Immigration again.

Immigration is being argued again to explain why not enough and too-expensive housing is being built.

Leave aside that in the 1970s, Ottawa financed the construction of 20,000 units per year of social housing (purpose-built affordable workforce rental housing) precisely to accommodate a per-capita immigration rate even greater than today's (which is declining).

The most cursory look at what is built, for whom, and why yields an obvious and far less convoluted explanation: that the real estate development project worldwide, not just in Victoria or BC, since the 1980s has been not to house people but to maximize rent extraction from the productive economy.

This is why we have a surfeit of luxury apartments overlooking the Inner Harbour. Industry that used to employ workers there is gone. Shipbuilding, for example, has been almost entirely off-shored.

Attracting out-of-province retirees, people who have worked their entire lives and have the money to buy expensive condos, is a business model, and it readily morphs into building multi-million dollar pieds a terre for billionaires.

In 1965, Prime Minister Lester Pearson acknowledged the importance of decent housing in a speech to the Ontario Association of Housing Authorities. He said Canada's primary issue was: " . . . the necessity for everybody to have a decent dwelling; not to make all homes mansions, but to ensure that none of them will be hovels. It is only a very rare soul that can expand in a hovel. This objective of decent housing simply has to be achieved in our democratic society."

This attitude drove Ottawa's housing policy from 1964 until it, too, was swallowed by the financialization of the Canadian economy and financing social housing construction was stricken entirely from Ottawa's budget in 1993.

There was a better way, but that golden goose has also been killed by geniuses driven by lust for short-term profit and no consideration whatsoever of the consequences for others.

If you haven't been to China, go to YouTube and expose yourself to the astonishingly populous, affluent cities China has built in the last 30 years. It is not hard to imagine millions of Chinese tourists seeking respite from that unrelenting urbanization among BC's giant trees.

China owes a debt of gratitude to Canada, too, despite NATO's newfound hostility to the PRC, because in the 1950's when U.S sanctions, using food as a weapon, were starving China for grain, Canada defied the U.S. and shipped life-saving wheat to China.

Chinese tourists would be delighted to support indigenous forest stewards and the BC hospitality industry to experience spiritual revitalization walking among BC's giant trees.

But of course resource extractors have all but extirpated BC's old-growth, so that's out.

April 25, 2023 Bill Appledorf