[Update: I've set up a separate blog, morehousing.ca, to talk specifically about the need for more housing in Metro Vancouver. Housing being so maddeningly scarce and expensive is making pretty much everyone worse off.]
The City of Vancouver is proposing to make six-storey rental apartment buildings legal in C-2 …
read more
We can see what's going to happen to Canadian house prices - we saw the US housing market crash. We just don't know when.
Economist Robert Shiller has US house price data going back to 1890. After you subtract inflation, over the long term prices are basically flat, with some spectacular …
read moreCanada isn't an abstraction - it's 38 million people.
I would suggest that the point of Canada Day is not so much to celebrate pride in Canada as to strengthen the feeling of connection that we have with other Canadians as a community. I think that's a necessary and fundamental part …
read more
Unemployment rate, January 1976 to May 2020. Source: Statistics
Canada
Our current social safety net is based on the goal of full employment, driven by monetary policy (interest rates) and fiscal policy (deficits and surpluses). It's primarily targeted at people who can't work - the elderly, children and single parents, the …
read moreThe election results illustrate a stark divide between Alberta (and Saskatchewan) and the rest of the country. The Conservatives won all seats save one in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but made very little headway in the rest of the country, losing votes in both Ontario and Quebec.
It's hard to find …
read moreI'm very glad that the national climate plan has survived its first electoral test.
Scheer's team thought that they could swing the suburban GTA ridings by making people angry about the carbon tax, falsely claiming that it was a federal tax grab. If Scheer had succeeded yesterday, politicians both in …
read moreA 30-minute video from 2004 explaining the Toyota manufacturing principle of Kaizen, or small improvements, illustrated by making toast. The presenter, Bruce Hamilton, discusses seven forms of waste which can be identified by direct observation: motion, waiting, storage, transportation, defects, processing, and overproduction.
read more
There's a warning that often appears in personal finance books: "Leverage cuts both ways." Because people usually borrow 80% or 90% of the price when buying a home, any gains due to an increase in the price are magnified - but any losses due to a decline are magnified as well …
Investing basically means lending out your money, and getting some kind of return on it.
There’s two kinds of investments: debt and equity. With debt, you lend the money and get a fixed rate of interest. With equity, you buy a small slice of a business and get a …
read more