Canada

I'd agree with you to a point, but I think the issue is partially technical expertise, but mostly a lack of will. Whether that's cronyism, cowardice and/or a lack of political capital I'll defer to insiders.

We're into year eight of Liberals' mandate, and they had at nearly five years unencumbered by COVID or interest-rate concerns to address an issue that economists had been red-flagging--for the GTA and GVA--since at least Martin's government. They chose not to do anything except for some very modest controls because it wasn't politically palatable.

Putting money back into the CMHC to build public housing at scale was always an option, it just wasn't done. And again, it's a matter of will; the government has shown they have the will to intervene when they want to, they just...don't want to.

Trans-Mountain is a particularly good example of this: no one in the area wanted it, oil prices didn't support it, the private sector wasn't going to pony up for it (you'd think they would, if the business case was so solid), it ran directly counter to the government's climate goals and it wasn't going to win votes in western Canada anyway, but the government still bought it for five billion dollars. Five. Billion. Dollars.

Without particularly much in the way of committees or commissions; it took four months from announcement to completion.

Think about how much housing we could have built for five billion dollars in 2018, especially if it was done directly, instead of filtered through developers' bank accounts. And TMX's cost has ballooned well past that since then. Housing has been an issue for far longer, the solution isn't nearly as controversial, and yet we have...studies.

Again, I agree with you that the government doesn't really have the expertise to tackle the issue right now, but I do think they don't *want * to: it's all cost, there's no upside (I mean, except for regular people...) and no way to make rich people richer. And I think that's really the issue: our policymakers and bureaucrats are no longer psychologically equipped to do anything that doesn't involve neoliberal, market-based incentivization of the wealthy. The idea of direct intervention at scale is something we can't even conceive of.