Just watching the morning news, and they did this "feel good" story about how a group of seniors in calgary, alberta is salvaging bikes and donating them to high schools. One of the groups members even said "some of them have never even ridden a bike before" and some rep for the school said it's great that the schools are teaching them the riding and maintenance skills for the bikes. You know, warm fuzzies all around!
This is just outlining how badly the inequality is out there. If you're in high school and can't afford A BICYCLE, how are you going to be able to afford a car? Where's the goddamn mass transit? When you only have the W option in BMW, you're severely limited in how far you can actually go for stuff like WORK, and FOOD. This isn't a feel good story: it's just ANOTHER primer in how our society is outright failing its citizens.
Oh, they'll be able to afford the car. There's always some crook out there willing to indulge a fool in financing their car over a 96 or 108 month term. That's how so many of the people (especially younger people) you see driving around today are in Teslas, Audis, BMWs and the like. The question is, at $2 and up/litre, can they afford to fill it up?
The fact that Canadian politicians are actually acknowledging the affordability crisis is singular proof that it's very nearly reached disastrous proportions , because they always tend to ignore problems until
juuuuuust before it blows up their faces. Now, along with the housing problem Canada has had for the last 2 decades which nobody wants to solve, we can add general inflation making essentials like (healthy) food and clothing increasingly unaffordable for the average family in Canada. Vacations? Electronic gadgets? RETIREMENT? For future generations, some or all of these things are going to be little-seen luxuries unless we change course quickly.
Canada has always been an expensive place to live, no doubt about that (although also less expensive than others, like Australia and some European countries). Canadians have tolerated it because the country is stable in an agonizingly dull way... practically approaching stagnant (this, to me, isn't a good thing), very safe, and up until recently a good place to raise a family. The majority may not get rich, but you could have a good quality of life with guaranteed health care. From the 1950s through to the late 70s or so, whether you were born in Canada or had come from somewhere else, as long as you were willing to work, you could get a job with decent benefits and a defined benefit pension that would guarantee you could retire with some dignity.
My grandfather grew up in Newfoundland and started working for the pulp & paper company that had basically built his town around their paper mill. Although that would've been enough for him to have a decent life there, he decided to get an accounting degree via correspondence, changed roles within the company and eventually got transferred to the Toronto area. Once there, still just on a single (and average for the day) salary my grandparents bought a house and raised six kids, still managing to save a ton for retirement (despite having a defined benefit pension that's still paying out to my grandmother almost a decade after my grandfather passed away). A modern couple with two above-average salaries would barely be able to afford that house, and certainly not while also raising a family.
Canada is no longer the country it was, and I honestly don't understand why (other than for the stability) anyone really wants to immigrate here at all, anymore. There are few opportunities, and even if you get a job in your field it's almost guaranteed not to pay enough for you to buy a home. Fixer-uppers start at $1 million, and any property a million or up requires a mandatory 20% down to qualify for a mortgage. Even rent is sky-high across Canada, which is at odds with the high cost of owning property. In countries like Germany, I understand that while the majority of people don't own property, rental prices are extremely reasonable. In Canada, we now have the worst of both worlds, making it impossible for families to ever get ahead. The only way out is inheritance, and obviously not everyone has that.
There are times I've strongly considered leaving just to escape the boredom, but I can't deny that I'm more comfortable than most, both in my job and my life situation. The one thing I can't do, as a single person, is buy a home of my own. If I had a family and children, that limitation likely would've driven me to transfer down to North Carolina or somewhere a while back, where you can buy a beautiful family home for $300,000. The company I work for is American and quite large, and they've facilitated visas/etc. for others in the past. Since I don't have a family, I'm content where I am for the moment, as I know that later in life I will be able to afford to buy into the market.