Ford may think that disappearing tenants and their unions from the LTB will disappear them from the city, but it won’t. Tenants and the growing tenant union movement in Ontario have been successfully utilizing the LTB to throw sand in the gears of financialized landlords’ predatory business model. Given the affordability crisis, they have no choice but to continue.

Canada’s household debt has soared to $3.07 trillion, the highest in the G7 for 15 years. James Hardwick explores how speculation, housing bubbles, and government policy created a fragile economy where ordinary families bear the costs—warning of bankruptcies, austerity, and the urgent need to confront financial elites.

The dominant class and its cheerleaders, intent on doubling down to maintain a social system which proudly features gross inequality and inequity, are out on top. The working class and its leftist protagonists, hoping to fuel a movement for a radical rethinking of our polity to get closer to a social system which advances equality and altruism, find themselves at the bottom.

Over the past three decades our governments have once again walked away from direct housing provision and, for the third time in a century, allowed the private sector to make a mess of our housing system. We know from our nation’s history that only strong non-market alternatives will restore affordability and get people into the homes they deserve.

If we wanted to create a world where everyone has affordable housing we would. We would take a track similar to France, Austria, or Finland and work to undo cultural stigmas against renting and social housing and use non-market alternatives to provide decent homes for all. But our leaders have made it clear that they have no interest in following this path.

We often speak of a “housing crisis” and it is certainly true that profit-driven housing provision means rapidly intensifying hardship for hundreds of thousands of people. However, the beneficiaries of upscale redevelopment and parasitic speculation are now experiencing a crisis of their own, as the speculative bubble they’ve created bursts spectacularly.

Carney has made it clearer than ever that he will be a conservative prime minister, governing on behalf of the rich and powerful to maintain their grip on Canadian society. Many thousands of progressive voters were clearly misled into thinking otherwise. This underscores that even as Poilievre lost the election, he won the ideological debate within the Liberal Party.

It is clear that supply and demand curves are not sufficient for understanding the housing crisis. We can build all we want, but if we are building houses as financial assets prices are going to stay high. The act of building matters a lot less than the decisions we make about what to build, who to build for, and most importantly, who will own our homes.

There is no more utility in technocratic fixes. We need to lower housing prices and address the knock-on effect falling home values will have on older Canadians. We must restore housing affordability while simultaneously improving our public pension and elder care systems. Every Canadian deserves both an affordable home and a dignified retirement.

Imposed from above during an economic emergency, rent control played a significant role both in curbing out-of-control inflation and solving the housing crisis Canada was experiencing at the time. A combination of robust rent control and concurrent investments in public housing saw housing prices fall by as much as 30 percent in real terms between 1975 and 1978.