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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Is Canada better today then when he started as PM? I struggle to agree that it is. Housing is as bad as it has ever been and the immigration decisions seem to have been so careless that even people that would agree with immigration as a general principal are horrified by it by and large. The Canadian dollar has collapsed VS the USD.

I guess it always ends bad if you stick around long enough.

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Depends on who you're talking to.

There are many indigenous communities that now have water that are better off than before he was PM.

Speaking for myself I think things in 2019 were better than 2015. The pandemic and things after the pandemic (hi inflation and spiking interest rates) have not been quite so fun but these are global issues and people around the world have had a similar experience. Arguably there is more Trudeau could have done but some things are beyond his reach (eg. Bank of Canada sets interest rates).

If you're a person without an established home you own you probably feel things are disastrously worse than 2015 when you presumed that surely eventually you'd own one. If you already own a home you probably care quite a bit less.

Housing was deeply dysfunctionally broken in the major cities well before Trudeau became PM in 2015 and the lazy status quo approach of his government ensured that the contagion of housing shortage would spread Canada wide. It's mostly Provincial and Municipal governments that are at fault but plenty of fault for the feds too. Despite the fact that Fed housing policy right now is better than it's ever been the damage has been done.

The problem is that massive spike in immigration under J.T. is making the housing issue worse.

That's the rhetoric but I'm not sure it's the reality. At least not where I live. It's a big country so ymmv. In a neighbourhood with a scam college bringing in lots of students yeah sure maybe some distortions of the market were more noticeable as rental vacancy plunged and rents increased.

In Vancouver housing prices were already going into their exponential curve in 2014 before this government was even elected or immigration numbers were fiddled with. In the last two years while immigration was increased home prices have been flat. You can have a look at BC Assessment as home values are updated every year. The biggest change comes with 2021 due to ultra low interest rates. As interest rates rose home prices stagnated as expected.

Personally I don't see any connection at all between home prices and immigration though I can imagine rental vacancy and rent prices were impacted in some places (particularly smaller town Ontario) due to the reluctance of municpalities and the province to build more homes and the prevalence of exploitative scam colleges).

> The Canadian dollar has collapsed VS the USD.

The CAD is sitting at about $0.70 USD right now, which isn't really outside of it's typical range, and not really unexpected given the difference in interest rate now between Canadian & US interest rates. If you look at historical prices it looks more like business-as-usual, the CAD usually bounces between 0.70-0.80 USD.

CAD was actually on parity with USD between 2007-2012.

Yes, but that was a very unusual time and can be attributed to the US financial crisis. In addition to money fleeing the US, the Canadian and US interest rates diverged to strengthen the Canadian dollar.

That's actually bad for the economy. Canadian companies benefit from the lower dollar as goods are often sold in USD, but wages are paid in CAD. 0.75 to 0.8 is the historical benchmark for the exchange rate.

> The Canadian dollar has collapsed VS the USD

This might be splitting hairs, but I think this is more about the strength of USD than the weakness of CAD. I don't know that you can say CAD has "collapsed" when every other major currency has seen a similar (or worse) drop compared to USD over the last 10 years.

It always is this. Same reason the CAD was at parity during the financial crisis.

After 2008 we also "benefited" from very high oil prices which drove the dollar higher

That high dollar didn't do any positive things for Ontario & Quebec's export oriented manufacturing sector though, which is why I put "benefited" in quotes.

Canada is definitely worse than it was ten years ago, but all of the major problems are provincial responsibilities: housing, health care, education, policing.

The largely conservative provinces have done a very good job of blaming Trudeau and immigration for problems that are entirely their own.

Out of curiosity, how is the housing & health care situation in those conservative provinces compared to other provinces (like Quebec, where I live in)?

I moved from a liberal province to a conservative province last year. My cost of living is 25% lower, gas is much cheaper and I was able to buy a new beautiful house which was an impossibility in my previous province.

What province to what province? This is an incredibly shallow observation without more information.

It's instructive to compare Vancouver to Toronto. 10 years ago in BC health care was in worse shape and housing was ~2X the cost of Toronto. In the past 10 years BC has had an NDP government and Ontario a Conservative one. Both housing & health care have gotten worse in BC, but at a much lower rate than in Ontario. Today health care in BC is in much better shape than Ontario, and the cost of housing in Vancouver is about the same as it is in Toronto.

Are there any numbers/data for the quality of healthcare in the provinces over time?

At least for housing I see the average home prices in each category (condos, townhomes, detached) still higher in Vancouver than Toronto (when googling a bit, I found https://wowa.ca/reports/canada-housing-market with some data. But there's probably lots of real estate related sites with more).

> Are there any numbers/data for the quality of healthcare in the provinces over time?

Good question. Let me know if you find some. My assertion is anecdotal, I have FOAF doctors who have moved to BC.

Living in QC, I'm scared about the future of medical care and infrastructure. I wonder too what's the situations for other provinces.

Quebec has been led by the Conservative CAQ party since 2018.

Immigration? The massive amount of temp foreign students?

> The largely conservative provinces have done a very good job of blaming Trudeau and immigration for problems that are entirely their own.

No. Immigration reduces available housing. Immigration overloads the health care system. Immigration strains the education system. Immigration creates ethnic enclaves that are hard to police.

Immigration is a federal responsibility. Trudeau and the Liberals are to blame.

Does immigration make these things worse? Yes. But it's only a very small part of the problem. You can't blame the entire problem on a minor cause.

Here's a very good 55 point plan to fix housing: https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force...

BC implemented far more of those points than Ontario has, and succeeded in changing Vancouver's housing costs from ~2X Toronto's to 1X Toronto's.

And P.S. the immigration surge was mostly in student visa's, driven by Colleges under provincial jurisdiction.

The problem with Trudeau's government is he didn't/doesn't consult with provinces very much. They continue to announce programs and initiatives that live in the territory of the provinces without provincial buy in.

If it was one or two provinces you would be correct, but when every province is facing the same issue(s), then the turd starts to stick to the feds... The immigration issue is a prime example, he announced higher than normal targets but didn't consult or work with the provinces about this, which caused many provinces to be taken by surprise and have their social systems overwhelmed by the influx of people. Many of these same systems where still recovering from covid... so yea recipe for disaster.

It seems like every other week I hear a news article about a joint announcement between BC & the federal government having to do with housing or health care. It takes 2 to co-operate.

Go listen to the statements the PMs made after their all provinces meetings. A lot of it is "back off from our turf".

Previous govts had a minister who's only job was managing provincial-federal relations and making sure the feds and libs moved in sync

Housing, healthcare and policing being provincial responsibility is an oversimplification. Provinces are basically compelled to comply with the federal Canada Health Act under threat of being taxed for, but not receiving the huge Canada Health Transfers which account for ~12% of provincial revenues. Housing on the supply side is largely provincial, but the feds could still take a larger role. They have had a long time to think of ways to bring in more skilled labour in the construction industry rather than, say, the fast food industry. And let alone thinking ways to solve the housing crisis, the Liberals wouldn't even admit until a few months ago that the price of housing is too high and should go down.

The feds run the RCMP, they set most criminal laws and sentencing, bail policy etc. As Poilievre repeats ad naseum, the same 40 repeat offenders are arrested thousands of times in Vancouver. It doesn't matter how good a job the police do if the justice system refuses to punish them.

I don't know what are the problems we're facing in education but I don't think that is on the top of the list of why Canadians are feeling frustrated with the Liberals.

> Is Canada better today then when he started as PM?

As you've already concluded, the answer is absolutely not. The Canada I grew up with, and mind you my family are immigrants from the 90s and early 2000s ourselves, is completely shattered.

>The Canada I grew up with [...] is completely shattered.

What happened?

One could endlessly go on about the economy/COL, immigration, crumbling healthcare, housing crisis, far-left ideology going mainstream, etc.

But I could frame it much simpler than that - Canada, at least in cities of modest sizes and up, is rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society.

An anecdote: my sister is more than 10 years younger than me, she's currently attending the same university as I did over a decade ago; in the span of less than half a year, she's got 2 bikes stolen - her original bike with front wheel removed to bypass the lock in late summer 2024, then the entire lock cut to steal her replacement bike in December; this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town.

> economy, healthcare costs, housing crisis, and... far left ideology

One of these things is not like the others. Could you elaborate on how 'far left ideology' relates to the others in terms of the supposed fall of our country?

Maybe he means the extreme levels of immigration that have tossed fuel on the housing and healthcare crisis?

For context, the liberal party is right of centre these days. We don't even have a "far-left" party. The NDP is solidly left, probably slightly left of what the liberals were years ago when this poster thinks things were wonderful.

We do have fringe parties that are far-left, that basically get a handful of votes a year, and we have one far-right party, the People Party of Canada, that gets enough votes to occasionally get some news coverage.

Whenever I see people using the term "far left", I realize its meaning has been subverted and neutered to mean something else entirely. Same with "woke". It's very Orwellian to see how successfully these words have been distorted to obscure their nature and power.

I think people are talking past each other. Some of these parties are "far left" on social issues while simultaneously being "moderate right" on economic issues. So you can label these parties either way, depending on what's convenient to your argument.

Such an odd anecdote given that it wasn't that long ago Igor Kenk was the king of bike theft in Toronto.

> One could endlessly go on...

Yet, apparently one will instead sidestep the discussion entirely. Frankly the more you've tried to answer the question the less you actually answer it...

I don't see how "rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society" or "she's got 2 bikes stolen ... this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town" reflect failures in Canadian government at all, really.

Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.

Is it possible your sister had a shockingly unlucky semester? Or that your world model was simply naive and wrong 10 years ago? Hard to say since the anecdote isn't really evidence of anything.

Look at Japan as a homogenous and extremely (if not the most) high trust society.

>Look at Japan as a homogenous and extremely (if not the most) high trust society.

Why does Japan need separate trains for women, and why can the shutter sound on Japanese phones not be turned off?

All countries need this; Japan's just the only one that did something about it. I'm sure NYC ladies would love segregated cars right about now.

Um... why exactly am I looking for a highly homogenous society?

I'm just saying they tend to be more high trust, which is supported by statistical data.

Ah yes, increasing theft is just a fact of the "developed" world, and simultaneously, anyone that claims theft has increased is just imagining things.

> Ah yes, increasing theft is just a fact of the "developed" world

It seems like a pretty likely outcome of high population growth!

> anyone that claims theft has increased is just imagining things

Anyone that claims an anecdote is data is just bullshitting, actually.

anecdote is actually data tho lol

Every store in my town now locks up anything small that costs more than $20 in cages. Talking to some people working there it was pretty common for people to walk in, take a bunch of shit, and walk out. Drivers are completely out of control. I've witnessed at least 3 people run red lights in the last 2 years, while I can remember only one such incident in the 10 years before that. Signalling is no longer something drivers do - like at all. For the last 2 years teenagers have terrorized the local park on Canada Day shooting fireworks at random passers by. With someone setting off fireworks under an occupied baby carriage last year. Car thefts in Toronto got so bad that people were building retractable bollards in their driveways[1].

I could go on, but there's a clear apparent trajectory to these experiences.

[1] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/a-thief-will-think-twice-some-tor...

Still mostly anecdotal, but a better answer, and probably belongs higher up in the thread actually.

>Still mostly anecdotal

In principle, what sort of hard evidence is gathered that could establish the point?

I'm kind of confused by the question. Do you think an unverified commenter on a public website saying "all the stores in my town [not named] do X [but I didn't count]" is a type of hard evidence that I'm arbitrarily rejecting?

No; I think that there's no feasible way that anyone could have hard evidence one way or another for the underlying question, and that you should therefore take anecdotes more seriously.

Technology isn’t the issue

Mass immigration and increasing wealth disparity are much more relevant.

If you know you know, and clearly plenty of people who read my original comment do.

Judging from your other comments, you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest, can't tell which, and frankly don't care either way. All I know is it'd be a complete waste of time to try to convince you.

> If you know you know

And if you don't, you... don't deserve to know?

> you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest

I think "willful ignorance" is a good description of accepting impossible-to-verify anecdotes of internet comments as evidence of societal change, personally. But I'm realizing we don't have the same goals in the conversation so I understand why it feels pointless to continue.

>Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.

Japan. Again, depending on where in the country, but things like muggings and drunk driving have drastically decreased in the last 35 years.

This anecdote could be explained by something as simple as her forgetting to lock her bike consistently, locking it incorrectly, using poor locks, etc.

I think any Canadian that identifies as “far left” would find your post hysterical. They don’t even have a party to vote for anymore - best they can do is a begrudging vote for the NDP. This country has been on a rightward shift for decades. e.g. look at the hard push towards privatization of government services in Ontario.

The 90s were a demographic golden age for Canada but people get old. This is a problem true of most of the western world and is upstream from almost any other issue.

Housing has gotten worse in many places.

I hate to be repeat a meme but land value tax would fix this.

Only the provinces have the constitutional authority to impose a land value tax. (The cities get their property taxing rights from the province).

Ding ding ding!

Yes! I find it interesting that the Federal government is getting the majority of the blame for these issues when in reality I feel like provinces should be at fault.

Not to say that the federal government is without blame, but I feel like given the current state of healthcare in many provinces, as well as the housing s** show, provincial governments should be primarily held at fault.

Zoning/housing, Healthcare, education... Obviously the immigration loop holes have been an issue as well, but these three are provincial.

Seems odd though that despite these issues being provincial that every province is seemingly struggling with these issues...

Almost like there is a larger macroeconomic force at play.

I don't see how it's odd at all. The kinds of changes that would stabilize housing and make growth more sustainable would threaten the interests of many wealthy people, including politicians themselves.

Sorry I really should've added /s

I agree with you.

> larger macroeconomic force

Ding ding ding!

Demographics my friend. Somehow what should have been the most predictable thing ever (that people get old over time, changing the age profile of the country), has somehow created issues that are coming as a complete surprise to the government... Healthcare underfunded because people are getting old. Tertiary education overattended leading to a skills mismatch. A large cohort of baby boomers who consistently push for NIMBY style policies because they spent so much on their house that their retirement depends on it...

Policies should be proactive in these fields rather than reactive. I'm of the opinion that many countries /regions struggling with these issues have largely done it to themselves by lack of foresight.

I'm hopeful that it will improve in the future though. Pretty much only able to go up from here! Let's go land value tax!!!

Sure, but no province would take the political risk without an assurance of it happening simultaneously in other provinces.

https://x.com/jayvas/status/1779557729629073660/photo/1

That's the problem with J.T., our economic growth has been vastly Government employees.. our private sector is dying..

Canada is in approximately the same unfortunate position of being a supplicant state of the US. This was apparent as far back as 2018 or so. The US "Commerce Department" recommended sanctions on Canada for a trade violation in timber. The worst case sanctions add about $9,000 to the cost of a new single family home in the US.

"March 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Obama instructed their respective cabinet members responsible for international trade to explore all options for resolving the trade dispute.[32] Canada's international trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that "what we have committed to is to make significant, meaningful progress towards a deal—to have the structure, the key elements there a 100 days from now"."

Then:

"April 24, 2017, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said his agency will impose new anti-subsidy tariffs averaging 20 percent on Canadian softwood lumber imports, a move that escalates a long-running trade dispute between the two countries...

"On April 25, 2017, the Trump administration announced plans to impose duties of up to 24% on most Canadian lumber, charging that lumber companies are subsidized by the government..."

Then:

"On August 19, 2024, the US raised tariff rates on imports of Canadian softwood lumber products from 8.05% to 14.54%".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...

If anything, tariffs are proof of independence, not of functioning as a "supplicant state".

Can you name a similarly wealthy country that is actually better today than it was on the date he started as a PM?

I can't. Seems like something else has been going on. Potentially you could name Ireland, by becoming a tax haven, screwing over everyone else instead.

America is, especially since 2021 but nobody wants to believe it.

Not sure why the parent comment is being downvoted. By most sources, the States has been the exception and not the rule post-pandemic.

* https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/why-...

* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-recovery-from-covi...

Because even HN, by nature, is still an incredibly US-centric place. And has historically been a very capital-focused place where the stock market and GDP are taken as the only serious indicators by which to measure whether a country is doing well. Both of these points have very slowly been changing here, but the downvotes show it's still largely the same.

I spend my time between East-Asia and Europe, with one foot firmly in each of them, giving me a different perspective showing that Canada is the norm, not the outlier, which would be the US if there were to be one.

I still didn't expect it though, I thought here people would realize authoritarians aren't being voted in everywhere because the populace think things have been improving.

There’s nothing wrong with America that would necessitate the gloom certain less informed quarters of the populace have. Nothing.

Do you not recognize the fact that housing affordability is at a record low? Do you not connect this to low rates of family formation?

I’m not sure how much more obvious these issues could be. I’m even more unsure of why you’re flat out denying them. The only reasonable explanation is that it’s related to some deeply held ideology or dogma of yours.

Depends who you are, I guess. If you’re a young person who is not financially stable enough to form a family because of high housing prices, then you would disagree. If you’re a relatively well-off person with assets like real estate and equities, then you’re quite happy. It’s all a matter of perspective.

I myself am doing quite well financially, but I am still quite unhappy with the current situation because of the devastating effects of inflation and increased housing costs specifically, have had on younger generations (despite the fact that it financially benefits me personally)

Take that problem in the states an multiply it by 3x in Canada.

Lower Income, High Prices, Less Options.

I'm in a similar position that I'm personally doing okay but almost everyone I grew up with has had to either leave Canada for the US, had to live with their parents into their 30s or more to very remote / rural areas to afford life.

Frankly a major skill issue. I know lots of people that have no problem doing that. These are state school and community college educated folks I went to high school with.

What is a skill issue? It is not clear to me what your comment is referring to.

If nobody believes it, then is it actually true?

Well, that is the ultimate philosophical rabbit hole.

If everyone is doing better objectively but have been hammered with propaganda so much that they subjectively believe they're doing worse, how do you square that?

I'd argue there's an easy solution in getting rid of the propagandists that are making everyone sad, so twitter, facebook etc.

Agreed, it’s a rabbit hole, so nobody is right. I’m just on the camp of — if people feel that they’re worse off than before, then telling them how “they have to feel better because of objective facts” won’t cut it.

Coddling people for being wrong doesn’t seem like a scalable solution here.

Wrong date. He was PM 2015.

Have you ever tried talking to the people who don't believe it, and showing them what their own lives were like in 2021?

Are you successful this way?

Have you considered the possibility that the metrics we use to decide whether "countries are better off" don't match the values of their citizens?

I think people that believe they were better off when they couldn’t go to the grocery store without a mask or thousands were dying of covid a day are delusional, frankly.

But it does sometimes work if you remind them.

Since 2015? Easy: Norway, Poland, Greece, Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, USA probably.

But I do anecdotally agree with your point as a whole: it feels like there has been a slowing or potentially reversal of progress. Perhaps to be expected given the pandemic though.

Easy? You've lived in each of those places for more than a year around 2015 and around now? Physically impossible.

My second homebase is in one of the countries you named. I can tell you that not even 10% of the population would agree with you. Across the political spectrum. No idea that you're basing it on. Crumbling infrastructure, housing worse than Canada, ever increasing problems with immigration.

The US I could potentially agree with, it is the outlier, though debatable.

Ireland I talked about.

Norway is laughable to bring up, sorry. Might as well bring up Saudi Arabia.

If you'd been to Poland and Greece you'd know they're nowhere near "similarly wealthy" countries wrt Canada, entirely different tier. This reveals you haven't really spent time there.

Singapore is a city-state. I'm sure we can find a city in Canada that's doing better. And from what I know, Singaporeans too are majority unhappy with their country compared to 2015, so not sure what you're basing it on.

A big reason driving the collapse of the Canadian dollar is the incumbent government's climate change policy. Since being elected to power, the government has regulated, stalled and effectively defunded the fossil fuel industry, accounting for approx. 22-30% of Canada's GDP. That loss of revenue is felt in the dollar exchange.

This is not true in the slightest. Beyond the fact that the government went so far as to buy a pipeline to ensure added capacity for Alberta oil sands development, they've been enormously supportive of LNG development in BC, approving many projects and recently going so far as to give a $500M loan toward a project.

https://www.ipolitics.ca/news/crown-corp-loans-500-million-f...

Please stop spreading lies and FUD. The pipeline buyout was too little too late after the government stalled and delayed permits over never-ending environmental assessments. All in all, the projected cost of capital flight exceeds $30 billion CAD (the article is from 2019):

https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/the-30-billion-...

The government has openly committed to ending all funding for fossil fuels in 2024:

https://www.iisd.org/articles/insight/ending-canada-support-...

> the courts stalled and delayed permits over never-ending environmental assessments.

FTFY.

> the courts enforced legislation enacted by the Liberal government.

There you go, the truth will set you free.

The legislation almost completely predates the current government. Much of it comes from the Harper government who had to rework environmental legislation because the courts forced them too.

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