Bogumil Pacak-Gamalski
Stroll through the streets of Halifax. Could have been Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal. The truth of it – it could have been any larger city in Canada. Yes, architecture would have been different, street names and their layout, too. Different parks and nature, maybe slightly an accent spoken by the majority. Maybe language altogether (Quebec, Arctic comes to mind).
It is such a vast country. Truly from ocean to ocean to ocean. And many mountain ranges, huge rivers. Traveled or visited most of it in the last forty years. I have seen it grow and expand in population in unprecedented numbers. Ever growing, ever more attractive, and open to thousands of new hopefuls from all over the globe. In a way – Canada is the envy of the world.
But with that important qualificator: in a way ….
It isn’t only the wide world that needs Canada. It is also Canada and Canadians that need the world, and it’s people. Who else does the cheap work in our country if not recent immigrants? Who else pays the salaries and otherwise makes up the budget of Canadian universities and university colleges if not foreign students? Yes – them. Not provincial or federal budgets. Recent studies revealed that the universities actually plan their budgets around the enormous fees they charge these students. It is their main source of income. How do they ensure that campuses and cities will house these students? They don’t. It is not only a big business for universities. It is also a huge business for homeowners and renters, who rent their rooms or apartments to these students. three, four, five per room? Why not. What were the words of the old movie “Cabaret”? O, yes: money, money, money!
Provinces and federal governments totally abandoned their responsibility for housing in Canada in the late 1970ies. All of a sudden the word ‘housing’ was renamed to ‘home ownership’. And that is a huge change. Of course, it was and is a dream and goal of many young Canadians. But home ownership is also clearly the responsibility of private citizen, not of government. Yes, there were here and there a few tweaks in regulations to help save some bucks for people, who planned to build their dream home. To put away, let’s say – five or twenty thousand dollars in RSA or specially created savings accounts in banks. Tax-exempt. Another miss moniker: they were not tax-exempt, they were simply tax deferred. Sooner or later you had to re-pay them back. But in the meantime, the young taxpayer was happy because he had five or ten thousand dollars in the bank, that he could use to purchase the home. Who cares about later! Let’s buy us a home! Totally obscured from the view and recognition were the families of poor Canadians, who couldn’t avail themselves of these ‘savings’. They were too busy paying the daily bills and rent for their apartments. Or scratching their heads about how they going to save a hundred or two hundred bucks for their child’s school trip next Saturday ….
It still worked somehow. Rents were expensive but were still manageable. Then suddenly something happened. The bubble burst. It was not, as many tried to portray it, the result of COVID and disruption in business. The virus doesn’t give a hoot about the dollar and interest rates. Baloney. It had nothing to do with it. It was the result of simple mathematics, a simple economics. And greed. Greed of corporations, greed of existing homeowners, and creeping up rates of borrowing. All of a sudden an average or even small house (typical bungalow) in Vancouver or Toronto was not 300 000 dollars but 3000 000 dollars. The Condo was not 200 000 but 800 000. Older owners were happy. Their retirement worries were solved – they were millioners! Often with very small pockets of cash but sitting on huge investments. New owners found themselves in a big crunch to pay the high mortgages. Two or three jobs were often not enough to pay for their dream. But there is a solution: use our existing (although not paid off yet) home/condo as collateral and buy one more! Easy. Then we will rent it out for 50% more than the mortgage and this way it will help us with our original mortgage. Or even better: use it as an Airbnb.
In all of these unsustainable calculations the renters, people, who couldn’t or just gave up the unreachable dream of homeownership – were left to their own devices. But the devices’ were no longer working. The system was broken. By wrong policies of all levels of all governments, by our own greed.
We, Canadians (apart from homeownership) have one more dream and holly tradition: camping! In motorhomes, in relatively cheap motels. But most of all the holy grail of being Canadian: in tents on the shores of wild lakes, rivers, on the foothills of our majestic mountains, by wild beaches of our oceans.
That dream was not abandoned, not lost. It is well and very much alive. It even found new spaces to set-up a tent. Or tent community. In cities. In parks or downtown streets. From ocean to an ocean to an ocean. What a majestic country and resourceful people we have!
Now, I know you could say angrily – why don’t they just find a job! These lazy bums! OK, you are right I suppose. After all, I did and obviously you did too. Wait a second though, it’s been a while since I applied for any job (had one my entire life) – but I seem to remember that when you apply you need a permanent address, phone number, even an account number as nobody pays cash anymore? Hmm. Ok, waiters, dishwashers, these simple, menial jobs for cash. But you can’t just show up unshaven, unwashed with layers of dirty clothes on your back for your interview on your first day of job, can you? No, not in real life.
Suddenly governments, especially the federal government, noticed that huge problem. The wording even changed. It is no longer ‘homeownership’, now it is called simply ‘housing’. Yes – that is correct. Homeownership is a dream, hard to achieve but still possible. Housing is not a dream – it is a minimum necessity. It is a must to function in life. If you live in your own home – you have a housing. If you rent – you have a housing. If you live in a tent – you don’t.
Building non-profit or municipal rental properties is a must. And taxpayer money should be spent only on solving this major problem. Expensive condos should be the worries of rich developers and people, who can afford to buy these condos. Even those of you, who can afford expensive city condos (and I hope most of you can) – do you want to see from your balcony a row of tents under this balcony or in a nearby small city park?
When I came to Canada over forty years ago, I landed within weeks a job paying over 15 dollars an hour. Rent for one bedroom in downtown was about $380. A nice two bedroom condo was between 50 000 and 60 000 dollars. A modest but comfortable 3 bedroom bungalow was 100 000 to 200 000 dollars. Today, forty years later, $15 an hour pay is not even legal minimum wage in many provinces. Just think of it. Something is terribly wrong with the picture. Unless you want the picture of Canada to be a tent of a homeless person.
Picture above are from Halifax, NS. The tents are in one of most popular and important part of historic Dwontown: the Grand Parade piazza, nestled between historic, original first Anglican Cathedral and City Hall. It also contains two importand Centotaphs commemorating the fallen soldiers in two world wars.
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