They won’t be able to address the cost of living issue.

They can’t. The policy changes required are too painful for voters to accept.

The easy fix to make cost of living cheaper is to crash the price of homes. Cheaper homes means cheaper labour (since people don’t need to make as much to rent/own) which in turn translates to cheaper everything produced by labour in this country. It makes our country more competitive globally too, though certain imports would be more expensive relative to percentage of income than they are now.

The government could crash home prices in a half dozen different ways, but it means that existing home owners would lose almost all the value of their home, which they’ve been told their entire life is an investment. Some people would literally end up with no retirement funds because they were banking on their house getting them through the last few years. Almost everyone who bought in the last 10 years would end up with mortgages which are greater than the value of their home that they would still have to pay legally.

We aren’t talking about a few thousand dollars here either, a single condo owner would lose multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars and some families would lose more than a million dollars on single family home. It would bankrupt almost every single landlord, even those people who just rent a suite and rely on it to pay the mortgage.

I don’t think voters are willing to do that, given that close to 65% of Canadian homes are owned by the family that live in them, and home owners tend to vote more than non-owners.

We’ve built a pyramid scheme on real estate, and far too many Canadians are invested in their home to want to let the system crumble. So we’re just fucking the next generation harder and harder until eventually we won’t have a choice.