Not much social housing these days.

A letter writer commented, "I don't see much socialization of housing these days."

I would go further and say that ruthless price gouging by real estate holders and cost-cutting in healthcare and education have become the rule not only in BC and across Canada, but throughout the G7, resulting in the thoroughly dysfunctional economy we are struggling with today.

We can put a date on when this trend began in Canada: 1977, when Established Programs Financing was introduced, replacing cost-sharing programs for health and post-secondary education with a percentage of "points" of personal income tax and corporate income tax, including some "points" carried over from a previous post-secondary education program, and a cash transfer based on GDP, not evidence-based medical or educational necessity.

Canada has a robust history of social housing construction, especially from 1965, when Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson dedicated his government to "the necessity for everybody to have a decent dwelling," through the 1980s, when 20,000 units of social housing were built every year. By 1993, funding for social housing was stricken entirely from the federal budget.

Not unrelated is the fact that according to the Toronto Star on July 6, 2023, "The wealthiest 20% of households controlled nearly 68% of the total net worth in Canada in the first quarter of 2023, while the least wealthy 40% accounted for 2.7%."

And according to a Jan. 15, 2023, Oxfam Canada report ("Richest 1% Bag Nearly Twice As Much Wealth As The Rest Of The World Put Together Over The Past Two Years"): "For every $100 of wealth created in the last 10 years [in Canada], $34 has gone to the richest 1 per cent and only $5 to the bottom 50 per cent. This means that the richest 1 per cent have gained nearly seven times more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent in the last 10 years."

High net worth individuals justify this inequality with a Fraser Institute study, "Measuring Progressivity in Canada's Tax System, 2022," which concluded that the top 20% of income-earning families in Canada pay more than half of total taxes, including personal income, sales and property taxes.

But high net worth individuals' incomes derive mainly from capital gains, 50% of which are taxed, and by a complex set of deductions, limits, and exemptions, that 50% are taxed at about half the rate on ordinary income. These rules withhold from the public purse a disproportionate share of the wealth controlled by the most affluent Canadians.

The capital gains of a senior whose life savings amount to the value of the family home deserve protection, but speculators in land, housing, and the derivatives casino extract from the productive economy and deprive the public sector of dollars at a compound rate which in a period of decades amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars.

It is no secret that rich people abhor paying taxes, which is where our problem with "healthcare, housing, and education" begins. Instead of investing decades ago in seats to train medical professionals to meet BC's needs today, for example, "cost savings" became public policy, with the sorry result of BC hoping now to poach doctors and nurses trained in other countries to meet those countries' medical needs to meet ours.

Understaffing and medical staff burnout did not start yesterday; nor did they begin during COVID, which merely highlighted the horrible mismanagement of personnel driven by "cost savings" – not medical science or informed workforce policies – that began in the 1970s.

"Cost savings" boils down to lower taxes for rich people. This, and the illusion that wealth is created by inflating prices of financial assets like apartment buildings got us where we are today, with real wealth being drained into enormous, untouchable hoards from sectors of the economy that perform useful work, and a public sector reduced to patching chronic gaping wounds with expensive, ineffectual band-aids because real money and real solutions have long been beyond the public's grasp.

August 25, 2023 Bill Appledorf