The Upcoming Election and the Housing Issue

It cheers me up to see the Conservatives pulling ahead in the federal pre-election polls. The Liberal government has been mediocre at best, and their ineptitude is displayed in their election campaign as much as it is in their governing style. They knew they were calling an election, but they didn’t even have a platform to announce for the first few days after the Writ. But what should we expect when an immature prime minister selects a cabinet on the basis of demographics instead of ability and commitment. And the breaches of integrity by this PM are now legendary. He has overstayed his welcome. It’s time for him to leave.  

Attention seems to be increasingly paid to the housing issue. The various political parties are blaming it on lack of housing supply. In some regions, housing prices have doubled in the last year or two, but population hasn’t. This is not a problem of supply of housing; it’s a problem of supply of money. There is too much of it. The Bank of Canada, allied with the Liberal government, has created way too much money, and I am not convinced it has been done legally either. There are rules about how much of a government’s deficit the Bank of Canada is allowed to fund. And the government has distributed new money unequally. People do not benefit from the new money in proportion to their existing financial status.  The result is that many people who need housing did not receive much of the increase in money, but they are faced with prices that have increased because people with surplus funds are able to buy more.

I am all for funding basic government functions (the protection of life, liberty and property) with newly created money provided that all tax laws were repealed. But our government uses new money to fund activities that are detrimental to the citizenry while taxes increase in some cases and stay the same in others. They are out of control and they should go.

Adapting to Climate Change is a Better Strategy than Preventing it

I notice that one of the biggest issues for people leading up to the September 20 federal election is still the environment --- same as with the 2019 election. Yes, covid and the economy are among the top issues also, but a very recent Angus Reid poll shows that climate change is the number one issue on people’s minds. Parties are scrambling to develop strategies to slow down or reverse climate change. So far as I can tell, we will not succeed in doing so because nothing man is doing is causing the problem. My comments at https://gordonfeil.blogspot.com/2019/09/ are still my belief in the matter.

Climate change is inevitable. It is solar related, not man related. What we need to do is develop policies to help us adapt to the inevitable. The targets we have set for ourselves to eliminate the petroleum powered cars and to build massive solar and wind farms are impossible to meet with current mining technologies. Think for a moment. An electric car battery requires minerals obtained from processing 250 tons of ores. To replace the world’s billion cars with electric versions would require 250 billion tons of materials to be mined and refined.

Assuming that the average car only traveled 10,000 km per year, and that a recharge can power a vehicle 500 km, which is very generous, we are talking about 20 billion recharges a year. We don’t come close to producing enough electricity. Solar and wind will not do the job. Firstly, they are not serious solutions in the latitudes and regions where energy is most needed, and secondly, to produce a single wind turbine takes 45 tons of non-recyclable blades made from plastic ---- petro-chemicals --- and solar panels of the quantities that would be needed require prohibitive amounts of rare earths and other minerals. Uranium might do the job, but not wind and solar.

What we need to do is plan how to cope with climate change, not how to prevent it.

Electric Cars.....hmmmm