There’s a lot of garbage and misinformation floating around. I’m a numbers guy, so it's always my first inclination to look at statistics. The data tells us a lot, if you know how to use it and if you are honest. But honesty is in scarce supply these days. Here are some examples:
Item: 5.8 million homes
According to the CMHC, this is the number of new homes that need to be built by 2030 to restore affordability for the average income Canadian. Currently, we build about 280,000 homes a year, meaning that to get to the CMHC’s target, we would have to build more than three times as many homes as we do now every year until 2030. Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
The problem of affordability has been blamed on immigrants and the Liberal government who let them in. And while I would certainly agree that the recent influx of immigrants has played some role in keeping housing prices high, the main culprit is that we weren’t building enough homes for the last two decades. Which brings me to the two guys trying to win the 2025 election, Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre. They are both promising that they will magically fix this situation. But they won’t. In fact, they both have pretty much the same plan, the only difference being is Trudeau will reward municipalities who build more homes with more money while Poilievre will withhold funds from municipalities that don’t build enough. Housing is a local issue and it’s highly contentious because of nimbyism - a.k.a. the gross entitlement of shameless hypocrites. Our leaders seem to have forgotten that there is a large, powerful constituency that doesn’t give a damn about affordability - most of the people who already own their homes - and they often stridently oppose new developments. No matter who wins in 2025, they won’t change this reality.
Oh, and if we do drastically increase the amount of homes we build, we are going to need a lot more construction workers. Where will we get them from, Mr. Poilievre? Exactly….
Item: 100 billion dollars in damages
This is the minimum estimate of the damage caused by Hurricanes Milton and Helene, the two storms that hit the southeastern US in September and October. Each storm is likely to cost at least $50 billion, making them the third and fourth such storms to hit the US in just the last six years. Shockingly, many of the people who lost homes and businesses were uninsured - up to 95 percent of the damage from Helene is not covered. For the homeowners reading this, imagine if you lost your house and had to pay to rebuild it yourself. What would that do to your financial situation for the rest of your life? Is anyone going to help these people? Nah, the vast majority will just have to fend for themselves. It’s the American way.
So you are probably asking why are they uninsured and living in a hurricane zone? Because they were scammed and lied to by slimy Republican politicians who claimed that climate change was a hoax. Home insurance costs had already gone parabolic before these two storms, with many home owners paying more than ten thousand dollars a year. The anti-government, free market worshipping Republicans tried to paper over this problem with gobs of taxpayer money. It hasn't worked, and the latest storms will result in more insurers either going bust or just leaving the state. The current governor, Ron DeSantis, really doesn’t give a crap because he’s a term limit lame duck who somehow thinks he has a chance to become president one day, so he’s happy to pretend everything is fine and prance around in his white booties looking for photo ops.
If you deny reality, if you pretend nature doesn’t exist, eventually you get punched right in the mouth.
Item: 30 percent increase in violent crime in Canada over the last 10 years
This number has been quoted repeatedly in the media and by Poilievre in his attacks on the Liberal government. The 30 percent number isn’t exactly false, it's just misleading. The two categories that account for most of the increase are human trafficking and distributing child pornography, and it is likely that they have ballooned because the justice system has become more aggressive in how they charge these crimes. There is a measure called the crime severity index (CSI) which tries to account for the fact that all crimes are not equal in the harm they cause, and by that measure, there has been little change over the last 10 years. The murder rate has gone up over that time, with most of that coming from the increased use of handguns, but that’s not a correlation the Conservatives want to talk about.
So the data is mixed at best. Why then is Poilievre constantly talking about crime as if the country is on the verge of Road Warrior-like anarchy? Because it works great with many voters. It’s a tried and true formula that conservatives have always used: scare people into voting for them as the ‘law and order’ party, promising more cops and stiffer punishments. Problem is, studies show that those things don’t do much of anything to the crime rate. The US routinely imposes longer sentences and even capital punishment, and yet it has a much higher murder rate than Canada.
When it comes to fear of crime, a lot of voters simply aren’t rational, and the Conservatives know this.
Item: 1.4 million gambling addicts
This is the number of addicts in the UK, which has had online sports betting for a lot longer than Canada, and therefore is a good guide for what’s likely to happen here in the future. For the betting companies operating in the UK, 86 percent of their revenue comes from only 5 percent of their customers, which flies directly in the face of the companies' claim that they try to stop people from getting into trouble. In a recent piece in The Athletic, a betting addict said that every time he quit for a few days, FanDuel sent him a cash bonus to get him going again. If you watch any of the four major North American sports (hockey, football, baseball, basketball), you are inundated with gambling advertising; TSN incorporates betting right into its NFL broadcasts. The ads frequently feature famous athletes, which studies show is a great way to lure in younger customers. The gambling apps are filled with parleys and prop bets on every sport across the globe, which means innumerable bets are always just a click away.
Governments in Canada have been raking in gambling revenue for decades, and the trend in our societies when it comes to “vices” like drugs, sex, etc. has been to let people make their own choices. But there are always going to be social costs. Gambling addiction can lead to crime, domestic violence, child neglect and suicide. With the prevalence of social media, athletes regularly get abuse and death threats from gamblers. There have already been match-fixing scandals, and there is sure to be more to come.
If we're going to have betting, we need to do better. In the UK, celebrities are now banned from appearing in gambling commercials. The companies need to be forced to put up more guardrails, such as stricter spending limits. Further, there should be a special tax on all gambling businesses that would go to treating the problem of addiction. The betting companies are almost all foreign-owned. Should we taxpayers be footing the bill for the social costs while the lion’s share of the profits leave Canada? The answer is a hard no.
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