Every single thing you just pinned on the Liberals or suggested we do was done or attempted by the Conservative government and the UK is just as bad as Canada is right now.

Unfortunately, no party in Canada is suggesting the policies changes that would actually fix any of these issues. So despite the likely Conservative win next year, we’ll still be worse off in 2029 than we are today. Plus we’ll have regressed socially into permitting hate of certain groups again.

yay!

His job is to govern, not run for election. Politics usually refers more the latter than the former.

Everyone should get off X, I stopped using it the moment that Muskrat bought it. It wasn’t great before, but it’s turned into an absolute dumpster fire now.

The goal for the political parties is to just get into power temporarily in order to further your own career.

Just to be clear, to get to the definition of affordable (3 times medium family income) most detached homes in cities would need to lose 80-90% of their value.

That has never been the goal, it’s not the goal of ANY of the major political parties because it would be political suicide.

For housing to be affordable, current house prices would have to drop significantly, which would means loses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for most home owners, and 65% of the current residential properties are owned by the family that live in them (the majority of voters)

People want change, even if it’s worse for them than the current government.

Hope springs eternal, I wonder if it will take them 4 years, or 8 years to figure out that they want change again…

Counting by units biases you towards junk that isn’t bought by the first world because it’s bad.

My winter range on a highway with heat on is around 385, which is the sticker value when I bought it.

My summer range is almost 500.

It’s a lot more than people think.

Switching to cheap EVs does not get us off fossil fuels as much as you think.

Personal transportation only accounts for something like 20% of the total fossil fuel use.

Having been to China myself, and seen the inside of multiple factories and worked with multiple experts, no, it’s not happening to every other company.

Western people simply do not understand the mindset of the Chinese government or populace when it comes to exploitation, corruption, and cheating. There’s a reason why China is having issues with buildings literally falling apart, and why people consider Chinese products to be inferior in quality.

Same deal, apartments should be mandated to have them too.

This is a common misconception. Fast chargers are EXPENSIVE. Even the BC hydro owned fast chargers are 35 cents per kwh for level 3 charging, compared to the 10 cents I pay at home with my time of use rate. Private chargers are even more expensive, sometimes as much as $1 per kwh.

It does not make financial sense to use fast chargers as a primary way to charge your EV, they are really only meant to be used for long distance travel where you’re driving 500km+ in a day.

It makes sense that they cost more too, the chargers themselves, the land they use up, and the extra electrical infrastructure to bring in the huge amounts of power they use them all cost money. Just for comparison, a 200 amp house gets around 24kwh of potential throughput, while the latest fast chargers can each draw 350kwh.

It’s far easier to just have a spot you can pull into once a week at your condo, and plug it in, then drive off the next morning with a full battery having paid only $6 for another 450km of range.

Yes… It’s quite common for companies to bid internationally for such projects. They tried and failed so badly they had to be replaced on a multi billion dollar European project a few years back.

Can you not read past a headline?

BYD outsold Nissan worldwide in number of units, but that includes BYD’s China sales which make up almost all of it’s sales.

If you eliminate sales in China, BYD sold only 242k vehicles globally, and Nissan sold around 2.4 million.

BYD is NOT a major brand outside of China.

That’s like saying China Railway Group is a major international construction company because it’s the worlds largest by revenue, despite essentially operating only in China.

If China was playing fair and being a good ally, I’d be okay with that. They aren’t. Their companies regularly engage in everything from dumping to industrial espionage, not to mention the worker exploitation and abuse, and extending into the government interference both internally and externally.

Protecting ourselves from a single country still allows every other country to compete with us.

That’s based on number of units, not revenue. They sell cheap cars in China to a billion and a half people, of course they move a lot of units. They had to redesign them to sell them outside of China because they don’t meet western safety standards with their normal model.

BYD sold 242,759 vehicles outside China in 2023, according to data from BYD and Chinese Customs.

Nissan sold 3.4 million vehicles in 2023, only a million of which were in China.

BYD is not a major brand outside of China, and or even globally if you count by revenue.

Street chargers would be good. If I recall those laws for requiring condo boards to respond are very recent, and a good start.

You’re absolutely right about the lack of education though. I swear half the people I talk to think the only way to charge one is via an 800v fast charger, and the other half assume my range is about 100km in the winter.

BYD is not a major brand, they aren’t even top 10 in the world yet and 95% of their sales are in China.

Nissan sells more than they do, and it’s the third largest Japanese car brand.

So, I drive an EV already but here’s the rub with just taxing gas powered vehicles.

I still believe some people need (or should use) gas vehicles currently.

The first case is for people who have no access to a charger at their home (primarily condo dwellers, since home owners can easily install them) This should be regulated by the government, every condo should be required to upgrade their parking to include a certain percentage of chargers. We don’t need more chargers at random places around the city like we have with gas stations, vehicles should always be charged wherever they happen to sit overnight.

I’ve had an EV for 3 years now, and I’ve never once needed a fast charger, I’ve never driven more than 400km in a single day so overnight level 2 charging is perfectly fine for me, I even used only the standard wall-socket level 1 charger for 4 months when I first got the car. It was do-able but a bit annoying.

The second case is for long distance drivers and/or towing, if you drive more than 2x your battery range in a day as a normal action then EVs just aren’t yet sufficient for you. This is common if you need to tow heavy things, because the towing range on EVs is absolute shit so 2x that battery range isn’t very far. A ford f150 lightning is fine for hauling your trailer around the suburbs for your yard maintenance business, but if you tow farm equipment a few hundred kilometers a day to different farms, it’s not going to work with the current options.

Third, People who already have vehicles. When you replace it, go EV, don’t bother until then. If you are a low distance driver, when you go to replace your vehicle, buy a used gas vehicle not a new one. EVs make more sense both financially and environmentally the more use they get.

These issues are all getting sorted out (slowly) but we aren’t done with gas vehicles just yet so I’d rather see the taxes on the Gas than on the Vehicle itself.

Still failing kindergarten I see.

And that isn’t suspicious to you at all?

Please go look up what reduce means in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

You clearly missed that part of your primary education curriculum.

Correct, but that doesn’t mean we need the ones designed and manufactured in China. There are already other options designed and manufactured in better countries.

Do you understand what reduce means?

Withhold choice? Do you not realize that there are electric vehicles from literally every major brand available today?

I love my Kia Niro EV, going on three years and 80,000km now.

Hard disagree, we should be reducing our reliance on China, not increasing it.

This is an absolutely massive “slide” to the right. Things like privatized healthcare, abortion restrictions, cuts to education, and massive rollbacks to environmental protections are now clearly back on the table.

I can only hope voters aren’t stupid enough to vote them in, but we both know they absolutely can be.

There are 2 (two) detached houses in Greater Victoria (0 in the City of Victoria) for less than $872k ( I just checked the MLS)

So there’s no way this isn’t heavily weighted towards townhouses/condos.

The civilian death toll after 9/11 is a half million or so.

You’re spot on. Some businesses need to fail for the system to work properly, but for some reason we don’t seem to want to let that happen.

If you think that the land prices are a Canada only issue, you haven’t been paying attention.

It doesn’t matter if it’s realized or not, homes are selling for those prices which means I could sell my home and some poor younger person would have to work even more hours than I did to afford it.

You’re thinking too few cycles deep. Even metal and lumber companies employ significant numbers of people or spend money on things which employ significant numbers of people, who all need to be paid more due to increased housing costs. The metal/wood needs to be exported by people, transported by people, with equipment made by people, using fossil fuels that are extracted by people.

It’s not uncommon for 50% of someone’s wage to be going to housing these days if they haven’t owned a home for a decade or more.

The amount of wealth being sucked out of the economy by real estate right now is obscene. My wife and I bought our first home in 2010, we now have around 1 million dollars in equity. We’ve paid only around $350,000 on mortgage payments in that period. So we’ve made $650,000 in 14 years simply by owning a home. That’s tax free, and essentially a third full time income that we did nothing to earn.

Want to know why material and labour costs are up? Because we have to pay more for land for businesses, and wages so people can afford homes. It’s a carryon effect of land values increasing.

We can always build more, but that’s never going to solve affordability. Supply and demand doesn’t apply to this situation like you think it does. Japan (and even just Tokyo) have had a flat or declining population for over a decade and housing prices are still going up.

Where do you think the money to buy the house from you later comes from? The next layer of the pyramid.

None of those are part of the solution.

The problem is simple, if house prices go up faster than wage growth housing will never become affordable. It’s literally the definition of a pyramid scheme. Land cannot be an investment for anyone, not just multi-owners.

Prices need to decrease over time, and there’s no possible way for that to happen with zoning, infill, multi-family taxes, technically you could do it with a 100% capital gains tax on property value but your other suggestions even added together will not achieve a decrease in housing prices. All those do is slow the growth.

There’s only one way to drive property prices back down to affordable levels, tax all profit from simply owning a home (every single residential property) and then add more tax on top of that so that owning a property costs money, and therefore only people who use the property for something (living, business, etc.) will be willing to pay to continue owning it. This should be done on a regular basis (yearly likely) rather than all at once like a capital gains tax to prevent people getting “stuck” in properties.

Then use all that tax money to fund the government and drop income taxes entirely.

This is not going to happen for decades though, this kind of policy would vaporize all the equity for every homeowner in the country and currently that’s about 65% of the population, and it’s very unlikely you’ll convince 65% of the population to give up $500,000+ just to fix this problem for “other” people. We have to wait for the ownership rate to drop much further first before policies like this will become viable.

Path of Exile new league drops on Friday, so I’m practicing and theory crafting ahead of that.

I don’t necessarily agree. There are some industries where the market is free enough that competition really does work.

Just not things like housing, healthcare, and the media.

Any problems the CBC has will be dwarfed by the massive problems having a for profit media cause.

When money becomes the only goal, society will be harmed.

That doesn’t mean the boomers aren’t a massive voting block pushing for specific policies. Also, the millenial cohort is very recent. Between being too young and poor voter turnout they were not significant until this decade.