If there’s one thing Canadians can agree on right now, it’s that we need more housing. But if there’s another, it’s that it should be built somewhere other than their own neighbourhood. That’s the crux of the conflict unfolding in cities across Canada, one that will be the subject of a crucial vote today by Calgary’s city council. Despite a torrent of supportive op-eds from city councillors, community advocates and even the mayor herself, the outcome is anything but guaranteed.
Calgary may not be as expensive as Toronto or Vancouver, but it’s feeling the pinch from the same sorts of housing-related pressures. As Mayor Jyoti Gondek noted in her op-ed, rents are up approximately 40 per cent since 2020 while the city’s vacancy rate has been cut in half. The median price of single-detached homes has increased 37 per cent over the same period, and that’s left one in five households in a position where they can’t afford their current housing. For everyone who isn’t sitting on a bunch of equity and a low mortgage balance, this is the biggest housing crisis they’ve seen in decades.
The city struck a task force last fall made up of 10 citizens and experts and five members of city administration. In June, they delivered their recommendations to council, which revolved around a simple premise: make it easier to build housing across the city. You might think conservatives, who make up a minority of the current council, would embrace a housing strategy that deliberately reduces so-called “red tape.” That’s especially true given federal Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre’s long-running campaign against municipal “gatekeepers” and their refusal to allow new housing supply in their proverbial back yards.
But in Calgary, at least, those gates are being kept by his fellow conservatives. Rather than enthusiastically supporting the recommendations, which include citywide upzoning in established neighbourhods to allow for row houses, side-by-sides and duplexes, conservatives have been trying to slow-walk the process by arguing for more time and consultation.
Some, like former councillor and failed mayoral candidate Jeff Davison, have even suggested the proposed changes amount to an abrogation of homeowners’ democratic rights. “Their current agenda appears to revolve around the reintroduction of the Guidebook for Great Communities, an idea widely regarded as one of the city’s most ill-conceived,” he wrote in a Calgary Herald op-ed. “This guidebook previously allowed for blanket zoning across the city, effectively stripping communities and all Calgarians of their right to participate in decisions about their future.”
This is, to be clear, complete nonsense. Any proposed zoning changes would have to come in the form of new bylaws, which would then be subject to public hearings before council votes. More to the point, buying a house doesn’t include the right to encase the neighbourhood in amber and stop change if it upsets your aesthetic sensibilities. In his op-ed, Davison writes: "These communities are treasured for their ability to allow residents to walk their kids to school, take in recreation and enjoy simple outings like getting ice cream at a nearby store." None of that would be impaired in any way by the addition of a few duplexes to the neighbourhood, though, or more cars parked on the street. The ice cream store, meanwhile, would almost certainly appreciate the new customers.
His proposed solutions are the same ones that get trotted out in cities across Canada: Build the housing somewhere else. In Calgary, that means adding to its already massive footprint, even though sprawl makes the city less efficient to operate and costs taxpayers money as a result. A recently updated version of a 2009 study showed growing within the city’s existing boundaries rather than continually pushing them outwards would save taxpayers $16.8 billion in capital costs over the next 60 years and $270 million in annual operating costs by 2070. Those savings are the result of less linear infrastructure like roads and sewers needing to be built, with most residents living in or near existing neighbourhoods. For a supposed fiscal conservative like Davison and his ideological allies on council, this argument should be one they’re making.
If we’re going to make any progress on housing affordability in Canada, we must confront the homeowner-industrial complex head-on. We need to challenge their biases, expose their privileges and remind them of the fact that they’re part of a broader community that isn’t supposed to cater exclusively to their needs.
It won’t be easy. No matter how the vote in Calgary’s city council chambers goes, the heaviest lifting still lies ahead. The battle for affordability will be fought community by community, street by street, neighbour by neighbour. We’ll need to find allies and alliances wherever they are available. And we’ll need to remember that catchy slogans are no match for the entrenched interests of homeowners or their nearly limitless sense of entitlement to define what’s best for everyone else.
More conservative hypocrisy on freedom of speech
One of the hallmarks of conservative politics over the last decade has been an increasingly noisy complaint that their freedom of speech is being curtailed, whether by “woke” institutions or tech companies. The other is their rank hypocrisy when it comes to the free speech rights of anyone they don’t agree with, and their utter silence when those are being attacked or infringed.
We can add three more examples to the ever-expanding body of evidence in support of this. First, there was the matter of reporters like Nora Loreto and our own Natasha Bulowski being refused press credentials for the recent CPC convention in Quebec City, with Loreto apparently being threatened by staffers for daring to show up and ask questions.
Refusing to credential progressive journalists is at least a little bit understandable, if not defensible. But blackballing Tasha Kheiriddin, a columnist with the National Post, makes even less sense. She writes for a media company that happily carries huge volumes of water for Poilievre, and she routinely writes about and advocates for conservative politics and policies.
As the co-chair of Jean Charest’s leadership campaign, perhaps she was deemed insufficiently loyal to the current leader. Either way, there’s a lesson there — and in the rhetorical questions she posed about Poilievre’s camp and its commitment to freedom. “If @CPC_HQ bars her, me, and others from covering a convention, what will they do when they’re in government ? Freedom is freedom. Including for the press.”
Then there’s Nili Kaplan-Myrth, the Ottawa doctor and school board trustee who’s been subjected to a vile campaign of anti-semitic abuse for months now. “Today I’m on trial with @OCDSB,” she tweeted, “accused of a code of conduct violation for calling out white supremacy and saying #Ottawa trustees should all care about health & safety.”
As a result, the threats — which include threats of violence and death — only ramped up. You might think a certain famous Canadian psychologist, who has had his own high-profile free speech battles, would speak out on her behalf instead of his own. But no surprise: There was nothing in the editorial pages at Postmedia from a Kay, a Black or a Peterson about her plight and the ways in which her free speech rights were being threatened. Funny, that.
Finally, there’s Elon Musk. He’s engaged in an increasingly bizarre battle with the Anti-Defamation League and Center for Countering Digital Hate, both of which have dared to document the ways in which hate speech has grown on his platform after he bought it. In recent comments, he accused the ADL of “trying to kill his platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic….if this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League.”
As New York Times columnist David French wrote (in a stellar column that’s well worth reading), “Despite his loud and frequent protestations, Elon Musk may be the worst ambassador for free speech in America.” Indeed. But as we keep seeing time and time again, most of the other self-appointed ambassadors aren’t much better.
Required Reading: The Mike Roman story
Like most Canadians, I’ve been watching the unfolding drama around Donald Trump’s various indictments and wondering what it could mean for my country down the road. But as a few readers have pointed out to me, there’s a very direct connection between the indictments in Georgia and Canada: Mike Roman.
He’s one of the people indicted along with Trump for allegedly trying to interfere with that state’s election results. He also has documented ties to former CPC leader Andrew Scheer and the International Democrat Union, the organization Stephen Harper has chaired since 2018. That role has seen Harper repeatedly cozying up to fascism-curious leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and it put him in Roman’s orbit as well, who joined the organization as treasurer and later was bumped up to the role of co-chairman.
Michael Harris’s piece in The Tyee lays out this relationship and its impact in impressively thorough detail. “While Roman was allegedly playing a key role in a giant Batman plot to steal a presidential election, surely the ultimate crime in any democracy, he was a senior official of the IDU. Which raises questions for Stephen Harper.
Did IDU chairman Harper know what his assistant chairman was doing? Did Harper have any knowledge of Roman’s participation in the meeting with Andrew Scheer and others prior to the 2019 federal election in Canada?”
Don’t expect Harper to ever answer any of these, of course. But Harris’s piece raises another important question for everyone else. “Who is Mike Roman and why should Canadians who care about preserving their democracy know his name? Consider Roman’s own words, which date back to 2008 but resonate darkly today. ‘If an election is worth winning,’ he wrote in his blog, ‘then there is someone willing to steal it.’”
For what it’s worth — possibly nothing! — connections like this are why I think the Liberals will be very tempted to call the election for next fall, when the prospect of a potential Trump return to power will loom largest. If they can tie Poilievre and the CPC to the broader Trumpist movement, that will reframe the ballot question in a way that’s far more favourable to the Trudeau Liberals than anything else I can see right now. Mike Roman’s story is just one piece of that potential puzzle.
Good News of the Week: Heat Pumps Get Cool
The heat pump revolution is well underway in Europe, even if it’s being driven by circumstances that go beyond the usual considerations around energy efficiency. But here in North America, and especially in Great Britain, their progress has been much more limited. One of the reasons is the belief they simply don’t work when it gets cold, a meaningful consideration in places like Canada where not having heat in the winter can be a life-or-death situation.
A new study should go some way towards allaying those concerns. “Published Monday in the scientific journal Joule,” my National Observer colleague Cloe Logan writes, “the research found heat pumps are two to three times more efficient — or, use two to three times less energy — than their oil and gas counterparts, specifically in temperatures ranging from 10 C to -20 C.”
The paper, which collected performance data from studies across Europe and North America, “found standard heat pumps are two to three times more efficient in places that typically reach up to -10 C, while cold climate heat pumps are 1.5 to two times efficient to up to -30 C.”
Does that mean they’re fit for purpose in some of the coldest parts of Canada? Probably not. But in large parts of the country, they’re an increasingly viable — and intriguing — option, one that combines heating and cooling in the same device while substantially reducing the emissions associated with both.
For more on this fascinating technology, read Cloe’s recent interview with heat pump enthusiast Ryan Kelly.
The Wrap
On Monday, I wrote about New York City’s regulations on short-term rental sites like Airbnb and VRBO, ones that are already having a huge impact. Cities like Vancouver and Toronto have required hosts to register, but New York went much further by forcing them to be in the home at the same time as their guests and preventing any rentals of the entire unit for less than a month. These new rules totally upend the business model these hosts and companies have built, one that implicitly prioritizes the rights of visitors and tourists over those of locals.
If we want to fix our badly broken rental markets, which are dangerously overheated right now, this is a natural and necessary first step. Time will tell if any Canadian city actually takes it.
On Wednesday, I wrote about the Greenbelt fiasco and Steven Guilbeault’s ability to put a stop to it. It’s abundantly clear Ontarians don’t support what the Ford government is doing here, and the stench of corruption around it is getting worse by the day. But so far, Ford seems determined to plow ahead, for reasons that we can only speculate about.
Guilbeault, in his capacity as federal minister of environment, can require studies and consultation in order to ensure species potentially at risk from the development aren’t adversely impacted. If nothing else, that would buy time for Ford’s opponents to continue building public resistance. He should do it.
But he shouldn’t do it alone. Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser should back his play here, especially in light of new polling that shows most Canadians think any housing solutions governments bring forward also have to be climate solutions. Memo to Liberals: it’s time to start fighting for your political lives, and there’s no better place to start than the intersection of these two issues.
Oh, and Suncor CEO Rich Kruger finally got around to reading the room — or having it read to him — on his tone-deaf comments about the energy transition. As I wrote on Twitter, the op-ed he had written for him missed the mark in a bunch of different important ways.
That’s it for this week. Find me in the usual places if you want to share some feedback, and, as ever, please share this newsletter with anyone who you think might enjoy it.