Housing is infrastructure.

People dwell in it.

Rent-seekers repurposing housing as financial assets and inflating its price based on its potential to appreciate further cannot and does not house Canada's population.

Evidence for this is everywhere: homeless people (whom rent-seekers blame for their homelessness); not enough housing to accommodate immigrants whom Canada needs to perform necessary work or foreign students whose exorbitant tuitions keep private educational institutions afloat; rents so high that wages and therefore prices have made manufacturing Canadian goods for global markets uncompetitive; and essential workers such as teachers, nurses, and first responders, not to mention working people of every other description, unable to find affordable housing in an ever-growing number of locales.

There are reasons too obvious even to state why rent-seekers are not allowed to own highway bridges and overpasses and charge the public tolls to use them, yet the mere mention of treating housing as a public utility renting or selling forever for what it costs to build and maintain it raises howls of protest from legions of rentiers who exploit housing to extract unearned income from Canada's ever-shrinking productive economy.

Municipalities prop up housing prices by approving unaffordable housing developments; BOC manipulates interest rates to prevent the floor from collapsing under ridiculously inflated housing prices; and CMHC makes a market in mortgages under the rubric that wealth equates to houses held in private hands.

Non-stop propaganda telling the public that owning a house is a highly desirable marker of "success," an "accomplishment," and a source of "pride" normalizes framing housing as financial assets, thus creating a multi-trillion dollar opportunity for individuals and institutions who have access to large amounts of money to make more money buying and selling houses, condos, apartment buildings, mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities, robust markets in all of which require large numbers of participants to inflate their prices reliably.

The assumption underlying all of these behaviours, from homeowners' to rentiers', is that "wealth" resides in individuals' personal portfolios, not in a strong economy that provides on an ongoing basis necessities of life reliably to everyone.

A practical reason for owning one's dwelling is to avoid being squeezed for higher and higher rent each year by private sector landlords, but millions of units of public sector housing – particularly apartments in multi-dwelling buildings in cities – renting by definition for a reasonable price would obviate this need.

The least a worker can expect in return for labouring 40 hours a week and once retired is adequately staffed, accessible healthcare; publicly funded post-secondary and continuing education; and a secure, affordable dwelling in which to relax, nourish oneself, and rest. Shoveling a massive share of the output of Canada's productive economy into the pockets of rentiers exploiting housing, particularly in view of the existence of proven public sector alternatives, is an enormous waste of money.

Holders controlling large amounts of capital prefer the sure thing of gouging the public for housing, a necessity of life that no one forgoes willingly, when investing instead in R&D, plant and equipment, and employing labour to manufacture value-added products for sale into domestic and global markets and supply chains would create wealth and bring revenue into Canada from offshore.

A proper tax system would translate a major share of this revenue into training healthcare professionals and a wide range of other skilled workers for the future; properly staffing and equipping hospitals, clinics, schools, and daycare centers; and 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.

Public sector investment in renewable electricity to generate green hydrogen, not for export but to refine precious metals and aluminum mined here, a suggestion Yanis Varoufakis made in a recent speech (should be cued to 21:24) to the National Press Club of Australia, would provide a platform for an entirely new industry exporting green metals.

Private sector capital should be developing novel construction materials such as photovoltaic cladding for buildings, manufacturing green steel, and developing new technologies and environmentally friendly products that would bring revenue into Canada, actually increasing the wealth of this nation, instead of draining the surplus generated by our economy into a few rentiers' pockets.

Private sector housing developers say again and again they are not able to build affordable housing, yet government, which can build affordable housing easily, refuses to finance the construction of public housing as it did on a massive scale from 1968 to 1992 or develop a rational industrial policy.

Real wealth is shared wealth. A few extremely rich people and financial institutions is not prosperity. A private sector employing workers to manufacture valuable products people everywhere want and need; a tax system that properly funds healthcare and education; and a publicly financed not-for-profit housing sector that actually houses all Canadians adequately and securely are wealth, not zeroes in a few rentiers' portfolios. It amazes me that adults need someone to tell them this.