Here we go again.

Re: "Canadian health system is one of the best," Letter, May 18.

Population growth and an aging population are demographic trends easily predicted by any post-graduate epidemiologist and, more importantly, easily planned for by any properly funded – there is the rub – public healthcare system.

The war on "government" – a polite way of saying class war on the population of this planet by a miniscule, money-obsessed rentier class – that began in earnest in the early 1980s, has systematically defunded healthcare, education, and social (publicly financed) housing development under the phony rubric of "waste, fraud, and abuse" paired with "efficiency, innovation, and rightsizing" – a toxic brew that eliminated hospital surge capacity, ignored and arbitrarily increased empirically established patient-to-caregiver ratios in order to run healthcare delivery "more like a business," and neglected investment in future medical training infrastructure because in the world defined by economic rent extraction there is no future, only now and getting out at the top leaving suckers holding the bag.

Population growth and aging did not suddenly appear out of nowhere. Planning for it and implementing those plans were thwarted by an ideology that captured government and slashed funding for the welfare state in favor of deindustrialization, privatization, and "investment" in vehicles for economic rent extraction – stocks, bonds, and most importantly land, housing, and commercial real estate – by a relative handful of speculators.

Don't believe me? Look at the historical growth of the Real Estate sector's share of Canadian GDP (dollars changing hands in a year) and the trajectory it is on. Here is the reference specifically to BC in the Better Dwelling article linked to above.

Here is Statistics Canada's link to the RERL (real estate, rental, and leasing) sector's operating profit margin in BC 2012 to 2022. It dwarfs the operating profit margin of every other sector of BC's economy every year, increases every year, and illustrates perfectly that economic rent extraction from the productive economy has no relationship whatsoever to a rentier's costs.

For comparison, here is Statistics Canada's link to Software development and computer services' operating profit margin in BC for the same period. Similar data published on the Statistics Canada website for other sectors can be perused here.

Finally, here are the distributions by industry of the GDP of BC in 2019, 2020, and 2021. In each year, the highest percentage by far of dollars changing hands in BC occurred in the RERL sector (17.63%, 19.6%, and 19.6%, respectively).

In human-readable terms, what these numbers mean is that we are spending our money on rent, while healthcare, education, and the obvious solution to the housing-affordability crisis – publicly financed, not-for-profit housing development – go begging.