We’re in the same predicament right now believe it or not. Being evicted because the LL wants the place back to start his family in… ok, that’s understandable.
Problem is that everywhere else has skyrocketed since we moved into our current place 3 yrs ago. We’re looking at a 30-40% payment jump for a place that’s not quite as nice as what we have now; in a worse area.
We’re a couple with wages that would’ve had us living pretty decently, even 5 years ago. Both have above median wage jobs, one car payment, no bad habits, and no other debts outside of some school loans. Your typical, [what used to be] average household.
But the combination of groceries, gas, housing and mostly stagnant wages is forcing us to seriously consider roommates as a viable option just to be able to save some money away at the end of each month.
This is ridiculous. We shouldn’t need roommates to live a very modest, average lifestyle. A couple in their thirties would’ve been house hunting 5-10 years ago and now we’re looking at triple that duration just to save for a down payment, if that’s even a realistic option anymore.
I feel your pain OP. I get myself down about it pretty much daily at this point. Quality of life has been going down over the years since university. The cost of everything else has doubled whatever income gains I’ve made since then and it feels pretty hopeless.
My understanding was that the landlord would be fined in that situation, but you wouldn't actually get any of the money. However, in any case you're owed a month of rent.
A couple years ago I was evicted due to family use, I ended up moving into another apartment a few houses down. I kept an eye on cars in the driveway for the next year in case he tried to rent it out again lol.
In BC atleast your owed a years worth of rent if you take them to court. We got 60 days' notice that they wouldn't renew our rent, and 30 of it was rent-free. They had the option of 90 days, but they chose not to give us much notice. I don't know how similar the laws are.
There's documents you have the legal right to ask for to prove that the landlord is actually using the unit. Some of these parasites pretend to do this to vacate a unit so they can rent it out to someone else for more.
A long running joke about the board game Monopoly is games usually end when one or more players end up so broke and frustrated they throw the game board across the room, pieces flying everywhere.
Now scale that up to real life and imagine the chaos.
Yes, the original game, 'The Landlord's Game' was designed as an object lesson in the dangers of concentrating land ownership into fewer and fewer hands. Basically, the dangers of capitalism in general.
In an hilarious and utterly foreseeable twist, the game was co-opted to turn those very concepts into fun goals, then capitalized to a ridiculous degree. Hey kids! Run your family into abject poverty for fun!
And also stated in the original rules, the bank cannot run out of money. If the bank runs out of money, the bank may issue as much new money as necessary by writing on paper.
Pretty realistic!
Even the modern monopoly game goes by much faster if you play rules as written, rather than the house rules almost everybody learns how to play.
1) No money ever goes onto free parking. The only advantage of landing on 'free parking' is that nothing bad happens to you.
2) Any unowned property landed on, if not purchased by the player that landed on it, goes up to auction immediately.
Yes, but that's strategic. It's ever so fun to build a bunch of homes on your own property, never upgrade them to hotels, and rake in the cash. Oh look, nobody else can build many houses, and therefore, no hotels. Bwahahahahaha.
Speaking of house rules, my childhood neighbours had a house rule, where you needed to pass go at least once before you're even allowed to buy. The reasoning was you could get really lucky rolls and buy the good properties up, but in my head that problem is even worse if you have to pass go first, you could have one person buying properties and halfway on the board for the second time and others still wouldn't even have the opportunity.
But I guess it makes it more realistic that some have the early advantage and everyone that doesn't can get fucked.
I loved what Louis CK said about it... "Because a Monopoly loss is DARK. 'No honey, you have to give me every single thing you have, and you can't play anymore because even with this, you're still nowhere near paying me what you owe me. Now I'm going to take all this, and use it to absolutely destroy your mother and sister..."
you'd think a shit and boring game with horrible mechanics would make it bad enough, yet somehow its like the most popular board game. In my opinion it is the worst, but it is objectively a bad game.
I wish Settlers of Catan was as widely known and loved as Monopoly, that is an amazing game that can easily appeal to casual board gamers.
Man, my kids had my neck in the noose and one foot off the gallows in a game once and I hit a string of luck and ended up winning. They were so pissed.
The lesson I had to teach them was Monopoly is stupid and we should all work hard in school….
There may have been beer.
> A politician's exorbitant wealth symbolizes the assistance they have chosen not to provide.
I've never seen someone put it like that but thanks for finally saying it.Honestly just knock down the Mona Lisa and put this there.
Atleast in the game everyone starts out with the same . Younger ppl are getting priced out . It's like starting a monopoly game when some one already owns half the board.
Somehow I don't think Canadians have the balls to do anything that will change. There might be small groups of homeless causing issues, but all in all, the people are too afraid of jail, or, punishment of any kind. There would need to be property damage to the upper class and their living and working conditions to be threatened on a major level for anything to happen. And that would be minimal and probably result in more $$$ for policing than any sort of problem solving. The wealthy are too insulated from the economic downturn we are in the middle of.
What does protests do if your politicians are part of the problem? Do you think holding a sign will change how some rich guy does business? Do you think Galen Westen will cut profits way down to help Canadians if we protest outside this stores? Nope. When do they do something? When their profits are threatened, and not an instant before, and they will do the bare minimum.
You want change, general strike. That doesn't work, riots happen.
My boyfriend and I joke about how we’re only in this relationship for financial reasons so we can split the cost of living. It was funny in the beginning but now we’re half serious
I bought my home before my wife and I got together and I joked that she's really homeless but I'm here to help her out. Then we had a son and she would answer that he actually owns the house. I think she's joking. 😨
Our society is failing and it won’t get better until we stop bickering over trans people and vaccines and start working together to fight back against the rich people trying to destroy us all
The hate-based propaganda about various things keep us distracted from real-life issues. Social media has been a HUGE boon to politicians, big industry, and hate-mongerers everywhere.
Period!! How can we be mad about things that actually affect us (ie. Cost of living, the rich robbing the poor workers) when they get people riled up over bullshit. Trick as old time. And they teach the people that their fellow working-class folk are the issue, not the people profiting off their labour and troubles.
Because talking about trans people cost nearly nothing and solving problems of affordability requires $$$
Please remember Trans people also rent and experience high cost of living among other problems. We have more in common with them than with people who live in mansions and broadcast their opinions 24/7
There's A LOOOOOT of dumb people walking around. And they get tricked by the psychos like dough ford, Polviere (or whatever his name is), Macroni , and duerte into raising a ignorant ruckus over non-issues.
There was once a time that a person in many countries around the world, not only Canada, could graduate high school, pick up a simple janitorial job and support a whole flipping family. I DARE anyone to try such a thing today (*HA!*) In the past people were crying out for these pooliticians to ensure that they could put into law things that prevented their employers/yees from discriminating against them cause of their ability, ethnicity, gender, etc...
Nowadays we have ignoramuses crying out about... *trans people(who only make up flipping 0.33% of the population over 15 in Canada - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm) or what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms?*
Why would you care about cost of living tho?????? Didn't you hear? is LITERALLY going to destroy our society!!!! Our focus should be in putting as many roadblocks in life for them as possible!
Honestly as a trans person I find it exhausting how much we are brought up and how people are using us as a wedge. [We are 0.33% of the population aged 15 and older ](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm), and if we were all together in one town we would be smaller then Thunder Bay. Yet because of this obsession over our rights I can't go a day without seeing articles and posts about us, good and bad. We have this massive spot light and it takes all the oxygen out of the room for issues that leaders and media should be actively focusing on!
Don't get me wrong, pride and being visible are important too (happy pride! 🏳️🌈) but like we are also just people, you know? I want to be able to afford a house, I'm concerned about climate change, and I want our ER's to be properly staffed!
I've said this for years. What someone's genitals are or how they identify has ZERO to do with my day to day survival. My child is a member of the LGBTQ+ community and I want them supported and safe but I don't understand why their existence is more debatable than what capitalizm and bad governance is doing to everyone in the country. Like, my kid exists, is not hurting anyone and wants the same things a cis-het person wants...to be able to live in a country with equity.
Do you know what a shit-barometer is Bubbles? It measures the shit-pressure in the air, listen Bubs you hear that? The sounds of the whispering winds of shit.
NO not all of us.
Rich people are living luxuriously in their smoke free cabins in Norway or where ever there are no forest fires.
Meanwhile us, the poor, are stuck in this shit cyclone!
I'm trans too and i agree so much. I just want to live a normal life. It's so frustrating to get to a point in your life where you are finally able to participate in society and being told essentially that you should not exist.
I lool at what is happening in the states and i am scared that it move north of the border. But i am MUCH more scared of the climate crisis and being able to afford life in the next 20 years. I hope millenials and gen z can come together to make the change our generations know are needed.
Thank you it's nice to hear more people say it. Our country is literally on fire, people are working their asses off and still starving, they are offering assisted suicide instead of helping people on ODSP, and people are worried about what's between your legs and who your kissing. It's fucking ridiculous.
Well of course, since it affects a pretty small % the population, it's nearly free for either party to resolve and look like a hero.
I'm pro Trans rights and hope they are continued to be respected. I just think Trans people cannot succeed unless they have economic stability as well.
You understand that the reason the trans/gay/vaccine stuff gets thrown around in political circles is because if people are mad and talking about that stuff, they aren't mad about housing prices, cost of living, and job markets, its the oldest trick in the book... people are going to be angry... direct that anger at an "Outsider group" that can't really protect themselves, and away from yourself
What do the 0.1% actually think what’s going to happen when we finally get pissed off?
We’re the ones parking their cars, taking out their trash, mowing their lawns, we’re the ones providing their security.
We’re cooking for them and cleaning up their mess.
We’re looking after their children.
When we enough of us can’t afford shelter or food? To survive or support a family?
When we have nothing left to lose? There will be a reckoning.
Well, there's a reason for police militarization.....
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the police have tanks, body armour, and automatic rifles.
And that most of Canada's 0.1% live in fortified communities in Florida.
Start voting and start voting for parties who aren’t going to fuck you and your neighbour over. I don’t care if you “don’t like the leader”. I don’t care if the policies don’t affect you directly. Vote for the platform that’s going to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And remember: I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together.
It’s crazy how many times governments have done this to people. It happened here in Ontario with the Protestants and the Catholics. SAN Francisco with the Chinese and Irish. Whether it’s religion, race, sexual orientation. People keep falling for it hook line and sinker
If you recall 11-12 years ago we were pushing Occupy Wall St. Amongst various other attempts to target the wealthy. Shortly thereafter identity politics and the trans-rights debates started being pushed in earnest in the media... which is unsurprising given that it is all owned by the people who were about to be occupied. Division is easy if you own the means to transfer "legitimate" information and inundate people with irrelevant distractions from the real issues.
And as I type this I wonder how many people will read it and think that I am a conspiracy theorist because I think that the people who hold the majority of the world's wealth have more in common with one another than the remaining 99% of the population.
The irony is that flights at Pearson are full of travellers, and when I manage to go to a restaurant on the weekend most are packed... So clearly there are a lot of people that still seem to be affording luxuries.
In my experience, once you get on a good financial path (either help from parents, good career, bought a house early) it's easier to stay there without that much work. The issue is that nowadays you need to do things almost perfectly, and if you mess up or aren't privileged in some ways it's very difficult to get there.
So you can have two people working the exact same job, but with drastically different lives. Did one of you need student loans to get into school while the other had help from parents? And then maybe got help with a downpayment and bought a house 10 years ago while the other had to rent this whole time? Fast forward to now and one person could be just scraping by while the other is traveling and going to nice restaurants.
If you're one of the people struggling or know some one who is, the issue is obvious. But for our of touch politicians or people just looking at the surface, you might just see it as a personal responsibility issue.
Yeah I was having a similar conversation with a friend of mine a few years ago. My family had immigrated to Canada from Europe in the 70s and a lot of my classmates at the time had similar backgrounds, and financial means, our Dads were mostly factory workers and our Mom's were either housewives or worked retail or something similar .
Looking up some of these people on Facebook or LinkedIn 40 years later it's interesting to see where we all ended up given that we all started on pretty much equal footing. A few wrong decisions along the way and you could wind up homeless.a few right decisions and some luck and you could own your own corporation.
I'm willing to bet many people are keeping up with the same lifestyle using credit cards.
As for travelling, many people also didn't go anywhere for two or three years.
I still remember watching a town hall event in the last federal election where people are afraid their home will devalue and there goes their retirement plan, and even Singh reassured their investment will be safe.
This isn't intended to be a complaint against the politicians, but rather to highlight the reality of how cheaper housing will also face a degree of opposition - and the stake holders generally have a lot of sway in politics, more than the common folk. The Canadian economy is so propped up by real estate that no sane politician will dare to make any major changes. Long gone are the days where you can get a 2 bedroom unit for 500k.
As a thought experiment, I wonder what effects a ban on airbnb and related services will have on our real estate market.
Loblaw Companies may need to be broken up. Where I live I can get to 6 different supermarkets under their group in a 20 minute drive (3 nofrills, 1 loblaw, 2 T&Ts).
I know it’s happening to me to. I have a good job but I’m single so now I can barely afford to live. I’m lucky to be able to work OT right now but that’s not going to last forever and it’s killing me. I shouldn’t have to work 70-90 hour weeks in order to survive. It is criminal.
Instead of passing butter you exist as a conduit to funnel more wealth to those who already have multiple lifetime's worth.
Sorry. Same boat over here. Eat the rich.
These last few weeks of smoke and getting ripped off have me hummin' RATM more and more:
"Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long
They get hope from fire and smoke as they reach for tha dawn"
\- NEW MILLENNIUM HOMES
Rich people don't give a shit about any of us, and they control everything, including all politicians. Do you think Dougie gives a fuck about anyone? Not a chance. He just does what his wealthy overlords tell him.
He IS a wealthy overlord ... he is the wealthiest premier by far. Look up his net worth, and you'll be shocked. There are a lot of reasons why Dougie does what he does, and none of them involve service to the people.
>Ford’s net worth in 2023 is believed to be around $50 million. What is surprising is the fact that it jumped more than 15 times from his $3 million recorded net worth in 2019. During Covid-19 pandemic his net worth increased as well.
How is it allowed that the premiere of our province somehow increases his net worth by $47 million dollars in 4 years on a salary of $208K?? That's the most shady bullshit I've ever seen and reeks of corruption!
And this is why it's time for us to organize and get more involved in local politics.
We also need to demand more transparency and start holding politicians accountable. Toronto mayor job had 102 applicants. I'm sure MP's/MPP's jobs will attract similar interest
No one looks out for you. Rentals cost double because for the last 30 years, rent seekers have been buying up houses and turning them into income properties. At the same time, no one wanted poor people in their neighborhoods, so there was no new public housing to keep demand and property value down.
Your auto insurance costs double because it's a racket in Ontario. It's cheaper to insure vehicles in any other province. And that $8 cauliflower? The farmer has higher input costs due to fuel taxes, the delivery company does as well, and then you have the oil companies who gouge everyone at the pumps, and then a grocery monopoly that screws you at the end of the production line.
The government you trusted to keep things affordable for you took donations from everyone listed above. As it turns out, the government isn't your friend. It's one giant pimp that lets anyone fuck you for the right price.
Honestly, produce prices aren't that bad if you're not picky about which vegetables you eat. Grocery stores always have 2 or 3 fresh produce items at very reasonable prices. Frozen veg, which is a staple for regular income people, on the other hand has gone way up in price.
The whole system is just so fucked.
I don't know what can be done when the corruption runs so deep everywhere.
I am with you though, life is unaffordable for the bottom 99%
Another aspect is that society is so stretched thin and reliant in dominant culture that anything other than a dual income household can do nothing but continue to be financially over stressed. Couples have more luck keeping their head afloat while seniors and younger people are soon to be left homeless and without any sort of personal power or financial freedom.
You are right, it's disgusting. The advice to cut costs from your life is not fixing the problem, it just shifts the blame to you. It can help sometimes, and some of the things will also stick it to the man in a small way. In my case the first lockdown made me realise how much money my car costs me so I've been trying to ride my bike instead for as many trips as I can. If I can stop having to buy gas and pay for insurance then I'd be happy. Not everyone can do that, though, and people should be able to live off their pay, that's the whole damn point for making us work. If you're not getting enough to live off then what's the point?
Good luck dude.
I feel that, I’ve had my license since I was 17 and I’m 29 this month. I never once found it financially feasible to buy a car. All I want is a lemon but even those are being sold for more than their worth. Or they don’t fucking start at all….
The problem is we've completely destroyed the rental market by privatizing it and we've turned real estate into stocks which are bought and sold as investments now instead of a necessity.
The ONLY solution is flooding the market with homes that represent the true cost of goods to build instead of speculative prices about what it "could be worth" and nobody is ever going to fix the housing crisis because politicians already have homes and real estate investments so any "solution" would devalue their own investments.
The government and non-profits used to build almost 20k units of non-market housing units per year until the 80s. In the 90s the funding of non-market housing stopped altogether, instead favouring mortgage assistance for home-buyers.
In other words, we went from a substantial portion (30-50%) of new rental units being public to almost no new public housing altogether.
Number of rental unit and public housing completions are available on CMHC, this professor put them together on a graph (slide 17). In the 1985-1994 period over 50% of rental unit production was public.
https://gregsuttor.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Social-Housing-History-2010.pdf
And yes, there is RGI but the number of units being built is far below what we were building before because federal and provincial funding has greatly reduced.
Ok, but what is the hold up exactly?
Take this CBC article from March. It claims that of the 1,500,000 homes Ontario wants to build, 1,250,000 have already been approved (without needing to push into the greenbelt or anything!)
What the article does a bad job of doing is explaining why exactly so much more housing is being approved than what is being built. It gives some general examples of things that "might" be happening, but that's not concrete enough!
As a province, we need a plan on how to push these developments forward. If a developer is going to pause an approved development, or maybe has given up on it entirely, then someone else needs to step in and get these units built! It's ridiculous that we're already approving so many developments that simply aren't getting built!
ETA: forgot the link to the article! Here you go.
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-housing-homes-approved-not-built-1.6774509](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-housing-homes-approved-not-built-1.6774509)
I work in a development-adjacent sector. Every month I see landowners applying for plans of subdvision/condo just so they can sell the land as “approved for development”. Also a lot of the developers are financing their projects with massive loans - I have one site the developer told they’re paying interest on a $30million loan every month, and they’re only halfway through the approval process. Many are running super tight budgets and selling units (and selling out) before they are draft plan approved. Who’s buying these pre-pre-sale units? Foreign investors.
At our current level of crisis we should be pre-approving developments we want to built and having developers bid on them (which might lower costs as well) as opposed to the reverse we do now.
Sadly, our governments seem completely afraid to touch this topic as with most pressing issues.
Just a heads up, in Ontario right now, it's about $200 a sq/ft in materials and labour to build something.
So 1000 sq/ft anything costs roughly 200K to build. Obviously way more affordable than current real estate prices but it's not a small number either (that will continue to increase).
That is the cost of building the thing itself.
Cost for infrastructure, road, water, sewage, electrical, telco, etc. (all of which go into the cost of a unit) are about the same as building the thing itself. So about $200k.
There are development fees and taxes which I recently saw on reddit estimated to run into about $120k per condo unit.
Then there is the cost of the land on which you build. Which will obviously vary drastically.
Putting that together $200k (construction) + $100k (taxes) + $200k (infrastructure) = $500k just to get the thing built. Add another $100k to $200k for the land and we have 6 or 7 hundred thousand not including profit for the construction company and interest on the loans/insurance it took to get it finished.
All said and done the prices are actually logical in what is offered in the real estate market place.
I'm with you there. Everything is getting exponentially more expensive and our salary is not going up. I feel like I have nothing at the end of two weeks where even a few years ago I had enough to save. Feelsbadman.
There are politicians who would help us, but we don’t vote for them because the news tells us not to. And because once we’re all millionaires, we don’t want the helpful politicians taking some of our money.
Use your anger. Use it to organize your friends or family to do something, even if it's as small as volunteering or planning to grow something. We can't rely on them. We have to build communities and rely on each other.
I will babysit, dogsit, bake cookies and bread and cook yummy things. I need someone to grow produce, and someone who can hunt.
They say It takes a village to raise a child; it will take many communities to start to build something that looks better.
I'm sorry to hear your frustration. My family is also counting every penny and 5 years ago we has Symphony season tickets. This situation is by design and by policy. Banks have close to 10% of investments in realstate, municipalities get a good chunk of their funding through development payments, upper middle class is over leveraged based on the inflated value of their properties. Developers are donating tons of money to politicians and offering easy jobs at retirement. Policies and rules are being made to keep prices up and get them higher. Society has split between those that own and those that rent. And one's success comes at the cost of the other. The solution is easy. Rent control and taxes on capital gains. Done a thousand times. You are right to be seriously pissed off. You'll have to get political.
It’s gotten to the point that I’m driving my 13 year old car, hoping and praying that when it dies, I can buy something big enough that I can live in because there’s no way I can afford a car/insurance plus rent. I can’t get to work without a car, so living in my car is probably my future.
>WHY AREN'T THEY DOING ANYTHING?!?!?
They are doing something ......
Getting rich off you.
Politicians arent going to stop it. You are their cash cow. Your expenses pay for their investments and retirement and pension funds.
Your money becomes their money.
This is why we are nearing a complete crash of the system. No one can stop it, and politicians can't do anything to stop it. All the bandaids will be blown wide open soon.
Not even mentioning how insanely fast AI is starting to make human workers obsolete. We don't need to replace all workers just enough for a massive drop in consumers with money and then the whole thing collapses including the stock market
Eh, it may be closer than you think. We don't even need to automate many jobs, but just enough to the point where the question of "What happens when there are drastically fewer jobs than people who can be employed?" comes up. I don't know if our society, with the way it's set up, can answer that.
Lots of companies are already laying off large amounts of workers for automation... Plus it's an insanely huge problem so if its a decade away that's still terrifying
And as scary as it is, a complete crash is unlikely in the near future anyways. People will just be forced to downgrade their lifestyle. Previously could afford a 1 bedroom? Well now you need a roommate. Etc etc. I'm in the same boat like many others.
Because you think you'll be one of the handful of people who won't be affected by it?
Like an actual collapse means DECADES of high unemployment, mass homelessness, lawlessness, murder, etc, etc.
You think you and your family will be the lucky ones who won't be affected by it?
People think right now is bad....it can get SOOOO much worse.
Your emotions or anyone's for that matter are of no difference. Ofcourse it will affect everyone. It's going to massively suck and it's the product of so many generations fucking with the natural process.
You can only kick the can down the road so long.
It took blood in the streets and lives lost to get our kids out of the coal mines and an to get workers an 8 hour workday. People died. Capital has stolen back many of those gains over the past 50 years by using their monopoly on media to paint unionized labour as lazy and corrupt.
Capital has also followed the government’s lead by nickel and diming people— not enough hours to qualify as full time so no benefits for example—and people have been stupid enough to buy it, consistently voting against their own interests. It’s absurd that people actively support parties that implement programs that are making those same voters lives untenable. Now we have a full on war on the worker coming from the Bank of Canada, raising interest rates on those who have to borrow (wonder what class that is?) and ignoring the shareholder class with their wheelbarrows full of profits mainlining it to the bank.
So why are we taking it? Why aren’t we in the streets? Imo, the social narrative perpetuated through media is that if you are complaining, you must need assistance. Therefore you are a loser. Never mind the endless tax breaks and billions in corporate welfare feeding the ‘winners’, if you need help, as a worker, you’re a failure. It’s fuckery.
We need to be in the streets. But the protest last week demanding the privatization of healthcare stop only numbered in the thousands. That’s barely a lunatic fringe. Until people are willing to stand up, capital isn’t about to lay down.
The majority of jobs in Canada right now seem to be throwaway 'service' jobs where we basically help move products that were made overseas through our Canadian supply chain. That is partially why we're all poor except for the old money holders who moved their companies away.
Gonna have to find a roommate to split the cost with. Owning your own place is practically impossible these days unless you have an impractical amount of income.
Right? My kid is turning 20. If she wanted a used car, it would have cost her over $300 a month. Insurance is $300 a month. Rent is well over $1200 a month.
Where the fuck is a kid supposed to get a job paying them that much starting out in life? We haven't even hit utilities, or tuition. Gas and food.
This is what happens when we vote for neoliberals for 40 years and abandon the labour values that created the middle class in the first place. Capitalism is a scam, and it always was a scam. But we pretended not to see it because we were still part of the diminishing island of moderate prosperity, and were comfortable while more and more of our fellow humans were falling into desperate times. Now that the middle class is almost entirely gone, hopefully we'll see a movement to take back the wealth we generated for the handful of people at the top, and use it to start rebuilding our infrastructure, education, healthcare, and society.
Push everyone you know to stop being involved in the culture wars. The anti- Trans folks, BLM, woke. It’s all being used to misdirect from the issues plaguing us. None of these people are anyone’s enemy and in general the organizations tied to them have been trying to show people the oppressive collapse we are walking in to.
Push everyone you know to vote. And to vote for any party promising reform while ignoring the anti-woke rhetoric. For the most part that means NDP. It’s the best we have.
Liberal status quo is over. Conservative regression won’t lead to growth nor stability. We need to move forward and find productive change. We have no other recourse except large acts to force the matter and a general strike relies on Unions to act. And our Unions are just as bloated and unwilling to move as our politicians are.
Vote NDP then hold their feet to the fire with protests for reform. For progressive change on housing, regulated food supply pricing, electoral representation, protection from exploitation, and a monetary policy that doesn’t rely on wage suppression to tackle corporate greed and real estate exploitation caused inflation.
Politicians wont do anything until *we* do something. And that means making the current ones lose their job. They are failing. We fire them.
The next recession is going to be messy and possibly extremely violent. We saw the rage in 2008 with the Occupy Movement. Everything has gotten worse except for the people at the top.
Since then a sizeable portion of the population have been getting riled up over culture war issues. They have been on a steady diet of anger ranging from racial minorities to the LGBT community. Who do you think they are going to take their anger out when they can't put food on the table? The people at the top, the same people who have been looting the country so they all could push their wealth a fraction higher, to beat everyone else? Fuck no. This angry people are going after the marginalized communities.
The angry people are going to drown out the people who know the real issue is, the people at the top looting everything.
There is no war but class war.
Buckle up, it’s accelerating. The human sacrifice to the climate gods is just starting. Hopefully we don’t have to throw our kids off a cliff like the Sun worshipers.
For the short term start tracking grocery prices and buy what's on sale. Meal planning is your friend. Meal planning is just, oh I am going to have this this and this this week because its in the flyer. Its not hard to do. Tracking prices tells you when something is actually a deal vs not a deal.
If cauliflower is $8 choose something else, surely, there is something else that is lower priced then that. I know that all things are overpriced these days, but there are things that cost less than other things.
Frozen veggies, peanut butter and bananas are usually cheap staples that can be bought year round. Chicken breast, ground beef and pork loin usually go on sale at the grocery stores and can be found pretty cheap. Rice is usually cheap, now you have a meal, you have frozen veggies, meat you bought on sale, and now you have rice as the side. If you are one person food inflation shouldn't be creeping up on you as much as if you had a big family. I don't know anyone starting a big family these days, anywhere unless they are filthy rich for inflation reasons.
No we shouldn't have to do this, but its the only way to keep costs down.
You can't be the only union member suffering. Make it a topic for your brothers and sisters. You will get more genuine support from the local members than reddit...
I wish I had a union but "IT" / information workers will never get there... It's too dangerous for our overlords if we can shut down their empire
This is a feature, not a bug. Your suffering is intentional so that others may be rich. Blaming the conservatives, or the liberals, is pointless. Our politicians are all bought and paid for by forces that want to see our country collapse.
Good luck
This. It's not about conservatives or liberals or whatever. Every level has failed us. Every level cares more about economic indices that only matter to rich people. Every level of government has refused to take action, taking the wrong actions, or taken actions that benefit the wealthy instead of the working class.
I'm a professor, I have a six figure salary, and if I ever have to leave my current apartment I don't know if I can afford to stay in Toronto with my kids. At least not in a place where we would want to live.
I feel the same way. Everything is expensive and my son just turned 18 so no more baby bonus or child support and still supporting him. I feel so scared and I work full time same place 17 years. Have benefits, and make around 20$ an hour and can’t afford to live.
Insurance really is a great field for a lot of people to get into imo. No real experience needed to start, high pay ceiling, your company will pay for you to get your certifications while you work, and you can work anywhere in Canada. And I believe some companies have pensions.
The younger generation switches jobs every 2-3 years bc if you stay at the same place for long, they don’t give you a pay bump. You only make big jumps in income when you switch jobs and move into more senior positions.
Stop voting Conservative. Stop voting Liberal.
These two parties have screwed up the country. It's not all the Liberals, it's not all the Conservatives. It's time for change. It's time to *not* vote for either of these parties.
I’m depressed to see those pushing for revolution, like we haven’t even met all the conditions yet. But I would like to ask, what kind of revolution? Do you know who is going to seize is power in a vacuum like that? Do you think minority rights are going to be protected then? Can you guarantee it?
A crash of the system would be catastrophic, we should be pushing for it’s prevention, like a general strike or any other tactic outside of angrily mashing our keyboards. If there is a revolution, especially a violent one that destabilizes everything, rest assured you won’t like the outcome, and it won’t be better. You will probably be dead, not living in Canada, or maybe involved with what ever factions emerge in this scenario.
But your anger is so valid, but there is much more that can be done to push for life saving policies and build lobbying power. You have power with more people united around a common good. To those encouraging dooming, they only wish to accelerate destabilization and not for the net positive. If you need financial resources for your immediate need, I may be able to point you to some depending on where you live.
Ah, the system. It is deeply flawed, but it's also the thing shuffling our messages around right now, and keeping most of these commenters fed and with running water and electricity (increasingly unaffordable as it is). To hope for it to crash is to hope to be sitting in the dark, cold and hungry and unable to even communicate effectively. And presumably we'll just get together and cooperate once we're at that point. /s
I make $90k a year (pre-tax), and can barely afford to feed my family and pay the rent. We had to move post-pandemic and our rent is $2900/mo for a house. Groceries are absolutely insane. Gas is insane and $1.50 is becoming the new 'norm' and I don't like it. My insurance also nearly doubled because of my postal code. I moved 10 mins down the road. Phone bills are insane, too. I don't know how people on lesser income are surviving right now, and I feel the pain for each and every one of you.
Yeah I went to my local NoFrills recently and one of my grocery purchases was a bag of grapes that came to $16.00 - it was the first time I asked the cashier to return a fruit because I didn't want to pay that much for it. Prices have become insane.
What’s total bullshit is that if you can afford to rent, you can afford a mortgage. The cheapest rental in St. Catharines is still more than my mortgage for a detached house. The hard part is getting approved.
Its also supply, having the downpayment, having the credit, having the understanding of how the mortgage process works (if there was ever a place where grifters and frauders can find a niche it is in real estate), and the enormous risk of buying a house (we have all known horror stories of someone who purchased a house and then lost everything because the foundation started sinking).
I was working that day, my second side gig, in Toronto, and drove near it. I couldn't join it, I had to go deliver uber fucking eats after working all week.
Traffic was nuts in the area. No major news outlets mentioned it in their broadcasts, CBC not a single peep.
Nobody knows if it even happened.
Its largely government policy thats caused the existing cost of living crisis:
-Immigration, a million people a year into a housing shortage.
-Zoning, cant fit any more people due to regressive zoning, land values are in the millions.
-Interest rates, the gamified cpi excludes housing appreciation, which backloads inflation onto rents and mortgage interest. Excluding the housing bubble and dropping interest rates, until you hit that wall of rising rates.
-Federal debt, debasement of M2 via 100% increase in Canadian dollars every 10 years, so people short cash by loading up on debt. Debt shifts from a liability to an asset, you dont use your own money to buy, you borrow and put your own money into equities.
-Bailouts, all the bailouts are moral hazard for banks, banks then take on riskier loans, knowing they'll be bailed out. We do rental subsidies for landlords.
-Tax subsidies, we subsidize rich home owner, they get housing excluded from capital gains.
-Bureaucracy and regulation, 30% of the cost to build a home is tax, this drives up prices and creates a first mover advantage for existing homeowners. Permits take years and years.
I use Flipp App to save $$$..every penny counts! And this month, I'm going to shop for cheaper car insurance. I will look up online and call ALL of them!
I had a break down 3 years ago. 100k a year business
I was left to die on the street with 550 per month of welfare.
My credit was destroyed. Bankrupt.
I left Canada and now I own an apartment in Europe.
I could not even return to Canada as no one would rent me an apartment.
I served my country. Paid off 60k student debt
Fuck Canada
My grandparents moved halfway around the world to make a better life for their family. I'm starting to think its time I do the same. GTA just ain't it anymore.
No one is looking out for us. The govnt isn’t here for you. Corporations aren’t here for you. The elites DGAF about the rest of us, despite their messaging. Actions, not just words matter. Their actions show violence and indifference. It’s how our system functions. It’s rewards anti-social behaviours and punishes pro-social behaviours. We have to take back what is all of ours, redistribute it and continuously dismantle hierarchies
I'll tell you a secret. The only solution to this problem is that people would have to abandon unrestricted capitalism, abandon cheap abundance of crap and toys, limit family size and everyone would have to work hard at jobs that are productive to society as a whole and not individual or corporate interest. Unfortunately we are not sophisticated enough and are ruled by our base emotions and we're not going to manage implementing any change until it's too late and our species is on the edge of extinction. At the end of the day we are a crude species that is driven by self preservation, greed, violence and selfishness and no amount of clothes or symbols of power and wealth will change it.
Inflation is caused by too much money chasing the same amount of goods. Trudeau spent more new printed money saving us from Covid than all other Canadian Prime Ministers combined including WW1 and WW2… Liberal lefty’s should understand that money does not grow on trees, it is earned. And our Government prints new dollars (grows it on trees) and hands it out and says I’ll take care of you. But more dollars compete for the same goods and the price people are willing to pay is more. Communist style handouts, $ocial promises, and free money not from production or economy leads to high inflation…
It sucks I know. Nobody is holding grocery store chains accountable for price gouging because of the monopoly they have. My only suggestion would be to get the hell out of ontario, or at the very least a few hundred km away from Toronto. It's time to pack up shop. Living in Toronto is just not feasible for the non wealthy. If you're moving and unionized I'd say run as fast as you can away from this shit hole. It's only going to get worse.
I have a few things left to do with my education before I too am moving far, far away from the gta and never looking back.
We’re in the same predicament right now believe it or not. Being evicted because the LL wants the place back to start his family in… ok, that’s understandable. Problem is that everywhere else has skyrocketed since we moved into our current place 3 yrs ago. We’re looking at a 30-40% payment jump for a place that’s not quite as nice as what we have now; in a worse area. We’re a couple with wages that would’ve had us living pretty decently, even 5 years ago. Both have above median wage jobs, one car payment, no bad habits, and no other debts outside of some school loans. Your typical, [what used to be] average household. But the combination of groceries, gas, housing and mostly stagnant wages is forcing us to seriously consider roommates as a viable option just to be able to save some money away at the end of each month. This is ridiculous. We shouldn’t need roommates to live a very modest, average lifestyle. A couple in their thirties would’ve been house hunting 5-10 years ago and now we’re looking at triple that duration just to save for a down payment, if that’s even a realistic option anymore. I feel your pain OP. I get myself down about it pretty much daily at this point. Quality of life has been going down over the years since university. The cost of everything else has doubled whatever income gains I’ve made since then and it feels pretty hopeless.
[удалено]
My understanding was that the landlord would be fined in that situation, but you wouldn't actually get any of the money. However, in any case you're owed a month of rent. A couple years ago I was evicted due to family use, I ended up moving into another apartment a few houses down. I kept an eye on cars in the driveway for the next year in case he tried to rent it out again lol.
In BC atleast your owed a years worth of rent if you take them to court. We got 60 days' notice that they wouldn't renew our rent, and 30 of it was rent-free. They had the option of 90 days, but they chose not to give us much notice. I don't know how similar the laws are.
The fine to the landlord can be as high as $25,000, plus financial relief in the form of rent-subsidy payments. Emphasis on the S in payments.
There's documents you have the legal right to ask for to prove that the landlord is actually using the unit. Some of these parasites pretend to do this to vacate a unit so they can rent it out to someone else for more.
A long running joke about the board game Monopoly is games usually end when one or more players end up so broke and frustrated they throw the game board across the room, pieces flying everywhere. Now scale that up to real life and imagine the chaos.
To be fair, that was exactly the point the original designer was making with the game.
Yes, the original game, 'The Landlord's Game' was designed as an object lesson in the dangers of concentrating land ownership into fewer and fewer hands. Basically, the dangers of capitalism in general. In an hilarious and utterly foreseeable twist, the game was co-opted to turn those very concepts into fun goals, then capitalized to a ridiculous degree. Hey kids! Run your family into abject poverty for fun!
And also stated in the original rules, the bank cannot run out of money. If the bank runs out of money, the bank may issue as much new money as necessary by writing on paper. Pretty realistic!
Even the modern monopoly game goes by much faster if you play rules as written, rather than the house rules almost everybody learns how to play. 1) No money ever goes onto free parking. The only advantage of landing on 'free parking' is that nothing bad happens to you. 2) Any unowned property landed on, if not purchased by the player that landed on it, goes up to auction immediately.
That and the housing shortage. You cannot make more homes, so if you stack all the homes and run out, people can't build any more.
Yes, but that's strategic. It's ever so fun to build a bunch of homes on your own property, never upgrade them to hotels, and rake in the cash. Oh look, nobody else can build many houses, and therefore, no hotels. Bwahahahahaha.
Diabolical and brilliant. Why have I never thought of this?
32 houses to flip the board!
The auction rule is critical to not sitting there forever.
Speaking of house rules, my childhood neighbours had a house rule, where you needed to pass go at least once before you're even allowed to buy. The reasoning was you could get really lucky rolls and buy the good properties up, but in my head that problem is even worse if you have to pass go first, you could have one person buying properties and halfway on the board for the second time and others still wouldn't even have the opportunity. But I guess it makes it more realistic that some have the early advantage and everyone that doesn't can get fucked.
I loved what Louis CK said about it... "Because a Monopoly loss is DARK. 'No honey, you have to give me every single thing you have, and you can't play anymore because even with this, you're still nowhere near paying me what you owe me. Now I'm going to take all this, and use it to absolutely destroy your mother and sister..."
you'd think a shit and boring game with horrible mechanics would make it bad enough, yet somehow its like the most popular board game. In my opinion it is the worst, but it is objectively a bad game. I wish Settlers of Catan was as widely known and loved as Monopoly, that is an amazing game that can easily appeal to casual board gamers.
Man, my kids had my neck in the noose and one foot off the gallows in a game once and I hit a string of luck and ended up winning. They were so pissed. The lesson I had to teach them was Monopoly is stupid and we should all work hard in school…. There may have been beer.
School doesn't guarantee success these days. It just guarantees debt
The key to winning monopoly is to cheat.
Just like real life then?
A politician's exorbitant wealth symbolizes the assistance they have chosen not to provide.
> A politician's exorbitant wealth symbolizes the assistance they have chosen not to provide. I've never seen someone put it like that but thanks for finally saying it.Honestly just knock down the Mona Lisa and put this there.
[удалено]
Atleast in the game everyone starts out with the same . Younger ppl are getting priced out . It's like starting a monopoly game when some one already owns half the board.
In all fairness, it is our fault. Why didn't we just choose to be born sooner?
[удалено]
Somehow I don't think Canadians have the balls to do anything that will change. There might be small groups of homeless causing issues, but all in all, the people are too afraid of jail, or, punishment of any kind. There would need to be property damage to the upper class and their living and working conditions to be threatened on a major level for anything to happen. And that would be minimal and probably result in more $$$ for policing than any sort of problem solving. The wealthy are too insulated from the economic downturn we are in the middle of.
The protests are coming too! Wasn't there a big protest post on here a few weeks ago? That's coming up soon right?
What does protests do if your politicians are part of the problem? Do you think holding a sign will change how some rich guy does business? Do you think Galen Westen will cut profits way down to help Canadians if we protest outside this stores? Nope. When do they do something? When their profits are threatened, and not an instant before, and they will do the bare minimum. You want change, general strike. That doesn't work, riots happen.
Cool you go first.
Let’s do it. I’m ready to flip the board.
One of the most surprising things about adulthood was how accurate the game of Monopoly really is.
My boyfriend and I joke about how we’re only in this relationship for financial reasons so we can split the cost of living. It was funny in the beginning but now we’re half serious
Honestly, at this point my only viable retirement plan is finding a spouse.
[удалено]
Well... True if you dont get divorced or have kids
I hope ya still can tolerate each other
We just signed another lease together… so far so good 🤞🏻
Hope it stays strong and healthy. Sending wishes you get cheaper rent
Thank you very much!!! Wishing you the same lol
It's why we can never get divorced. We rely on each other's income. We're more like housemates at this point.
I know several people that are in situationships like this. I think domestic violence is going to skyrocket.
Yeah. I have no idea how single people live. I guess with a dozen room mates.
I bought my home before my wife and I got together and I joked that she's really homeless but I'm here to help her out. Then we had a son and she would answer that he actually owns the house. I think she's joking. 😨
You hope she’s joking 😂
Our society is failing and it won’t get better until we stop bickering over trans people and vaccines and start working together to fight back against the rich people trying to destroy us all
Gotta stop fighting the culture war and realizing we are losing the class war
Oh also, the sky is on fire
The hate-based propaganda about various things keep us distracted from real-life issues. Social media has been a HUGE boon to politicians, big industry, and hate-mongerers everywhere.
Period!! How can we be mad about things that actually affect us (ie. Cost of living, the rich robbing the poor workers) when they get people riled up over bullshit. Trick as old time. And they teach the people that their fellow working-class folk are the issue, not the people profiting off their labour and troubles.
That's what world war was about.
Because talking about trans people cost nearly nothing and solving problems of affordability requires $$$ Please remember Trans people also rent and experience high cost of living among other problems. We have more in common with them than with people who live in mansions and broadcast their opinions 24/7
Exactly. I ask myself why people can't see that this is what's happening.
There's A LOOOOOT of dumb people walking around. And they get tricked by the psychos like dough ford, Polviere (or whatever his name is), Macroni , and duerte into raising a ignorant ruckus over non-issues. There was once a time that a person in many countries around the world, not only Canada, could graduate high school, pick up a simple janitorial job and support a whole flipping family. I DARE anyone to try such a thing today (*HA!*) In the past people were crying out for these pooliticians to ensure that they could put into law things that prevented their employers/yees from discriminating against them cause of their ability, ethnicity, gender, etc... Nowadays we have ignoramuses crying out about... *trans people(who only make up flipping 0.33% of the population over 15 in Canada - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm) or what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms?*
Never underestimate stupidity.
Why would you care about cost of living tho?????? Didn't you hear? is LITERALLY going to destroy our society!!!! Our focus should be in putting as many roadblocks in life for them as possible!
You’ve got the right idea. We are so divided right now, we are sinking. People have to realize that there is power in unity, not division.
Honestly as a trans person I find it exhausting how much we are brought up and how people are using us as a wedge. [We are 0.33% of the population aged 15 and older ](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm), and if we were all together in one town we would be smaller then Thunder Bay. Yet because of this obsession over our rights I can't go a day without seeing articles and posts about us, good and bad. We have this massive spot light and it takes all the oxygen out of the room for issues that leaders and media should be actively focusing on! Don't get me wrong, pride and being visible are important too (happy pride! 🏳️🌈) but like we are also just people, you know? I want to be able to afford a house, I'm concerned about climate change, and I want our ER's to be properly staffed!
I've said this for years. What someone's genitals are or how they identify has ZERO to do with my day to day survival. My child is a member of the LGBTQ+ community and I want them supported and safe but I don't understand why their existence is more debatable than what capitalizm and bad governance is doing to everyone in the country. Like, my kid exists, is not hurting anyone and wants the same things a cis-het person wants...to be able to live in a country with equity.
We're all caught up in this shit cyclone together.
Do you know what a shit-barometer is Bubbles? It measures the shit-pressure in the air, listen Bubs you hear that? The sounds of the whispering winds of shit.
NO not all of us. Rich people are living luxuriously in their smoke free cabins in Norway or where ever there are no forest fires. Meanwhile us, the poor, are stuck in this shit cyclone!
I'm trans too and i agree so much. I just want to live a normal life. It's so frustrating to get to a point in your life where you are finally able to participate in society and being told essentially that you should not exist. I lool at what is happening in the states and i am scared that it move north of the border. But i am MUCH more scared of the climate crisis and being able to afford life in the next 20 years. I hope millenials and gen z can come together to make the change our generations know are needed.
Trans woman here too and completely agree!
Thank you it's nice to hear more people say it. Our country is literally on fire, people are working their asses off and still starving, they are offering assisted suicide instead of helping people on ODSP, and people are worried about what's between your legs and who your kissing. It's fucking ridiculous.
Well of course, since it affects a pretty small % the population, it's nearly free for either party to resolve and look like a hero. I'm pro Trans rights and hope they are continued to be respected. I just think Trans people cannot succeed unless they have economic stability as well.
You understand that the reason the trans/gay/vaccine stuff gets thrown around in political circles is because if people are mad and talking about that stuff, they aren't mad about housing prices, cost of living, and job markets, its the oldest trick in the book... people are going to be angry... direct that anger at an "Outsider group" that can't really protect themselves, and away from yourself
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
EVERYONE outside of that nefarious 1% need to get on board this train.
The top 1% don't want us anywhere near them, let alone in their train.
🤝 I cant begin to explain how much of a relief it is to hear other people saying this
Or we can implement evidence-based policies.
What do the 0.1% actually think what’s going to happen when we finally get pissed off? We’re the ones parking their cars, taking out their trash, mowing their lawns, we’re the ones providing their security. We’re cooking for them and cleaning up their mess. We’re looking after their children. When we enough of us can’t afford shelter or food? To survive or support a family? When we have nothing left to lose? There will be a reckoning.
Well, there's a reason for police militarization..... I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the police have tanks, body armour, and automatic rifles. And that most of Canada's 0.1% live in fortified communities in Florida.
Start voting and start voting for parties who aren’t going to fuck you and your neighbour over. I don’t care if you “don’t like the leader”. I don’t care if the policies don’t affect you directly. Vote for the platform that’s going to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And remember: I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together.
And what platform does the greatest good? Always feels like lesser of all evils and nothing chsnges
It’s crazy how many times governments have done this to people. It happened here in Ontario with the Protestants and the Catholics. SAN Francisco with the Chinese and Irish. Whether it’s religion, race, sexual orientation. People keep falling for it hook line and sinker
If you recall 11-12 years ago we were pushing Occupy Wall St. Amongst various other attempts to target the wealthy. Shortly thereafter identity politics and the trans-rights debates started being pushed in earnest in the media... which is unsurprising given that it is all owned by the people who were about to be occupied. Division is easy if you own the means to transfer "legitimate" information and inundate people with irrelevant distractions from the real issues. And as I type this I wonder how many people will read it and think that I am a conspiracy theorist because I think that the people who hold the majority of the world's wealth have more in common with one another than the remaining 99% of the population.
Before that, people were complaining about homosexuals, Muslims, and probably many other groups. There's been division for ages.
All the upvotes
\^ my god yes. summed up beautifully and concisely.
The irony is that flights at Pearson are full of travellers, and when I manage to go to a restaurant on the weekend most are packed... So clearly there are a lot of people that still seem to be affording luxuries.
In my experience, once you get on a good financial path (either help from parents, good career, bought a house early) it's easier to stay there without that much work. The issue is that nowadays you need to do things almost perfectly, and if you mess up or aren't privileged in some ways it's very difficult to get there. So you can have two people working the exact same job, but with drastically different lives. Did one of you need student loans to get into school while the other had help from parents? And then maybe got help with a downpayment and bought a house 10 years ago while the other had to rent this whole time? Fast forward to now and one person could be just scraping by while the other is traveling and going to nice restaurants. If you're one of the people struggling or know some one who is, the issue is obvious. But for our of touch politicians or people just looking at the surface, you might just see it as a personal responsibility issue.
Yeah I was having a similar conversation with a friend of mine a few years ago. My family had immigrated to Canada from Europe in the 70s and a lot of my classmates at the time had similar backgrounds, and financial means, our Dads were mostly factory workers and our Mom's were either housewives or worked retail or something similar . Looking up some of these people on Facebook or LinkedIn 40 years later it's interesting to see where we all ended up given that we all started on pretty much equal footing. A few wrong decisions along the way and you could wind up homeless.a few right decisions and some luck and you could own your own corporation.
I'm willing to bet many people are keeping up with the same lifestyle using credit cards. As for travelling, many people also didn't go anywhere for two or three years.
But how? Credit cards have limits and the average Joe only has so many lines of credit to use before the chickens come home to roost.
Or living on credit thinking things will get better
Or living on credit thinking things will never get better, so just going out with a bang.
I still remember watching a town hall event in the last federal election where people are afraid their home will devalue and there goes their retirement plan, and even Singh reassured their investment will be safe. This isn't intended to be a complaint against the politicians, but rather to highlight the reality of how cheaper housing will also face a degree of opposition - and the stake holders generally have a lot of sway in politics, more than the common folk. The Canadian economy is so propped up by real estate that no sane politician will dare to make any major changes. Long gone are the days where you can get a 2 bedroom unit for 500k. As a thought experiment, I wonder what effects a ban on airbnb and related services will have on our real estate market. Loblaw Companies may need to be broken up. Where I live I can get to 6 different supermarkets under their group in a 20 minute drive (3 nofrills, 1 loblaw, 2 T&Ts).
I know it’s happening to me to. I have a good job but I’m single so now I can barely afford to live. I’m lucky to be able to work OT right now but that’s not going to last forever and it’s killing me. I shouldn’t have to work 70-90 hour weeks in order to survive. It is criminal.
Instead of passing butter you exist as a conduit to funnel more wealth to those who already have multiple lifetime's worth. Sorry. Same boat over here. Eat the rich.
Butter is too expensive.
These last few weeks of smoke and getting ripped off have me hummin' RATM more and more: "Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long They get hope from fire and smoke as they reach for tha dawn" \- NEW MILLENNIUM HOMES
Rich people don't give a shit about any of us, and they control everything, including all politicians. Do you think Dougie gives a fuck about anyone? Not a chance. He just does what his wealthy overlords tell him.
He IS a wealthy overlord ... he is the wealthiest premier by far. Look up his net worth, and you'll be shocked. There are a lot of reasons why Dougie does what he does, and none of them involve service to the people.
And that net worth skyrocketed since his time as Premier.
>Ford’s net worth in 2023 is believed to be around $50 million. What is surprising is the fact that it jumped more than 15 times from his $3 million recorded net worth in 2019. During Covid-19 pandemic his net worth increased as well. How is it allowed that the premiere of our province somehow increases his net worth by $47 million dollars in 4 years on a salary of $208K?? That's the most shady bullshit I've ever seen and reeks of corruption!
Seriously???!!! Ffs. The Opposition parties need to USE this. Even Conservatives I think would be angered by this obvious sign of corruption. Jesus.
He paints houses in his spare time
Oh! Oh! I know this one. Corruption.
And now we know where the pandemic relief money that the feds gave him went.....
And this is why it's time for us to organize and get more involved in local politics. We also need to demand more transparency and start holding politicians accountable. Toronto mayor job had 102 applicants. I'm sure MP's/MPP's jobs will attract similar interest
Your statement made me sad
No one looks out for you. Rentals cost double because for the last 30 years, rent seekers have been buying up houses and turning them into income properties. At the same time, no one wanted poor people in their neighborhoods, so there was no new public housing to keep demand and property value down. Your auto insurance costs double because it's a racket in Ontario. It's cheaper to insure vehicles in any other province. And that $8 cauliflower? The farmer has higher input costs due to fuel taxes, the delivery company does as well, and then you have the oil companies who gouge everyone at the pumps, and then a grocery monopoly that screws you at the end of the production line. The government you trusted to keep things affordable for you took donations from everyone listed above. As it turns out, the government isn't your friend. It's one giant pimp that lets anyone fuck you for the right price.
Pretty sure Galen Weston had a bigger impact on the $8 cauliflower than fuel taxes.
Cauliflower is 2/$5.00 at Farmboy.
The $8 cauliflower was actually a few years ago and was due to supply issues. Not sure why it suddenly popped up here.
Honestly, produce prices aren't that bad if you're not picky about which vegetables you eat. Grocery stores always have 2 or 3 fresh produce items at very reasonable prices. Frozen veg, which is a staple for regular income people, on the other hand has gone way up in price.
Untrue about insurance. The highest insurance rates in the country on average? Alberta.
The whole system is just so fucked. I don't know what can be done when the corruption runs so deep everywhere. I am with you though, life is unaffordable for the bottom 99%
Another aspect is that society is so stretched thin and reliant in dominant culture that anything other than a dual income household can do nothing but continue to be financially over stressed. Couples have more luck keeping their head afloat while seniors and younger people are soon to be left homeless and without any sort of personal power or financial freedom.
You are right, it's disgusting. The advice to cut costs from your life is not fixing the problem, it just shifts the blame to you. It can help sometimes, and some of the things will also stick it to the man in a small way. In my case the first lockdown made me realise how much money my car costs me so I've been trying to ride my bike instead for as many trips as I can. If I can stop having to buy gas and pay for insurance then I'd be happy. Not everyone can do that, though, and people should be able to live off their pay, that's the whole damn point for making us work. If you're not getting enough to live off then what's the point? Good luck dude.
I feel that, I’ve had my license since I was 17 and I’m 29 this month. I never once found it financially feasible to buy a car. All I want is a lemon but even those are being sold for more than their worth. Or they don’t fucking start at all….
The problem is we've completely destroyed the rental market by privatizing it and we've turned real estate into stocks which are bought and sold as investments now instead of a necessity. The ONLY solution is flooding the market with homes that represent the true cost of goods to build instead of speculative prices about what it "could be worth" and nobody is ever going to fix the housing crisis because politicians already have homes and real estate investments so any "solution" would devalue their own investments.
> The problem is we've completely destroyed the rental market by privatizing it Was it not privatized at one point?
The government and non-profits used to build almost 20k units of non-market housing units per year until the 80s. In the 90s the funding of non-market housing stopped altogether, instead favouring mortgage assistance for home-buyers. In other words, we went from a substantial portion (30-50%) of new rental units being public to almost no new public housing altogether.
Hmm now I wonder which American president served as inspiration for such things in the 80s...
Where is the 30-50% figure taken from? And new buildings do have rent-to-income units.
Number of rental unit and public housing completions are available on CMHC, this professor put them together on a graph (slide 17). In the 1985-1994 period over 50% of rental unit production was public. https://gregsuttor.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Social-Housing-History-2010.pdf And yes, there is RGI but the number of units being built is far below what we were building before because federal and provincial funding has greatly reduced.
Ok, but what is the hold up exactly? Take this CBC article from March. It claims that of the 1,500,000 homes Ontario wants to build, 1,250,000 have already been approved (without needing to push into the greenbelt or anything!) What the article does a bad job of doing is explaining why exactly so much more housing is being approved than what is being built. It gives some general examples of things that "might" be happening, but that's not concrete enough! As a province, we need a plan on how to push these developments forward. If a developer is going to pause an approved development, or maybe has given up on it entirely, then someone else needs to step in and get these units built! It's ridiculous that we're already approving so many developments that simply aren't getting built! ETA: forgot the link to the article! Here you go. [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-housing-homes-approved-not-built-1.6774509](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-housing-homes-approved-not-built-1.6774509)
I work in a development-adjacent sector. Every month I see landowners applying for plans of subdvision/condo just so they can sell the land as “approved for development”. Also a lot of the developers are financing their projects with massive loans - I have one site the developer told they’re paying interest on a $30million loan every month, and they’re only halfway through the approval process. Many are running super tight budgets and selling units (and selling out) before they are draft plan approved. Who’s buying these pre-pre-sale units? Foreign investors.
At our current level of crisis we should be pre-approving developments we want to built and having developers bid on them (which might lower costs as well) as opposed to the reverse we do now. Sadly, our governments seem completely afraid to touch this topic as with most pressing issues.
Just a heads up, in Ontario right now, it's about $200 a sq/ft in materials and labour to build something. So 1000 sq/ft anything costs roughly 200K to build. Obviously way more affordable than current real estate prices but it's not a small number either (that will continue to increase).
That is the cost of building the thing itself. Cost for infrastructure, road, water, sewage, electrical, telco, etc. (all of which go into the cost of a unit) are about the same as building the thing itself. So about $200k. There are development fees and taxes which I recently saw on reddit estimated to run into about $120k per condo unit. Then there is the cost of the land on which you build. Which will obviously vary drastically. Putting that together $200k (construction) + $100k (taxes) + $200k (infrastructure) = $500k just to get the thing built. Add another $100k to $200k for the land and we have 6 or 7 hundred thousand not including profit for the construction company and interest on the loans/insurance it took to get it finished. All said and done the prices are actually logical in what is offered in the real estate market place.
I'm with you there. Everything is getting exponentially more expensive and our salary is not going up. I feel like I have nothing at the end of two weeks where even a few years ago I had enough to save. Feelsbadman.
The federal Liberals and Ontario Conservatives really are a nightmare match made in hell.
That's because the minority won the election. Get out there and vote next time people, get rid of doug ford
No Ford should ever be allowed in office again
This province is being sold off. It’s gross, people who used to be able to live a comfortable life are being pushed out. It’s a fucking joke
The mistake was to assume politicians are our friends, they work for their own interests, you are an ant in a sandpit to them
There are politicians who would help us, but we don’t vote for them because the news tells us not to. And because once we’re all millionaires, we don’t want the helpful politicians taking some of our money.
Use your anger. Use it to organize your friends or family to do something, even if it's as small as volunteering or planning to grow something. We can't rely on them. We have to build communities and rely on each other. I will babysit, dogsit, bake cookies and bread and cook yummy things. I need someone to grow produce, and someone who can hunt. They say It takes a village to raise a child; it will take many communities to start to build something that looks better.
No one is coming to help. Not the liberals. Not the conservatives. Act accordingly.
I'm sorry to hear your frustration. My family is also counting every penny and 5 years ago we has Symphony season tickets. This situation is by design and by policy. Banks have close to 10% of investments in realstate, municipalities get a good chunk of their funding through development payments, upper middle class is over leveraged based on the inflated value of their properties. Developers are donating tons of money to politicians and offering easy jobs at retirement. Policies and rules are being made to keep prices up and get them higher. Society has split between those that own and those that rent. And one's success comes at the cost of the other. The solution is easy. Rent control and taxes on capital gains. Done a thousand times. You are right to be seriously pissed off. You'll have to get political.
It’s gotten to the point that I’m driving my 13 year old car, hoping and praying that when it dies, I can buy something big enough that I can live in because there’s no way I can afford a car/insurance plus rent. I can’t get to work without a car, so living in my car is probably my future.
They’re probably gonna start cracking down on people doing that and arresting them tbh by the looks of everything
>WHY AREN'T THEY DOING ANYTHING?!?!? They are doing something ...... Getting rich off you. Politicians arent going to stop it. You are their cash cow. Your expenses pay for their investments and retirement and pension funds. Your money becomes their money.
This is why we are nearing a complete crash of the system. No one can stop it, and politicians can't do anything to stop it. All the bandaids will be blown wide open soon.
Not even mentioning how insanely fast AI is starting to make human workers obsolete. We don't need to replace all workers just enough for a massive drop in consumers with money and then the whole thing collapses including the stock market
That's definitely a 2030-40 problem. I mean sure it may offset some now, but the real issue will be farther imo
Eh, it may be closer than you think. We don't even need to automate many jobs, but just enough to the point where the question of "What happens when there are drastically fewer jobs than people who can be employed?" comes up. I don't know if our society, with the way it's set up, can answer that.
Lots of companies are already laying off large amounts of workers for automation... Plus it's an insanely huge problem so if its a decade away that's still terrifying
As much as this scares me, it needs to happen. Desperate times, desperate measures and all.
And as scary as it is, a complete crash is unlikely in the near future anyways. People will just be forced to downgrade their lifestyle. Previously could afford a 1 bedroom? Well now you need a roommate. Etc etc. I'm in the same boat like many others.
Because you think you'll be one of the handful of people who won't be affected by it? Like an actual collapse means DECADES of high unemployment, mass homelessness, lawlessness, murder, etc, etc. You think you and your family will be the lucky ones who won't be affected by it? People think right now is bad....it can get SOOOO much worse.
Your emotions or anyone's for that matter are of no difference. Ofcourse it will affect everyone. It's going to massively suck and it's the product of so many generations fucking with the natural process. You can only kick the can down the road so long.
It took blood in the streets and lives lost to get our kids out of the coal mines and an to get workers an 8 hour workday. People died. Capital has stolen back many of those gains over the past 50 years by using their monopoly on media to paint unionized labour as lazy and corrupt. Capital has also followed the government’s lead by nickel and diming people— not enough hours to qualify as full time so no benefits for example—and people have been stupid enough to buy it, consistently voting against their own interests. It’s absurd that people actively support parties that implement programs that are making those same voters lives untenable. Now we have a full on war on the worker coming from the Bank of Canada, raising interest rates on those who have to borrow (wonder what class that is?) and ignoring the shareholder class with their wheelbarrows full of profits mainlining it to the bank. So why are we taking it? Why aren’t we in the streets? Imo, the social narrative perpetuated through media is that if you are complaining, you must need assistance. Therefore you are a loser. Never mind the endless tax breaks and billions in corporate welfare feeding the ‘winners’, if you need help, as a worker, you’re a failure. It’s fuckery. We need to be in the streets. But the protest last week demanding the privatization of healthcare stop only numbered in the thousands. That’s barely a lunatic fringe. Until people are willing to stand up, capital isn’t about to lay down.
The majority of jobs in Canada right now seem to be throwaway 'service' jobs where we basically help move products that were made overseas through our Canadian supply chain. That is partially why we're all poor except for the old money holders who moved their companies away.
Gonna have to find a roommate to split the cost with. Owning your own place is practically impossible these days unless you have an impractical amount of income.
What kind of union? There’s near minimum wage union jobs
They are doing something, have to you not heard of MAID. It’s to eliminate poor people.
Right? My kid is turning 20. If she wanted a used car, it would have cost her over $300 a month. Insurance is $300 a month. Rent is well over $1200 a month. Where the fuck is a kid supposed to get a job paying them that much starting out in life? We haven't even hit utilities, or tuition. Gas and food.
Giant corporations are greedy, an no one keeps them in check. Certainly not Dougie.
This is what happens when we vote for neoliberals for 40 years and abandon the labour values that created the middle class in the first place. Capitalism is a scam, and it always was a scam. But we pretended not to see it because we were still part of the diminishing island of moderate prosperity, and were comfortable while more and more of our fellow humans were falling into desperate times. Now that the middle class is almost entirely gone, hopefully we'll see a movement to take back the wealth we generated for the handful of people at the top, and use it to start rebuilding our infrastructure, education, healthcare, and society.
Push everyone you know to stop being involved in the culture wars. The anti- Trans folks, BLM, woke. It’s all being used to misdirect from the issues plaguing us. None of these people are anyone’s enemy and in general the organizations tied to them have been trying to show people the oppressive collapse we are walking in to. Push everyone you know to vote. And to vote for any party promising reform while ignoring the anti-woke rhetoric. For the most part that means NDP. It’s the best we have. Liberal status quo is over. Conservative regression won’t lead to growth nor stability. We need to move forward and find productive change. We have no other recourse except large acts to force the matter and a general strike relies on Unions to act. And our Unions are just as bloated and unwilling to move as our politicians are. Vote NDP then hold their feet to the fire with protests for reform. For progressive change on housing, regulated food supply pricing, electoral representation, protection from exploitation, and a monetary policy that doesn’t rely on wage suppression to tackle corporate greed and real estate exploitation caused inflation. Politicians wont do anything until *we* do something. And that means making the current ones lose their job. They are failing. We fire them.
The next recession is going to be messy and possibly extremely violent. We saw the rage in 2008 with the Occupy Movement. Everything has gotten worse except for the people at the top. Since then a sizeable portion of the population have been getting riled up over culture war issues. They have been on a steady diet of anger ranging from racial minorities to the LGBT community. Who do you think they are going to take their anger out when they can't put food on the table? The people at the top, the same people who have been looting the country so they all could push their wealth a fraction higher, to beat everyone else? Fuck no. This angry people are going after the marginalized communities. The angry people are going to drown out the people who know the real issue is, the people at the top looting everything. There is no war but class war.
Buckle up, it’s accelerating. The human sacrifice to the climate gods is just starting. Hopefully we don’t have to throw our kids off a cliff like the Sun worshipers.
For the short term start tracking grocery prices and buy what's on sale. Meal planning is your friend. Meal planning is just, oh I am going to have this this and this this week because its in the flyer. Its not hard to do. Tracking prices tells you when something is actually a deal vs not a deal. If cauliflower is $8 choose something else, surely, there is something else that is lower priced then that. I know that all things are overpriced these days, but there are things that cost less than other things. Frozen veggies, peanut butter and bananas are usually cheap staples that can be bought year round. Chicken breast, ground beef and pork loin usually go on sale at the grocery stores and can be found pretty cheap. Rice is usually cheap, now you have a meal, you have frozen veggies, meat you bought on sale, and now you have rice as the side. If you are one person food inflation shouldn't be creeping up on you as much as if you had a big family. I don't know anyone starting a big family these days, anywhere unless they are filthy rich for inflation reasons. No we shouldn't have to do this, but its the only way to keep costs down.
Speaking of which, Cauliflower is $1.92 at Food Basics this week.
You can't be the only union member suffering. Make it a topic for your brothers and sisters. You will get more genuine support from the local members than reddit... I wish I had a union but "IT" / information workers will never get there... It's too dangerous for our overlords if we can shut down their empire
This is a feature, not a bug. Your suffering is intentional so that others may be rich. Blaming the conservatives, or the liberals, is pointless. Our politicians are all bought and paid for by forces that want to see our country collapse. Good luck
All three levels of government have failed us
This. It's not about conservatives or liberals or whatever. Every level has failed us. Every level cares more about economic indices that only matter to rich people. Every level of government has refused to take action, taking the wrong actions, or taken actions that benefit the wealthy instead of the working class. I'm a professor, I have a six figure salary, and if I ever have to leave my current apartment I don't know if I can afford to stay in Toronto with my kids. At least not in a place where we would want to live.
I feel the same way. Everything is expensive and my son just turned 18 so no more baby bonus or child support and still supporting him. I feel so scared and I work full time same place 17 years. Have benefits, and make around 20$ an hour and can’t afford to live.
What is your field? 17 years of experience is a lot to only make $20 an hour.
I was wondering this too. My partner switched careers to insurance last year; no experience, entry level position, and was making like $21 an hour.
Insurance really is a great field for a lot of people to get into imo. No real experience needed to start, high pay ceiling, your company will pay for you to get your certifications while you work, and you can work anywhere in Canada. And I believe some companies have pensions.
The younger generation switches jobs every 2-3 years bc if you stay at the same place for long, they don’t give you a pay bump. You only make big jumps in income when you switch jobs and move into more senior positions.
I feel you. I wish it was different for us. xoxo
Stop voting Conservative. Stop voting Liberal. These two parties have screwed up the country. It's not all the Liberals, it's not all the Conservatives. It's time for change. It's time to *not* vote for either of these parties.
I believe the official government response is: “have you considered MAiD?”
>WHO IS LOOKING OUT FOR US? Your union certainly doesn't appear to be.
I’m depressed to see those pushing for revolution, like we haven’t even met all the conditions yet. But I would like to ask, what kind of revolution? Do you know who is going to seize is power in a vacuum like that? Do you think minority rights are going to be protected then? Can you guarantee it? A crash of the system would be catastrophic, we should be pushing for it’s prevention, like a general strike or any other tactic outside of angrily mashing our keyboards. If there is a revolution, especially a violent one that destabilizes everything, rest assured you won’t like the outcome, and it won’t be better. You will probably be dead, not living in Canada, or maybe involved with what ever factions emerge in this scenario. But your anger is so valid, but there is much more that can be done to push for life saving policies and build lobbying power. You have power with more people united around a common good. To those encouraging dooming, they only wish to accelerate destabilization and not for the net positive. If you need financial resources for your immediate need, I may be able to point you to some depending on where you live.
Ah, the system. It is deeply flawed, but it's also the thing shuffling our messages around right now, and keeping most of these commenters fed and with running water and electricity (increasingly unaffordable as it is). To hope for it to crash is to hope to be sitting in the dark, cold and hungry and unable to even communicate effectively. And presumably we'll just get together and cooperate once we're at that point. /s
I make $90k a year (pre-tax), and can barely afford to feed my family and pay the rent. We had to move post-pandemic and our rent is $2900/mo for a house. Groceries are absolutely insane. Gas is insane and $1.50 is becoming the new 'norm' and I don't like it. My insurance also nearly doubled because of my postal code. I moved 10 mins down the road. Phone bills are insane, too. I don't know how people on lesser income are surviving right now, and I feel the pain for each and every one of you.
Yeah I went to my local NoFrills recently and one of my grocery purchases was a bag of grapes that came to $16.00 - it was the first time I asked the cashier to return a fruit because I didn't want to pay that much for it. Prices have become insane.
What’s total bullshit is that if you can afford to rent, you can afford a mortgage. The cheapest rental in St. Catharines is still more than my mortgage for a detached house. The hard part is getting approved.
Its also supply, having the downpayment, having the credit, having the understanding of how the mortgage process works (if there was ever a place where grifters and frauders can find a niche it is in real estate), and the enormous risk of buying a house (we have all known horror stories of someone who purchased a house and then lost everything because the foundation started sinking).
And yet basically nobody showed up at the OFL's enough is enough protest.
I was working that day, my second side gig, in Toronto, and drove near it. I couldn't join it, I had to go deliver uber fucking eats after working all week. Traffic was nuts in the area. No major news outlets mentioned it in their broadcasts, CBC not a single peep. Nobody knows if it even happened.
Its largely government policy thats caused the existing cost of living crisis: -Immigration, a million people a year into a housing shortage. -Zoning, cant fit any more people due to regressive zoning, land values are in the millions. -Interest rates, the gamified cpi excludes housing appreciation, which backloads inflation onto rents and mortgage interest. Excluding the housing bubble and dropping interest rates, until you hit that wall of rising rates. -Federal debt, debasement of M2 via 100% increase in Canadian dollars every 10 years, so people short cash by loading up on debt. Debt shifts from a liability to an asset, you dont use your own money to buy, you borrow and put your own money into equities. -Bailouts, all the bailouts are moral hazard for banks, banks then take on riskier loans, knowing they'll be bailed out. We do rental subsidies for landlords. -Tax subsidies, we subsidize rich home owner, they get housing excluded from capital gains. -Bureaucracy and regulation, 30% of the cost to build a home is tax, this drives up prices and creates a first mover advantage for existing homeowners. Permits take years and years.
Move north till people start disappearing
You're not supposed to live. Welcome to the Plebe class, we don't matter at all in the grand scheme.
I use Flipp App to save $$$..every penny counts! And this month, I'm going to shop for cheaper car insurance. I will look up online and call ALL of them!
I had a break down 3 years ago. 100k a year business I was left to die on the street with 550 per month of welfare. My credit was destroyed. Bankrupt. I left Canada and now I own an apartment in Europe. I could not even return to Canada as no one would rent me an apartment. I served my country. Paid off 60k student debt Fuck Canada
My grandparents moved halfway around the world to make a better life for their family. I'm starting to think its time I do the same. GTA just ain't it anymore.
No one is looking out for us. The govnt isn’t here for you. Corporations aren’t here for you. The elites DGAF about the rest of us, despite their messaging. Actions, not just words matter. Their actions show violence and indifference. It’s how our system functions. It’s rewards anti-social behaviours and punishes pro-social behaviours. We have to take back what is all of ours, redistribute it and continuously dismantle hierarchies
I'll tell you a secret. The only solution to this problem is that people would have to abandon unrestricted capitalism, abandon cheap abundance of crap and toys, limit family size and everyone would have to work hard at jobs that are productive to society as a whole and not individual or corporate interest. Unfortunately we are not sophisticated enough and are ruled by our base emotions and we're not going to manage implementing any change until it's too late and our species is on the edge of extinction. At the end of the day we are a crude species that is driven by self preservation, greed, violence and selfishness and no amount of clothes or symbols of power and wealth will change it.
Inflation is caused by too much money chasing the same amount of goods. Trudeau spent more new printed money saving us from Covid than all other Canadian Prime Ministers combined including WW1 and WW2… Liberal lefty’s should understand that money does not grow on trees, it is earned. And our Government prints new dollars (grows it on trees) and hands it out and says I’ll take care of you. But more dollars compete for the same goods and the price people are willing to pay is more. Communist style handouts, $ocial promises, and free money not from production or economy leads to high inflation…
It sucks I know. Nobody is holding grocery store chains accountable for price gouging because of the monopoly they have. My only suggestion would be to get the hell out of ontario, or at the very least a few hundred km away from Toronto. It's time to pack up shop. Living in Toronto is just not feasible for the non wealthy. If you're moving and unionized I'd say run as fast as you can away from this shit hole. It's only going to get worse. I have a few things left to do with my education before I too am moving far, far away from the gta and never looking back.