There’s nothing to scrap, Capital gains taxes are already already waived for selling your primary residence in Canada.

My preference would be a policy that taxes all properties (just the land, not the building) and then refunding that money to every Canadian citizen (and maybe people who are on a PR track working towards citizenship) equally. That way if you have a big property with a high land value, and only 2 people living there, you’re not getting most of your tax back, but if you’ve got 3 kids and 2 adults in a 5 bedroom house in a suburb, or the same in a townhouse closer to the core, you’re breaking even, and if you choose to live as a couple in a 1 bedroom apartment (low land value per unit) or a larger place but further out of town where property is cheaper, you may even get a little bit of extra money back each month.

That way people are paying everyone else for the amount of desirable land they want to consume. You want a mansion in downtown Vancouver, go right ahead, pay everyone else for that privledge. You don’t need as much and are happy to have a small apartment just outside the core? Thank you for your sacrifice, here’s some cash from Mr. Mansion.

This scales nicely and encourages people to only use what they need at a given time, and also encourages development of density of properties that have high land values because people want to live there.

It also directly taxes non-citizens who want to own land here. Paying every Canadian for the fact that they’re consuming land in Canada.

That’s what I’m saying, there’s too many people in houses that aren’t the right size for them. It’s not a supply issue, it’s a distribution issue.

If you make 1100 dinners, and there are 1000 people, but you give two dinners to 400 people you’re going to run out before everyone gets a dinner. There’s no shortage of dinners though, it’s simply a distribution issue.

People don’t have to stay in a house that’s far too large for them. Allowing or encouraging them to do so is actually a huge problem.

My parents are a perfect example of this, they have a house with 4 bedrooms, and a suite with 1 more bedroom. They had the suite rented out, but decided they didn’t need the money so they stopped. It’s literally just the two of them in a 5 bedroom house. They also have a one bedroom cabin elsewhere. Was that 4 bedrooms useful when they were raising my sibling and I? Sure, but we haven’t lived there in 25 years.

We need policies that encourage scaling house size to family size, so that the distribution issue gets resolved. We need policies that encourage essentially force density in desirable locations. Those are the only way we solve the housing issue. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, build our way back to affordable housing.

Except that’s not what the data says, there are more bedrooms in BC than people, not even accounting for the fact that lots of people are couples and share a room.

It’s true for every location I’ve ever checked in Canada, including Metro areas like Vancouver and Toronto.

There’s a lot of excess bedrooms that are not being used for housing people.

What? Nah, His edit is 11 minutes after I said it.

Did you even read what I said.

It’s not a supply and demand problem locally. In fact, it’s the opposite of that. It’s a local supply problem, with a national demand issue.

That’s why all this nonsense about supply building is so fucking useless. You can’t supply all of the houses in Vancouver that are desired from the 41 million Canadians across Canada.

By all means keep building more, but unless you tamp demand down it will not matter.

That looks like a list of major tour stops for sure…

Don’t forget Niki Minaj.

You can look up the data even for cities specifically, it’s not significantly different. You aren’t doing that because you don’t want to be proven wrong.

Continue tilting at windmills my friend. I’m going to go after the actual monsters.

Let me ask you a simple question. It has a very obvious answer too.

What if 5 million units magically appeared overnight in Vancouver and they were all available at “affordable” rates, so no more than 3x median annual household income. So around $150,000k for a 1 bed condo, and around $270 for a 3 bedroom townhouse.

How long would it take for those units to be snapped up by buyers?

I’ll tell you the answer, they would be sold as soon as people could talk to their bank.

People would straight up abandon their lives elsewhere for those units. From Halifax to Hope, there would be a migration like never seen before.

And the next day, Vancouver housing prices would still be higher than those new rates, because there would still be more demand and not enough available units driving the prices up.

This is the eternal problem with supply in desirable areas, there can never be enough of it.

Greater Tokyo has 40 million people, and even with the entire country losing something like a half a million people, Tokyo’s population is stable because of constant inbound migration from other areas. The moment costs drop, or jobs become available, someone else moves in to take it.

This isn’t a random side take either, Greater Tokyo has about 3x the density of Greater Vancouver. Tripling the current Vancouver population would be around 6 million new people.

Do you know how Tokyo stays somewhat affordable for housing? The per-person average square footage for housing is like 150-250 square feet. There are entire 4 person families living in 500 square foot apartments, and singles living in units so small you can touch the walls on both sides.

It’s not about a lack of supply, or rather, there is no possible way to reach a supply level that would reduce housing prices to affordable levels.

Instead, and here’s the genius trick, you change the demand. You introduce a tax on EVERYONE in Vancouver, not a small tax, a large tax, but you don’t tax the people, you tax the land they use. Maybe $100,000 a year for a detached house in the City of Vancouver, Maybe $10,000 a year for a condo in Vancouver. That money gets refunded to all Canadians equally, even to the people who live in Vancouver. This gives people an incentive to live outside of Vancouver, and the people who do get to live there subsidize the people who don’t get to live in such a desirable location. People who want a lot of land, pay for the privledge. People who are happy to share the land pay less, or even benefit from others who don’t want to share.

You’re a fucking moron.

Should the government take over every farm, food processor, food manufacturer, and transportation company too? They’re all profiting off a basic necessity of life.

Should the government take over all housing construction, development, renovation? That’s also a necessity of life.

Countries have tried this before, it didn’t end well.

Capitalism is working just fine for groceries right now, why throw that out when the real problem is the current land ownership and energy systems?

“slightly higher level”

They quite literally multiplied it by no less than 3, everywhere.

How much supply are you looking for here?

Again, that is factually untrue.

No, it isn’t, and it’s very easy to double check.

https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&SearchText=ontario&DGUIDlist=2021A000011124%2C2021A000259%2C2021A000235&GENDERlist=1&STATISTIClist=1%2C4&HEADERlist=20

Go look at the section of that statscan data that shows number of total units by bedroom count. Even if you assume that 4+ bedrooms is only 4, the total bedrooms in Canada is about 40.5 Million and that data was as of 2021, when the population from Statscan was a little under 37 million.

Like I said before, even assuming nobody ever sleeps in the same room, and using the worst case for counting bedrooms where no house has more than 4, there are still 4 million excess bedrooms in this country.

Once you account for couples, it’s probably close to 10-15 million excess bedrooms with nobody sleeping in them.

Even if you look at just BC data, it’s the same thing. If you switch BC out for Ontario, guess what… At least 15.1 million bedrooms, and 14.2 million people in 2021.

You need to stop spouting off about “factually untrue” when the facts don’t support your argument. There is more than enough housing available for everyone at the moment if it were distributed equitably. Homeowners and politicians are lying to you to keep profiting off your stupidity.

I mean, when you can’t use birth control it is not your only hope?

You haven’t been keeping up with the changes in the law. There is no such thing as single family zoning inside cities in BC anymore.

The provincial government made it so that essentially any property in a municipality over 5000 people is allowed to have 3 units if it’s under 280 square meters, or 4 units if it’s over 280 square meters.

If it’s greater than 280 meters near frequent bus service(15 minutes or better during daytime hours), it goes up to a minimum allowance of 6 units.

Any property within 800 meters of a rapid transit exchange or 400 meters of a regular transit exchange also gets automatic zoning allowing a massive upgrade to number of stories for condo/apartment buildings.

Again, there’s no shortage, there’s plenty of housing available, it’s just that there’s a lot of over-housed people who are hogging properties they don’t reasonably need.

I argue it is not, because unreasonable desire shouldn’t be part of “housing” conversations.

If every single person wanted a detached house on Robson Street, that’s clearly just stupid and should be ignored. It’s not a supply shortage. If everyone wanted a 3-bedroom condo unit overlooking Kits beach, that’s also clearly unrealistic. It’s not a supply shortage.

Think about it this way, if you earned the same amount you currently do, and condos and houses were $1000 per bedroom each to buy outright anywhere you wanted. What would you end up with? I suspect it wouldn’t be a 1 bedroom condo in a bland area of town. You’d probably have a house somewhere near your work, a condo downtown, maybe a cabin up at a lake.

You may not want 10 different places, so the demand for housing is not infinite, but it’s orders of magnitude greater than anything that’s realistic to supply.

If we use that logic, we will always be in a supply shortage no matter how much we build, because there will never be enough inventory available to push prices down to $1000 per bedroom.

Which is why I don’t consider that original situation a supply shortage in Vancouver. Once you bring “reasonable” into the conversation, there’s already enough supply to meet the reasonable needs of the population. As I said before, the problem is the price and current distribution.

It’s not a housing shortage, it’s a pricing issue.

If you do the math based on statscan data, there are FAR more bedrooms in Canada than people, even if you assumed couples never slept together and kids never shared a room.

People are splitting rooms to make it more affordable, not because rooms don’t exist.

There are retired couples, or families with a single kid, living in 4-5 bedroom houses in Vancouver, because they either don’t want to downsize, or they can afford the space so they buy more than they need.

The problem ais the distribution of housing, some people have too much, and some people don’t have what we would reasonably consider enough.

There is also some distribution issues around where those houses are located compared to the desires of where people want to live. If someone has a house in Edmonton, but wants to live in Vancouver in a similar house and can’t afford it, is that a housing shortage in Vancouver? I would argue it is not.

Where we define that “reasonable” line is where an ACTUAL shortage would come in. How much housing is reasonable for each person, and how reasonable is the location they want that much housing in?

However, I don’t believe we have crossed that line. In my opinion we need to regulate the market better in order to have the distribution more aligned with overall social benefit. Of course we need to continue building more units with the population and to replace buildings over time, but policy could re-distribute the existing housing more fairly without needing a single one of those today.

Given the system we have, this is a non-issue.

In a perfect world we wouldn’t need capitalism at all, but we don’t live in a perfect world. We will never have a perfect world, humans are not perfect. We’re greedy little fuckers.

A 4.2% Profit is very low. Extremely low. That profit level is actually so low that it’s almost losing money for investors once you account for inflation. Any lower and there wouldn’t be any investors, and we’d see grocery store closures and price increases until it went back up again to attract investment.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very much for socializing certain industries. Healthcare, Electricity, Internet/Communications, Water, Sewer, Roads, should all be run by the government in my opinion. They each have particular problems where Capitalism has massive market failures. Healthcare is too necessary and usually too urgent to be able to “shop around” for the best deal. Electricity and Internet have natural monopolies on transmission due to infrastructure building requirements.

This just doesn’t apply to grocery stores. There’s some fierce competition among the major players, minor players exist, and there isn’t an obvious market failure like regulatory capture or a monopoly leading to ridiculous profit margins or an inability for new entrants to join the market.

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

In my mid-sized city, there all three major players present of course (Pattison, Loblaw, Empire), then we’ve got walmart, costco, whole foods, h-mart, and I know of at least a dozen smaller grocers and full time farm markets that aren’t even chains. There’s even a co-op grocery store owned by members.

I don’t mean to downplay the situation, but it’s quite clear when you look at the numbers that grocery stores are NOT the root of the issue with food price increases.

If you really want grocery stores to drop the prices more, do you know what would be even more useful than taking their 4.2% profit? Take the land from their landlords, and lease it to them for $1. Grocery stores typically are paying 4-8% of their total revenue in land prices.

The highest costs of grocery stores (in descending order) are Inventory, Labour, and Rent.

Now imagine if, instead of just dropping their rent prices, you actually dropped the land/housing costs for EVERYONE. That reduces how much the famer needs to spend, that reduces how much the processing plant spends, that reduces the amount the manufacturer spends, that reduces the amount the warehousers spend, and it reduces the amount the grocery stores spend.

It gets worse though when you realize that housing prices are also why labour prices are so high. If your rent/mortgage was half, you wouldn’t need to be paid as much money to have the same standard of living, it wouldn’t reduce your costs by half, there are non-rent costs in your budget, but say you earn the median income of $80,0000, and you’re spending $3000 a month on rent for your family, if your rent dropped to $1500, you could earn $62,000 and have the same life. That’s reducing labour costs by 22%.

Then take that and apply it to the entire chain as well. Reduced labour for the famer, processor, manufacturer, warehouse, grocery store.

This is the big thing people are failing to understand. Land owners are taking a huge cut of everyone’s money right now. This is where the money flows to in the economy. I’m not talking about corporate land owners either, I’m talking about every single person who owns real estate from some random big corporate entity all the way down to your parents who bought a house 20 years ago and have seen it’s value go up by 4x since then. That value had to come from somewhere, and it’s coming straight out of everyone’s pockets in the form of higher prices.

It’s a hidden tax on everyone that the government controls through policy, but which the government doesn’t receive the money for.

The government has the power to end that, but there’s very little appetite for it because it’s far too removed from public understanding for the public to even know what to ask for to fix it.

No, I really don’t. The “record breaking profits” are still very small percentages.

Do the math. The numbers are publicly available. https://www.loblaw.ca/en/loblaw-reports-revenue-growth-of-4-6-in-the-third-quarter/

2025 Quarter 3, 19.4 Billion in Revenue, Adjusted net earnings (what most people would call profit) of $828 million.

That’s about 4.2% Profit, even if you assume accounting fuckery and double that number it’s still not a concerning amount of profit to make for a business.

People using misleading headlines and statistics against you, knowing you are too lazy to do the actual math yourself.

The real concern, as made evident in my original post, is that the cost of land for these grocery stores, and the cost of fuel to transport shit around, and the cost of the products themselves (because their makers also have land and transport costs) has massively increased their costs.

Then then answer to your question is yes, you interpreted it incorrectly. The original (and common) definition of that word is vastly different than what you assumed.

This comment is 90% of why this won’t get fixed.

The public has ZERO idea of what’s actually causing the problem. Blaming grocery stores for the issues because that’s the only place they see the product and have to hand over cash.

Completely ignoring that the issues start 3 or 4 levels up the production chain and persist the entire length.

Go ask a commercial farmer how much it costs to raise a chicken or grow some peppers now compared to what it did 20 years ago. Their costs have gone up the same amount as yours at the store.

The things that ACTUALLY have caused this are Land value appreciation, Fuel cost increases, and fertilizer costs. The first has gone up because government policy around land is fucking stupid, and the second has gone up because oil is harder to extract than ever, and more in demand than ever globally. Fertilizer costs are almost entirely based on fuel costs because they’re heavily used in extraction and processing.

If we want prices to go down again we need land value taxes and to 10x our government investment in renewable energy tech just like what China is doing now.

Do you know what a semaphore is?

Quite literally designed for long distance communication.

Used extensively in many different variations before wire/electricity based systems became available, then even used after that for communication in places where you couldn’t have a wire (like between boats)