The News Rundown
- Calgarians will be in store for another 3-4 weeks of water limitations starting later this month.
- This time the city says that the restrictions will not affect businesses. Home owners will have to take care to not run into watering restrictions.
- The PipeDriver inspection of the Bearspaw feeder main showed 16 new spots that need attention. The PipeDriver inspection uses effectively x-rays and ultrasonic pulses to inspect large sections of pipe.
- The city says the pipe is not in immediate danger of a break but there is enough of a concern that maintenance needs to be done sooner rather than later.
- The new areas of concern are just north of the TransCanada east of Stoney Trail and north of the Bow River near 33rd avenue NW.
- It is estimated that the water restrictions and work will be complete by September 23.
- The city plans to use concrete presently to remedy the vulnerabilities while moving to liners or sleeves in spring to further increase the strength of the line.
- The city is also pushing forward with plans to explore long term solutions against future water main breaks. This includes a new north feeder main and a south feeder main. These projects would take 8 years to complete and be delivered in phases.
- 8 years (emphasis)
- Here at WC we’ve talked about the lack of houses, the lack of hospitals, and in general the malaise of the Canadian infrastructure.
- To modernize the country and solve issues from housing to homelessness it has been suggested in the past that we build new cities.
- We have the space but one would even wonder at this point if we would have the ability to do that.
- While many are shocked at the state of our pipes before the city even begins the process of fixing the existing pipe we need to question why it would take 8 years to build two new feeder mains.
- Question everything. Question everything from the ground up.
- Design, permitting, contracting, execution, and rollout.
- It all needs to be questioned if our cities are ever going to tackle infrastructure again in a way that allows them to move into the second half of the 21st century.
- This of course also doesn’t get us to the point that most Calgarians are thinking: what if these restrictions become more widespread?
- What if they go on for longer than the 3-4 weeks anticipated?
- Calgary’s water woes in June and July should be a wakeup call. We should be encouraged the city is taking the time to proactively fix problems.
- But at the end of it all, it highlights something much greater, the inability to build things in our country.
- Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on the federal government to slap tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, steel, aluminum, critical minerals and other products, backing calls from industry for Canada to act in alignment with its allies.
- Poilievre says that China, through massive subsidies and exploiting weak environmental and labour standards, are producing "artificially cheap steel, aluminum and EVs,"
- He said that China is "doing this with the goal of crushing our steel, our aluminum, and our automotive production, and taking our jobs away," as he stood behind a "bring home our jobs" placard and in front of Stelco steel workers in Hamilton, Ont. on Friday.
- Poilievre is calling for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to effectively match the tariff package proposed by this country's largest trading partner, the United States. Under his proposal, Canada would introduce: A 100 per cent tariff on made-in China EVs; A 50 per cent tariff on semiconductors and solar cells; A 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminum products as well as other critical minerals and EV batteries; and Block any rebates for Chinese EVs.
- Responding to the Conservative proposal, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland's office called it "incredibly rich" for Poilievre to come to the defence of Canadian auto workers "months late," noting his party tried to delay the implementation of auto sector investment tax credits.
- Freeland's deputy communications director Katherine Cuplinskas said: "The Deputy Prime Minister has been clear that action is necessary – such as a surtax under Section 53 of the Customs Tariff – to counter China’s intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity. As the true defender of Canadian workers and industries, including the auto manufacturing, steel, and aluminum sectors, our government will have more to say soon."
- Freeland held consultations throughout the month of July to look at the EV issue. When she announced the launch of those consultations, Freeland said she would consider "all possible tools," including tariffs, though the Liberals have yet to say what they'll do to respond to Beijing's trade practices in the EV sector.
- The proposal echoes calls made in Ottawa on Thursday by leaders in Canada's steel and aluminum industries, who urged the federal government to quickly impose a new tariff package targeting Chinese goods.
- The United States and Mexico have already advanced trade action against China, and there are concerns that if the federal government doesn't follow suit, Canada could become a dumping ground for those imports.
- In doing so, the government also risks running afoul of the key North American trade pact known in this country as the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), the stakeholders warned.
- CEO of the Aluminium Association of Canada Jean Simard said: "In an ideal world, you would walk in lockstep… So that we don't open up a hole in the CUSMA fortress that will enable Chinese imports to come in. We think that the period of the coming weeks is crucial for Canada to take a stand on this."
- Now that the short consultation window has closed, Canada has no choice but to quickly move in lockstep with its allies on tariffs, or face finding itself on the wrong side of a trade war, said NorthStar Public Affairs Partner Adam Taylor: "If we don't have tariffs, then things can come into our country, and then they could potentially go into the United States and circumvent their own tariff regime."
- Poilievre's call for tariffs comes as the Conservatives have intensified efforts to gain support from union workers, many of whom have traditionally supported New Democrats.
- Poilievre's Friday press conference was held at the local Stelco plant, a Hamilton-based steelmaker. The United Steelworkers union — which represents 2,000 Stelco workers — was one of the founding members of the NDP. The union still encourages its members to support the NDP.
- In September, the Tories are hoping to swing the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona, an NDP stronghold.
- In that byelection, Conservatives are running Colin Reynolds, a local union member, as their candidate. Reynolds' own union is urging members to support the NDP as well, but it's clear more than ever that there are massive disconnects between union leaderships and its members. We'll see soon enough if Canada's workers unions support the NDP and by extension the Liberal's plan which has seen trade flee to China, or the Conservatives instead.
- Supplementals:
- It’s time to have a conversation about what the UCP is and is not doing a year out after the last election.
- The media will claim to do this regularly but it is done through an opposition partisan lens with a focus on those who do not have a stake in Alberta’s conservative movement.
- Smith and the UCP opened the last election with a promise to create a new income tax bracket of 8% and increase the amount of income one can make before taxes need to be paid - that hasn’t happened yet.
- Other things such as discussions on trains, population increases, and gender-affirming procedures and medications have been advanced.
- The discussion on gender-affirming procedures and medications will resume this fall.
- In the past Smith has mused about increasing Alberta’s population to surpass that
- The idea of bringing Alberta’s population to 10 million by 2050 appeared on the Shaun Newman podcast this week where Smith suggested “[having] an aggressive target to double our population” and that “people are going to want to come here, and we have to embrace them, and we want to build this place out.”
- By Friday the Premier had walked this idea back due to pushback from the UCP base on the idea of bringing this many people to Canada who she hopes would be from the rest of Canada but of course based on population dynamics will be from Asia and Africa.
- Now while many will be against this idea simply because they do not want to see people from these regions come to Canada and Alberta - we need to be honest with ourselves.
- Infrastructure, housing, and services are a problem right now in Canada for the people that we have. Adding more for the sake of gaining more power in the federation isn’t a winning proposition at this time.
- Until we build the houses we need, the cities we need, and fill them with services to serve our existing population, immigration needs to be controlled. It needs to be used as an economic measure to ensure our country doesn’t stagnate.
- Presently that means lowering numbers to what they were in 2015 or pausing new arrivals for a time period to allow our systems and services to catch up.
- From there we need to determine what we need for our economy if we are unable to sustain a sufficient birth rate.
- Numbers for the sake of numbers is what Justin Trudeau has done. Look where it’s got us.
- This is another example of the UCP abandoning the core conservative base.
- Now the core conservative base that reliably has turned up since the 70s made up of Calgary and the suburbs of Edmonton is in danger of being astray by the more modern internet-based base that brought Danielle Smith to leadership in the wake of the pandemic.
- This base of the UCP wants to see recrimination of COVID policies and this risks general election prospects for the UCP going forward.
- As we saw this week, Calgary-Lougheed MLA Eric Bouchard is pushing for the COVID vaccine to be made illegal in Alberta and banned.
- Calgary-Lougheed is the definition of a safe Alberta conservative seat, both federally and provincially. Pursuing special projects such as banning COVID vaccines are pushing Alberta to 10m people puts this in jeopardy.
- The COVID vaccine should be a choice and politically mandates should have been the sticky point, not the vaccine itself.
- We don’t know what the issue of the day will become in 2027 when the next election is but everyday the UCP through Smith or other MLAs pursues special projects, putting that election in jeopardy for Alberta’s bedrock conservative movement.
- A media discussion on these stories of course talks about how they push Albertans apart and don’t deliver on promises. But the natural endpoint of this is that the opposition comes to gain by way of production of their stories.
- The reality is that there’s far more at play in terms of the dynamics of Alberta conservative circles than the traditional left-right of Alberta's modern media portrays.
- The BC NDP under the leadership of David Eby has been wanting to make the upcoming October election about housing. They were so confident in fact, that many of their signature policies have been about housing affordability, including Housing Hub, a $2-billion NDP government plan to subsidize developers to deliver units at affordable rents and prices.
- Any time the B.C. NDP government makes a housing announcement, there is one word repeated again and again and again for anyone who will listen: affordable. Affordability is the frame for all the NDP’s housing policies, programs and billions of dollars of program spending. And yet, despite all that effort, the government’s success in actually achieving anything that a normal person might consider affordable, is questionable at best.
- Eby, whose Dec. 16, 2021 release touted “affordable” and “affordability” a dozen or so times, said: “Our government is investing in more affordable housing for people who work and live in Vancouver, and throughout BC. Two billion dollars in a rotating line of credit that builds affordable housing across this province will be transformative.It will build thousands of units of affordable housing again, and again, and again. Let’s get building.”
- The release was boastful, but 3 years later, we have to look at what sorts of affordable housing the plan has delivered. Case in point: A five-storey, 64-unit project at 1807 Larch St. in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood, scheduled to open next month with rents priced at the high end of the market, from $2,650 to $4,300 a month. When the project was announced three years ago, then-Housing Minister David Eby touted it as a groundbreaking example of the NDP government’s commitment to “affordable” housing.
- For the Larch Street project, Housing Hub advanced a $31.8-million low-interest loan to Jameson Development Corp., a family-owned company headed by Tony Pappajohn. The subsidy was intended to hold rents “at-or below-market level rents restricted to middle-income households within the provincial middle-income limits” for the next decade.
- The studios and one-bedroom units are targeted to “middle-income households” without children and an income up to $131,950. The two and three-bedrooms are for those with children who earn up to $191,910.
- The rents and targeted income figures were surprising enough. The greater shocker was the response from B.C. Housing, when asked to reconcile the current numbers with Eby’s promise of affordability.
- Michael Pistrin, vice-president of development for B.C. Housing explained the affordable housing program was actually not about affordable housing at all: “The Housing Hub program is a supply-based program. It’s not an affordability program. The whole intent of the Housing Hub was just to build more housing. And it was intended to be market (rate) rental housing.”
- Pistrin pulls back the curtain even further: “It’s not supposed to be below market at all. It’s supposed to be ‘at market’ for the most part. We can leverage — through the low-cost financing that we’re able to provide during construction — we can leverage that to force the builder to reduce the rents to slightly below market in some cases, for a percentage of the units. But that’s on a case-by-case basis … for the most part it was just intended to put market supply out there.”
- So, what exactly did B.C. taxpayers achieve by loaning billions of dollars to developers at below-market rates then, if not an impact on the price of the resulting units?
- BC Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko said: “The only people getting ahead in this equation is the developer. Time and again this is a government that has promised to make housing affordable, but what that means is that you actually need to reduce the cost of it… and what we see here is that we haven’t reduced the cost.”
- This is from a government that made housing affordability a key promise in the 2017 and 2020 elections. Affordable housing was also one of the four areas where Eby promised results “that people can see and feel and touch and experience in their lives” before the election.
- The B.C. Housing exec’s discounting of affordability has people wondering if this is another case where a public official discloses the actual truth of government policy as opposed to the fluff and propaganda displayed in the news releases from Eby, who has always had pie in the sky goals and targets.
- Earlier this year, Eby quietly shelved HousingHub, shifting the $2 billion in revolving financing into a new “BC Builds” program. The promise now is to leverage public land into (you guessed it) affordable rental housing projects. It’s too early to tell whether it will actually work this time.
- Eby’s successor as housing minister, Ravi Kahlon, shed light on how the Housing Hub has been rolled into B.C. Builds a new program that will also, supposedly, promote housing affordability.
- “B.C. Builds is designed to increase the supply of rental housing for middle-income households,” said Kahlon. “It does this by reducing development costs and timelines in exchange for securing rental affordability at prescribed levels for a period of 10-35 years.”
- Note the wording: B.C. Builds will deliver “rental affordability at prescribed levels.”Prescribed by the NDP government that is, meaning they will tell us what's affordable, with ever moving goalposts. The B.C. Builds renaming, which happened earlier this year, is a classic governmental dodge for an election year.
- But the BC Builds income thresholds are the same as the ones used for HousingHub. And we’ve seen the ending of that story before. Even though, it would appear, there’s an active effort underway to rewrite the history of what all this public money was supposed to accomplish in the first place.
- When results fall well short of the promises, repackage the program and relaunch it under a new name. Then hope the votes are counted before anyone notices that the old program failed to deliver affordable housing, rental or otherwise.
- The NDP were so prepared to make the election about housing. We'll see if voters think they've delivered enough on their lofty promises to let them have another crack at it.
Quote of the Week
“The Housing Hub program is a supply-based program. It’s not an affordability program. The whole intent of the Housing Hub was just to build more housing. And it was intended to be market (rate) rental housing.” - Michael Pistrin, vice-president of development for B.C. Housing on how the affordable housing program was not actually about affordable housing
Word of the Week
Market rate - the usual price for goods or services in a free market
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Show Data
- Episode Title: Sticker Shock
- Teaser: Calgary’s water system may be worse than expected, Poilievre wants tariffs on Chinese EVs and metals, and the UCP has issues with the popularity of their special projects. Also, BC’s affordable housing program is not actually about affordable housing.
- Recorded Date: August 10, 2024
- Release Date: August 11, 2024
- Duration: 56:19
- Edit Notes: None
Podcast Summary Notes
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