Two charts.

Two charts illustrate where the money generated by BC's productive economy is going.

This matters because three full-blown crises – healthcare, affordable housing, and homelessness – are crying out for dollars that are being poured down the drain as rent and are to a large extent results of all of that money being thrown away.

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is referred to in non-professional economic circles as a measure of "growth" or "wealth creation", when in fact what GDP actually measures is the number of dollars that change hands over a certain period of time, usually a year.

Chart #1 shows that British Columbians spend just shy of 1 in 5 dollars per year on rent:

The top blue bar shows that the Real estate, rental, and leasing (RERL) sector accounts for 19.6% of the dollars that changed hands in 2021. That number was the same in 2020. Construction, the next blue bar, is 9.6%, less than half of what British Columbians spent on rent in 2021.

Chart #2, published online at the StatCan website, illustrates that the gross operating profit; i.e., profit before taxes, for the RERL sector has increased steadily from 41.3% in 2012 ($2.2 billion) to 47.2% ($4.6 billion) in 2022 over the time span available for this particular data point:

Software development and computer services' operating profit margin in BC for the same period, for comparison, averaged 4.2 percent per year, more than ten times less. Similar data, ranging between 4 and 10 percent, is published on the StatCan website for other sectors and can be perused here.

The gargantuan profit extracted by the RERL sector from BC's productive economy (activity that makes and does things people want and need) exemplifies what is known as economic rent; i.e., profit that is limited in no way by the cost of production, and it demonstrates how the financialization of BC's economy, at least since 1981, has distributed the wealth produced by the performance of actual work in this province away from public investment in healthcare, affordable housing, and ending/preventing homelessness into the hands of so-called "investors" who have transformed housing in BC from dwellings people live in into assets the prices of which can never be high enough.

The solution to this situation consists of five systemic changes that powerful vested interests will do everything they can to prevent. These changes are:

1. Fund municipalities with senior government money, not property taxes.
Funding municipalities with property taxes encourages for-profit housing development and fantasies about market-rate "supply" somehow making housing affordable. Only not-for-profit housing should be built.

2. Stop subsidizing wildly profitable corporations.
In 2022, Canada's fossil fuel subsidies surpassed $15.6 billion and Canada's five biggest oil & gas companies raked in $38.3 billion in combined profits, more than double their profits of $16.9 billion in 2021. Meanwhile, on April 7, 2022, Finance Canada announced its plan to make housing more affordable: $1.5 billion over two years, starting in 2022-23.

3. Stop spending money on boondoggles like Site-C ($16 billion), Canada LNG ($48.3 billion), and TMX ($30.9 billion).
Healthcare, housing, and education should be financed and managed as public utilities. Private money should finance private enterprise.

4. Reinstate funding for social (publicly financed) housing.
Canada has a robust history of social housing development, 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. It is time to resurrect the vision of housing as a public utility.

5. Reinstate funding for healthcare and mental health.
Healthcare and mental health policies and funding have followed similar trajectories to that of social housing, namely defunding in the name of "efficiency and innovation" and to make way for the miracle of money making money by driving up the prices of financial assets like housing.

Canadians are fighting about how to deal with public disorder and chasing homeless people from one encampment to another, when the root cause of our healthcare, affordable housing, and homelessness crises – the financialization of housing – is rarely mentioned, let alone seriously discussed or corrected.