Ford has really ramped up the showmanship lately, calling for a bike lane witch hunt and making magical announcements about beer, highway tunnels and $200 cheques. Much of it, it seems, is being done in the service of getting us to look away from the reality of how things are going in Ford’s Ontario.
In particular, he’d really like us to pay no attention to the housing policy failure behind the curtain. But by the numbers, Ford’s failure on housing should be way too big to hide.
A report released last week by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation revealed that housing starts in Ontario are down 18 per cent so far this year. That stat, which measures the number of new housing units that saw construction get started, should set off loud alarm bells. Because housing, more than any other issue, has been Ford’s signature issue — the subject of lots of legislation. He’s styled himself as a builder-in-chief who will “get it done.”
This isn’t a case of Ontario’s large population skewing the numbers, either. For his excellent Data Shows newsletter, analyst Tom Parkin recently crunched the per-capita numbers for housing starts and found Ontario ranked eighth out of Canada’s 10 provinces. According to Parkin’s numbers, with just 34 new starts for every 100,000 people, Ontario’s rate of per-capita building was well below that of provincial peers like Manitoba (47), Quebec (47.8), B.C. (58.8) and Alberta (89.9).
With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that the province has dim hopes of hitting its much-ballyhooed goal of building 1.5 million homes by the end of 2031.
It feels like all legacy/mainstream social/news media are owned by billionaires these days and these media provide coverage that promotes the interests of billionaires, emphasizes rage-bait, treats facts and rigorous analysis as passé, fails to call out right-wing politicians on their lies and BS, and create algorithmic echo chambers that make it seem like these ideas are more widely endorsed than they really are. This degradation of the news ecosystem (no doubt facilitated by other parties in favour of watering down a self-interested electorate) means that people must be “investigative news consumers” to actually know what’s going on. Not taking on that part-time job, which might require above-average critical thinking capabilities, some kind of university education, and some free time, leaves results like the outcome of the recent US election (an objectively bad outcome for everyone but uber-rich bigots) to be expected. I’m so used to this I’m not mind-boggled myself. I feel gravely concerned about how this state of affairs will change. This year, Musk is clearly sowing misinformed discord on xitter in the US and UK and most people still won’t entertain leaving that platform. It’s kind of a new bystander effect on a much much larger scale
This is so well put. 👏