FTA: The unaffordable cities:
1- Richmond Hill, ON
2- Oakville, ON
3- Markham, ON
4- Vaughan, ON
5- Richmond, BC
6- Vancouver, BC
7- Toronto, ON
8- Milton, ON
9- Whitby, ON
10- Coquitlam, BC
11- Burlington, ON
12- Brampton, ON
13- Mississauga, ON
14- Burnaby, BC
15- Ajax, ON
16- Surrey, BC
17- Langley, BC
18- Oshawa, ON
19- Saanich, BC
20- Kelowna, BC
21- Abbotsford, BC
22- Guelph, ON
23- Hamilton, ON
24- Waterloo, ON
25- Cambridge, ON
26- Barrie, ON
27- Kitchener, ON
28- Ottawa, ON
29- London, ON
30- St. Catharines, ON
31- Montreal, QC
32- Windsor, ON
33- Kingston, ON
34- Halifax, NS
35- Greater Sudbury, ON
36- Longueuil, QC
And the affordable cities:
1- Edmonton, AB
2- St. John’s, NL
3- Regina, SK
4- Saguenay, QC
5- Trois-Rivières, QC
6- Quebec City, QC
7- Lévis, QC
8- Winnipeg, MB
9- Saskatoon, SK
10- Gatineau, QC
11- Calgary, AB
12- Sherbrook, QC
13- Terrebonne, QC
14- Laval, QC
The social contract has failed in Canada. We’ve basically reverted to feudalism (with big TVs & iphones) with barely a whisper. We’re working harder than ever and getting less and less… It’s extremely demoralizing when we realize that all our work is going straight into stock buybacks & real-estate investment funds for the boomers to suck dry, leaving us with no savings, investments, homes, or really anything with value.
Capitalism is indeed somewhat broken in this sense – in its current form, wealth is a funnel, and it moves towards the more wealthy from the less wealthy. However, it’s still not feudalism and it could definitely get worse.
What would you propose as incremental changes towards a future you wish to see?
I think the most important change is to revert taxation to the way it was for thousands of years up until about 100 years ago.
It used to be that all taxes were wealth taxes. A guy would come around, eyeball all of your stuff, guess how much it was worth, and then demand a cut of it for the emperor/pharaoh/ceasar/etc. If you didn’t have anything valuable, the guy would more or less leave you alone.
That’s not how it works now. The main forms of taxation are on income and spending, with tax codes carefully written to avoid any “non-income” forms of revenue. There are very low capital gains taxes on stock dividends, zero on most home equity gains, and loads of ways to avoid those if you’re even remotely savvy. Basically, it’s specifically structured to extract wealth from the working and preserve the wealth of the rich. Personally, I paid nearly twenty thousand dollars in income tax alone while the richest guys in Canada paid practically nothing.
We need to go back to a wealth tax, which worked for 99% of human civilization. It’s easier than ever, considering that every financial institution and government knows your exact net worth down to a few %. The burden needs to be taken off of the working class, and this is the easiest way to do it. No revolution, no eating of the rich – just some rich guys kicking in their fair share.
Of course, we all know it’s not going to happen – the wealthy are far too powerful to threaten their own interests. Until then, we work the fields I guess.