Like Ottawa, Washington wants more housing built. Piling ever more rules onto builders and landlords won't get that done
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No one ever lost money, H.L. Mencken said, underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Nor, he might have added, did anyone lose an election doing the very same thing. And if he’d looked northward, the Sage of Baltimore might have included the Canadian public, too.
In 1961, fewer than one in 10 Canadians had any form of post-secondary education. In 2024 almost six in 10 do. Yet our politicians apparently still feel they can assuage concerns about housing affordability by pursuing an Eleventh Commandment policy: “Apartment rents, thou shalt not rise!” Talk about underestimating intelligence: just how dumb do they think we are?
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In July, when Joe Biden was still the Democrats’ presidential candidate, he proposed national price controls limiting rent increases to five per cent. True, he wouldn’t simply have outlawed increases above that amount, as local rent controls often try to do. Instead he wanted Congress to give “corporate landlords a choice to either cap rent increases on existing units … or risk losing current valuable federal tax breaks,” which is a slightly gentler form of cudgel. You often hear the same sort of proposal in this country.
The new Kamala Harris Democratic Party’s........