Only Thanos can save Canada from its economic crisis

Canada's cost of living crisis has hit rock bottom. It will take a miracle to get us out of it.

Barbra Streisand’s son-in-law, Josh Brolin, rendered in CGI for the film Avengers: Endgame.

This is off topic from my usual beat, the Gender Mess, and I promise, I’ve got several pieces in the works on that front. But today, here’s an off-the-cuff rant/explainer video about the dire situation that Canadians are facing today.

Last month an internal document from our national police, the Mounties, was leaked to the press, which warned that the real estate crisis poses a first-order existential threat to the country, with the possibility of widespread civil unrest within five years, when the populace under age 35 realize not only that homeownership is permanently out of their reach, but homelessness among the former middle class could become commonplace. Comparisons to the Irish Potato Famine are being made.

Internal rumblings within the federal government warn of widespread civil unrest in the near future over the real estate bubble-driven cost of living crisis, with the potential to be as destabilizing as the Irish Potato Famine.

Do we need something like a "Thanos Snap" to forcibly cut real estate prices in half all at once across the board, in order to bring Canada back to sanity?

Thanos, of course, was the Marvel Comics supervillain who snapped his omnipotent fingers and made half the universe’s population vanish into dust, because he believed this was the painful but necessary way to save the galaxy from the terminal crisis that overpopulation was threatening to unleash. The way I see it, maybe the only painful but necessary way for Canada to save itself from the biggest real estate bubble the planet has ever seen would be to “snap” the value of the market in half, all at once, Thanos-style.

Today there was another shocking headline, another sign of the financial misery Canadians are presently struggling to get through: someone advertised $500 monthly rent for homeless people to camp out in tents in his backyard. And social workers actually referred some homeless people to it as a viable option. That’s how bad the housing situation has gotten in this country.

Behold, Canada’s latest innovation: the “for-profit homeless encampment.”

Let’s briefly look at how we got here, and where we came from:

In the 1950s, with a median income in Canada, you could buy a house, a car, and put two kids through college.

By the 1990s, a family needed two incomes to buy the same house.

And then many of the houses in the inner cities were subdivided into two units, requiring now four median incomes — two households with two incomes each — to buy the same amount of property.

All of this was to feed the idea that if you invested in a home, its value would double or more over each generation, building intergenerational wealth for your family, because somehow somewhere down the road there’d always be some other family willing and able to pay double what you paid. But we're starting to realize that the basic math simply doesn't add up: you can't keep doubling real estate values forever without hitting a mathematical ceiling.

We've hit that ceiling.

Now the Federal government is pushing for the entire nation's residential streets to be re-zoned into "fourplexes,” splitting each housing plot into four units, in an effort to double yet again everyone's housing investment, thus doubling yet again the number of median incomes required to own the same amount of property that once was affordable to one single average Canadian worker.

Canada is resorting to ever more desperate measures to keep up the preposterous premise that wealth can be generated exponentially through real estate investment, with property values skyrocketing relative to a living wage, forever and ever.

For the past several decades, Canada has pretended it could have its cake and eat it, too: to treat real estate simultaneously as the nation’s primary investment vehicle, as well as its most essential good. This state of affairs could never carry on indefinitely.

Now, the country has been plunged into a state of crisis, and it's largely a silent one because most people are too embarrassed to tell the truth: no one can afford to live here anymore, and we're all just barely holding on.

Homelessness, unemployment and poverty are looming, while the wealthy political class refuse to face the hard reality: the value of all real estate in the country must come down by half or more, and the country's entire economy must shift away from real estate speculation in order to save itself from catastrophe.

We’ve doubled the last time we could double in the logarithmic ballooning of real estate prices relative to wages and everything else in the economy. In fact, we’ve gone a doubling too far, and we have to bring it back down.

We need a Thanos to "snap" the cost of housing right in half across the country, and the economic consequences of that are going to be dire.

Here’s my spontaneous YouTube rant about this situation, with a little dip into what is and isn’t working to help us. Australia offers a very bad model for Canada, as they’ve fallen into much the same trap, and are making the same (doomed) efforts to fix the problem. Japan, on the other hand, with its deep-rooted philosophy of wabi-sabi, offers a possible economic alternative to the way Canada handles real estate.

There’s hope from our own past as well. But one thing’s for certain: the way forward is going to be extremely painful.