50 dollars is a joke.

A Nov 07, 2024, CBC News article, "Annual rental prices fell for the 1st time in over three years, but only in big cities," reports that in October, 2024, the average rent across Canada – primarily in urban centres in Ontario and British Columbia ("rental prices in smaller mid-sized markets were still on the rise") – was $50 less than June, 2024's "record high."

A $50 reduction in certain rents in particular cities is a joke.

The compound rate of increase in intertenancy rent on a 2-Bdr apartment in Victoria, BC for the period Aug., 2021 through Jan., 2023 was 79%.

In 2021, one in five dollars spent in BC were spent on rent.

According to Statistics Canada, the operating profit margin for "Lessors of residential buildings and dwellings (except social housing projects)," increased steadily from 41.3% in 2012 to 47.2% in 2022 over the timespan available for this particular data point.

Steve Pomeroy, an industry professor at McMaster University's Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative quoted in the CBC article, attributes this decrease to "units coming onto the market" as a consequence of a "significant increase in rental construction over the last five or six years."

This interpretation sounds reasonable, but developers themselves have been saying since at least 2012 that constructing purpose-built rental housing is not profitable and that in their view it is government's job to subsidize tenants who are unable to meet their rents.

Professor Pomery points as well to recent federal government policy changes limiting temporary foreign workers and international students as helping to "ease pressure on housing demand."

There is no formula, however, that quantifies rent as a function of "demand," "population growth," "immigrants," or "supply." In fact the formula is the maximum a ruthless predator is able to demand. As the article states: rents have "already gone up to what the market can currently bear, there isn't much else to go."

Dropping rents by $50 is pure gaslighting PR phoniness.

Once upon a time, when rental housing was owned and operated by human beings, as opposed to faceless piles of money looking to make more money by not doing anything, landlords were content to accumulate equity in their properties over a long period of time and cash out on retirement. Human landlords had human relationships with human tenants and avoided raising rents to retain good tenants who paid their rent on time and took good care of their property. Rents were in whole dollars. No one had ever seen a rent that included digits after a decimal point until multibillion-dollar real estate holding companies targeted housing as easy prey.

Merciless entitled bloodsuckers apparently see the anger building against their ruthless sociopathy and think throwing the rabble a $50 crumb will distract public attention from the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) sector extracting into its own hoards the surplus created by Canada's real economy, a surplus that otherwise could have been invested for the last 30 years in training healthcare professionals and a wide range of other skilled workers for the future; building, properly staffing, and equipping hospitals, clinics, schools, and daycare centers; building and staffing mental health facilities, supportive housing, and drug treatment centers adequate to the magnitude of our country's problems with untreated mental illness and drug addiction; and managing housing, which is in fact infrastructure, as a public utility.