prodigalsorcerer

If only there were some sort of article attached to the title that contained quotes and statistics to answer your question. I guess it will forever remain a mystery.

If pp cares so much, he can get the security clearance and look at the list himself.

Where can you get a BYD Seagull outside of China for that price? When they install all the required safety features, it's much closer to 20k Euros (30k CAD).

That's still a little cheaper than anything we have here, but not so much cheaper that it's worth the human rights violations and loss of local industry.

I don’t know, it just feels like we haven’t tried much of anything here.

You're absolutely correct in that. We've mostly just allowed for monopolies and oligopolies to take over industries in a way that only supports their bottom line.

This is one place where I think the free market could have worked, given enough time and sufficient enforcement to prevent this sort of conflict of interest, but the time for that was a decade or two ago. Now we need strong interventions by multiple levels of government to fix this problem.

if you’re not increasing supply then you’re failing your free market duty

I disagree. Brooks is correct in saying that it's not their job and that its two separate industries. Affordable/social housing is the government's job, not theirs.

In theory, the free market should see this increase in rental prices and react by building more units. Why isn't that happening? Largely it comes down to the fact that a lot of developers are also landlords, and thus have a huge conflict of interest in this area. This is where regulators need to step in. But landlords (on their own) do not, and should not, be responsible for building housing.

Ontario had a program called micro FIT (feed in tariff) to encourage people to generate electricity. It paid higher than the going rate for electricity and was a really good deal if you could install solar. I think it was capped at 10 kW systems, but wasn't dependent on your own usage. New sign ups ended years ago, but the existing contracts were something like 20 years.

Now the best you can get in Ontario are credits that expire in a year.

If only the NDP had made electoral reform a part of their deal to support the liberals. None of the other parts of the deal mattered - they could easily do all that and more after winning the next election. But instead, we get a bunch of half measures and they don't have a chance at winning a majority.

No such thing.

The $10k Chinese EV is only $10k in China. When localized for other markets, it's much closer to the same price as all other EVs. Some of this is tariffs, but there's a bunch of changes they need to make to meet safety requirements. Even the $15k Seagull they talk about in the article is expected to be the cheapest offering in Europe, eventually, and they're aiming for 20k Euros, which is 30k CAD.

CBC didn't offer all the events in previous years. They may have had everything that had Canadian participants, but for the smaller sports, coverage was hit or miss.

I'm not sure why you think I'm rich. Mail isn't like any of those other services. There is no mail urgent enough that it can't take one extra business day to arrive. If there is, it certainly wouldn't be sent through lettermail nor delivered by the normal carrier.

If we're going to raise taxes to pay for things (and by all means we should), I would much rather prioritize all of the other strawmen you brought up than continue to pay for lettermail delivery 5x per week.

Two days per week can still be constant and reliable. It's not like I actually get mail every day - the mail carrier just walks past my house about 2-4 days per week anyway. The only thing that comes on an actual weekly schedule are the flyers.

I think we need to address the gig economy as a whole. It's not good for anyone other than the companies who are exploiting these workers.

Beyond that, for Canada Post specifically, I don't understand why I need lettermail delivered 5x per week. Cut it back to twice per week, and suddenly one worker can deliver to 2.5x as many houses per week. Or even just give them a day off and "only" double the number of houses served in 4 days.