, so you might be under the impression that we're all sherry and giggles up here with Trudeau.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Sure. And yet I believe social media is contributing to your mistrust, as many of these events occurred in the past. If you are indeed Canadian, then I suggest you read David McLaughlin's article in the Globe today and reflect on his thinking.

Link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-trust-th...

You mean governments worldwide have had a change of heart since "Social Media" has become a thing, and have changed for the better?

Now pull the other one.

> you probably haven't heard about the bodies they recently exhumed of native school children that the government poisoned

You have invented that story out of whole cloth. You can not provide any story of “recently exhumed, poisoned, Canadian, native children.”

It's a real story, but there's a ton of misinformation around it (including, probably, in his comment).

The real explanation is something closer to the kids dying of the Spanish Flu and they were buried by the school because they were orphans. (And no, I won't look up a source; this is completely tangential to the subject of this story and I'm sure some debunkers took it on if you care)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mas...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-residential-schools-unma...

https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/children-of-the-poison...

>During the 1960s and early ‘70s, the chemical plant at the Reed Paper mill in Dryden, Ont., which is upstream of Grassy Narrows, dumped 9,000 kilograms of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River. The fish in the river were full of poison, and the people from Grassy Narrows, who relied on the fish as a staple in their diet, were full of it, too.

>Once ingested, mercury never goes away. It “bioaccumulates,” meaning it passes from one generation to the next, from mother to child, through the placenta.

And so on....

This sort of thing is covered in University-level courses in Canadian History. But nevermind that - it's just "misinformation" that I have invented "out of whole cloth."

Native schools and residencies were built downstream rivers from factories that produced toxic chemicals and dumped them into said rivers. Again, it's not new knowledge, it's just labeled as misinformation because people are ignorant and they would rather not know. This subject is directly covered in the aforementioned coursework.

How gullible you want to be is a choice you have to make.

> Some of those found had succumbed to disease, Yellowhorn said, citing one cemetery where it became apparent many children perished from the Spanish flu a little over a century ago. [0]

[0] https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/kamloops-mass-grave-debunked-b...

Yes, the mercury dumping by a corporation is the whole cloth from which you wove your story about the government running around deliberately poisoning the little native children. By twisting culpability, you created misinformation. Just as you do with the Kamloops story: debunked by the Chief for Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, it is not a mass grave and bodies have not been found; the media invented the narrative you now provide as “proof.”

You are abusing history, making claims and stories that are loosely based on history but are not actually real history. you, my friend, are the gullible one.

https://mobile.twitter.com/AngelaSterritt/status/14008766918...

The western world seems to be gripped by a death cult - drug overdoses, assisted suicide, suicide, victim culture - despite having 'the highest standard of living on the planet.

What's happened, is it the incredible pressure to perform and get ahead? Very rich school kids are topping themselves in the heart of silicon valley despite having probably some of the best prospects of anyone anywhere. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

We have vast transient encampments across north America, particularly the west that are riddled with violent and petty crimes, substance abuse and serious mental illness.

It is really hard to know what remedies are possible or workable.

We have vast transient encampments across north America, particularly the west that are riddled with violent and petty crimes, substance abuse and serious mental illness.

Oh, that's what you call ... poverty. Being homeless gives you a strong incentive to do drugs 'cause they dull the misery. The homeless often wind-up mentally ill because they're systematically prevented from getting sufficient sleep as well miserable and isolated.

What planet are you on? Vast transient encampments?

You have vast transient encampments some places (Fresno, the desert, etc) because the homeless are moved from one place to another and sometimes an encampment gets established and so takes a lot of people a lot of place - but usually the homeless are invisible, yes.

Edit: not that the alienation of modern society isn't also a factor but people unable to meet their costs of living (especially rent) is factor that should always be mentioned with any description of the mood of today. Plenty of people don't want to die but being pushed into death by circumstances - the subject of the article, in fact.

joe_the_user You have entirely missed my point. I broadly agree with what you say, but why is it that the western world are killing themselves in droves, when 2% of the world's population are homeless and close to a billion go hungry every day. what has gone wrong in the society that is supposed to be the flywheel of the global economy?

San Francisco and Los Angeles have massive transient drug and SMI issues right now. More people died of drug overdoses in SF than of Covid etc.

I broadly agree with what you say, but why is it that the western world are killing themselves in droves, when 2% of the world's population are homeless and close to a billion go hungry every day. what has gone wrong in the society that is supposed to be the flywheel of the global economy?

I'm not sure what you're saying, that Westerns doing drugs are privileged and ungrateful, unable to deal with the real problems of the world? I guarantee you that the homeless of San Francisco are not privileged.

Suicide is a complex phenomena - the US suicide rate has risen over the last twenty years but it's still below quite a few third world nations. Suicide has decreased in other Western nations, etc. Your article about a rash of suicides doesn't show the most wealthy "dying in droves", one needs to look at statistics to see what's happening.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

And

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5463019/

"We found that the hazard ratios of suicide showed an increasing trend as socioeconomic position decreased."

Thanks.

I think the fundamental point I was making is why 'privileged' westerners are taking to psychological pain killing (and self ending) drugs in such relatively large numbers.

I'd also say, knowing quite a lot about San Francisco 'homeless' specifically, is that the social media grapevine has brought huge numbers of addicts in from around the continent because of liberal drug, crime laws, generous benefits and a rapidly growing homeless industrial complex of 'non profits' to serve them.

@op00 to Watch a few videos about San Francisco and LA, east coast cities, visit a few Twitter accounts https://twitter.com/streetpeopleLA etc

When the state does more to keep medically-assisted death accessible than living, that seems a lot like eugenics to me

Also a lot mentally ill people commit suicide this way, because it is legal (at least in Belgium)

Well, if they are determined to do it, this way is better than the alternatives, because it avoids harming others (physically or mentally - there are a lot of train drivers around the world with PTSD from running over people, although they have no chance of stopping in time to avoid it). Of course avoiding the suicide would be the best option...

What if they're not determined to do it, but only do it because it's conveniently available?

I'm not familiar with the laws involved, but I hope they mandate some kind of counseling before making this decision? Which is definitely more than you have when contemplating "unassisted" suicide?

By that same argument, you could say that a free market economy is eugenics.

Slightly off-topic, but what exactly is this website? A "self-funded progressive news outlet... since June 2021". "Our writers are liberals, social democrats, and democratic socialists. It is not a political denomination that brings us together, rather what unites us is a desire to progress as a united country."

Sounds awfully like a front for political organisation of some stripe or other rather than a genuine news outlet.

https://ourgeneration.news/about

edit

Also kind of interesting: the "ourgeneration.news" domain was registered 11 April 2022.

https://who.is/whois/ourgeneration.news

The linked Twitter account seems to have first tweeted on 20 April 2022, doesn't get a huge amount of engagement yet already has over 15K followers:

https://twitter.com/Our__Generation

I'm curious people's thoughts about the housing cost political equilibrium/cycle idea.

Here's the theory: Cost of housing is a major issue for voters. Home owners, especially new home owners, want their homes to increase in value to pay off their mortgage / get return on their investment, while non home owners want to be able to get an affordable mortgage. When most Canadian voters own homes (ie today), a politician causing house prices to decrease is political suicide. So the prices increase.

The housing cost should keep going up until, due to continued immigration/aging of minors, the majority of voters do not own homes. Then at the next election cycle, policy will change, and housing prices will start going down again. Maybe immediately due to raised interest rates, maybe slowly due to kickoff of long scale housing development projects.

The question is, are these forces the strongest influence on the housing market? or are there other market forces which disrupt the political equilibrium (and what are they)?

In the US credit distorts the market equilibrium very heavily by making building new houses far far more expensive than buying old ones.

How does credit play into the cost of new housing? Do you mean that it's more difficult to secure a loan for new house building supplies than it is to get a mortgage on an existing home?

Yes. It's nearly impossible for normal people to get loans for land and materials.

Greg Daniel's "Upload" did a good job on this. In that world, the poor voluntarily chose to die because living in a virtual heaven was better than the real world, but corporations monopolized those as well. Crazy stuff.

Cigarette smoke, laundry chemicals, air freshners. That's not a huge list. Why can't people find housing away from these three things ?

Sounds like the plot from the movie "Safe" (Todd Haynes, 1995).

But a bit off-topic, do doctors recognize MCS as a legitimate illness? I see in the article that multiple doctors backed these patients, encouraging the Canadian gov. to come up with a solution. But I guess with the insane real-estate prices over there, it's tough to find anything that isn't very old for a decent price.

It’s a combination of multiple factors causing the one patient to turn to MAID, and safe housing is simply one of them. MAID is not the problem, society is.

i predict that housing will become even more unaffordable ... now that big business has financialized housing to a greater degree than ever before, soon big business will be using some of their old tricks they used to build anti-competition moats in other areas--namely, paying politicians and the media to restrict the building of more housing and making housing even more expensive to build...

This should be an indictment of our Government, but in the circus that is Canadian politics, nothing positive will come of it.

"Since early 2020, Canadian home prices have surged 30% while many Canadians lost their jobs or had periods without working due to COVID-19."

As usual blaming COVID and not COVID restrictions done by stupid politicians.

Btw. why not move to Cuba, Mexico or Southeast Asia with much lower cost of living?

What was that? Something along the lines of "Just because some new groups of people are coming into our countries and making us the minority doesn't mean the we're being pushed out or killed?"

“Soylent green is people!”

Welcome to the future!

I'm all for the right to die for people suffering painful terminal illnesses, for the simple moral reason that it relieves suffering itself, and the the cause of much of their suffering is directly the result of surviving long enough, that deep into an illness, because they are supported mainly by technology and medical practices that keep us alive in such a terrible state to where we couldn't end it ourselves if we tried.

However, normalizing death as a treatment option for what is essentially mental illness seems like a modern version of the UK's Blair era "Nudge" policies, where now the ultimate result is the state euthenizing people for compassionate reasons, or at least that will be the pretext, and once it's legal and normalized, it's just a matter of how the papers are filed and the numbers are tallied.

Sure, if you are truly suffering, there is absolutely no shortage of death inducing opioids that will give you a very pleasant end. This government has tacitly already prescribed it by freely addicting small towns to the stuff, and doing nothing about the trafficking from our major trading partner causing opioid deaths.

The part that makes me spitting mad is when you look at the kinds of policies made during the pandemic using truly horrific misrepresentations (e.g. "deaths with vs. of", vaers data fudging, counting deaths less than 14-days of a shot as being from covid and not from vax, "nobody made you do it,"-mandates, "pandemic-of-unvaccinated" propaganda, travel bans for people with antibodies, emergencies act used and repealed before the senate could quash it, orders of magnitude inflated childhood covid death rates, tolerance for allied partisan riots, nursing home packing, internal passport systems, geolocation tracking, unrepealed "emergency" stop and search powers - to name just a few), it's fairly clear they are dangerous and utterly mendacious nihilists, and - what can only be described as "WEF-influenced governments" - absolutely cannot be trusted to manage a "compassionate" euthenasia system.

The housing shortage is related to how this government wants to destroy the savings and standard of living in the country as a means to install permanent technocratic rule, and they are doing it by wiping out wealth and opportunity so as to subordinate the milennial and Z generations to this system. Their messaging reduces to, don't worry, you'll like it, and if you don't, you will just have to find a way to, citizen.

This MAID issue is it's own real end of life issue for an aging boomer generation, but conflating it with prescribing death to the poor and mentally ill (for now) is symptomatic of how bad these people are. It's normalizing the power of the state to do this outside the parameters of humane relief of suffering due to terminal illness, and if you will pardon the pun, that should raise a red flag for anyone.

This is a fine example of the unintended but perverse side-effects that are created by state-assisted suicide. We basically offer death as a "solution" to a housing problem. The system settles into a new equilibrium that depends on a certain percentage of the population killing themselves because their situation is too miserable to cope with, thus creating just enough space for other people -- which then reduces the pressure on politicians to actually solve the housing problem. See also: abortion among poor people.

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