Too few people in Canada have the slightest idea what is actually going on.

Near-zero interest rates for 21 years -- from 2001 after the dotcom bubble collapsed to 2022 when households were no longer able to pay more for housing -- drove a housing price inflation that, for example, has left 34% of Canadian renters paying more than 50% of their take-home pay for rent, a typical scenario across the neoliberal West. In 2022, when no further upside remained in residential real estate, big money moved on to AI stocks and data centers, where it has been plundering governments and environments ever since. The brazenly insulting narrative to excuse more than tripling the price of a house in 21 years is that "demand" by households for a family home -- especially "demand" by the handiest of handy scapegoats, "Immigrants!" -- has so outstripped the "supply" of houses that "Economics 101: Supply and Demand," an immutable law of nature similar to gravity, necessitates that housing prices skyrocket without limit. What actually occurred is that cheap money chases unearned income, and the greater the supply of cheap money (near-zero interest rate money) the more likely the demand by holders of financial assets for higher prices will be met. Housing, of course, was concurrently repurposed from structures in which people dwell to financial assets whose function is to increase in price. Why? Because nobody willingly becomes homeless, and everybody prioritizes paying their mortgage or their rent. People will pay whatever prices speculators in housing are able to extract, so gouging them for a place to live is a sure thing, way surer and requiring way less creativity than conceiving of and producing necessary, useful products that would benefit humanity, as opposed to ripping everybody off. More here: radiobill.ca/Content/Interes…