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Red Deer’s 2% house depreciation hurts the most, the ones we need the most.

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We welcome your opinions.. Here’s one from Red Deer resident Garfield Marks.

Red Deer has a severe supply management issue when it comes to housing. In 4 years our population grew by 195 residents while we added 1299 new homes. House values decreased last year by 2%. Making it undesirable to young families to put down permanent roots in Red Deer.

Why it may be better to just rent in the short term.

The prices of real estate has declined in the last year by 2 %.

So what, you may ask.

Let us look at last year’s first home buyer.

Buys a $300,000 house. Puts 5% down ($15,000) and takes out a mortgage. Pays legal and moving fees for about $1,000 which would be a bargain. $16,000 out of pocket to start.

5% down means a $285,000 mortgage which means mortgage insurance which if added to the principal means a real mortgage of $296,400 to start.

Taxes for the year on property will be about $2,600.

If the mortgage was at 2.94% that would mean a monthly payment of about $1,394 or $16,728 for the year.

Let us say the needs no maintenance but one could expect maintenance of at least $1,000 but in this example we will negate maintenance.

House insurance would be about a $1,000.

During the year the home buyer spent $16,000 buying the house, $16,728 on mortgage payments and $2,600 on property taxes, $1,000 on insurance for a total of $36,328.

Today the house sells for 2% less or $294,000, then minus $12,411 real estate fees and GST, down to $281,589, then minus $1,000 legal fees to $280,589, then minus mortgage payout of about$290,000 to a net loss of about $10,000 in proceeds to the owner.

So that $300,000 home cost the owner $46,000 to live in the home for 1 year. He could have rented it for $20,000 so in this case it would make more sense to rent.

So to many people losing 2% value in their home is a big deal.

Perhaps we could slow down the building of new homes to let the market catch up, because now it leaves the most vulnerable home buyer at risk, and those are the first time buyers, the young families and the residents most needed to create a growing community.

So far from encouraging the young upwardly mobile to move to Red Deer, we are scaring them away.

Perhaps our supply and demand equation is heavily weighted to the supply side, yet we keep investing in new subdivisions while devaluing our own homes.

Who wins? Developers, city hall tax collectors, builders but not the tax payers. The city definitely makes the case for big property managers and renting. Too bad.

 

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Elon Musk praises families on X: ā€˜We should teach fear of childlessness,ā€™ not pregnancy

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From LifeSiteNews

By Stephen Kokx

As fertility rates across the West plummet, Musk has consistently warned about the coming population collapse.

Elon Musk is continuing to spread the word about the importance of families.

On X this week, Musk sounded the alarm in response to a post that claimed birth rates in Sweden and Britain are now at their lowest levels since 1749 and 1938, respectively.

“Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness,” Musk said.

While campaigning for Donald Trump in Pittsburgh this past election cycle, Musk had shared a similar message while speaking to an abortion survivor.

“There’s nothing greater than having a kid,” he said. “I get more joy in my life for my kids than anything else … having a child will make you happier than anything else in your life, ever.”

Musk also used that opportunity to blame schools for “terrifying” girls and women with the idea that “getting pregnant is the end of your life” for why they are not having as many children as they used to, echoing remarks he made to Tucker Carlson in October.

After President-elect Trump’s landslide victory earlier this month, he announced that Musk will lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with businessman and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Musk said on X that “either we get government efficient, or America goes bankrupt. That’s what it comes down to.”

As fertility rates across the West plummet, Musk has consistently warned about the coming population collapse. While he has never adopted the true pro-life position, he has pointed to birth control and abortion as contributing factors to the demographic crisis and has also pushed back  against the absurd claims of climate extremists that a reduction in population is necessary for the future of the planet.

“Many men also fear that they will be unable to have ‘fun’ if abortion is outlawed,” he wrote.

Children are “absolutely” one of the most fulfilling things a person can have in life, he said.

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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Itā€™s Time To Stop Church Arsons And What Fuels Them

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Religious freedoms and the right to worship have been a recognized hallmark of civilized societies for centuries. The preamble of Canada’s constitution says our country is built on the principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God and the rule of law. In defiance of both, almost 600 Canadian places of worship have suffered arson in recent years. Nothing could be more unCanadian.

The stats were revealed by Member of Parliament Marc Dalton following a formal inquiry to the federal government. The response showed 592 arsons had been set on places of worship between 2010 and 2022. they rose from 58 in 2020 to 90 in 2021, then down to 74 in 2022.

The peak coincides with claims made in May of 2021 that the remains of 215 school children had been discovered on the site of the former Kamloops Residential School.

Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a subsequent wave of church burnings “unacceptable and wrong” he also called their likely motivations “real and fully understandable.” This hardly doused the flames.

These arsons far outnumber those made on Canadian churches in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan, which opposed non-Protestants and non-whites. In those years the KKK desecrated Sarnia’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. They killed ten people when they set Saint-Boniface College in Winnipeg on fire. They also burned the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. In 1926, three Klan members were jailed after they blew up St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Barrie, Ont.

The Klan soon fizzled out, seemingly unlike these recent church burnings. The 110-year-old Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses Catholic church burned down in Trois-Rivières, Quebec last month, but whether arson was involved has not been confirmed.

The presence of bodies underneath the former residential school in Kamloops has not been confirmed either. A 1924 septic field could also account for soil anomalies found there by ground-penetrating radar. Eight million federal tax dollars spent to investigate the site have yielded no remains and details on how the money was spent are sketchy. It’s high time the site was excavated to confirm or rule out the graves and do autopsies on any corpses found there.

Federal funds also fuel the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), the Orwellian title for a group that fuels resentment against socially conservative organizations with negative characterizations. On August 7, CAHN published “40 Ways To Fight The Far-Right: Tactics for Community Activists in Canada” thanks to $640,000 from Ottawa.

“White boys and men make up the majority of people involved in hate-promoting movements,” the handbook explains. Pro-life and pro-parent groups, CAHN says, are among those “characterized by racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQ+ views, and pro-colonialist/ anti-Indigenous bigotry.”

CAHN says the Catholic-dominated, pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition is a “hate movement.” Liberty Coalition Canada, a legal defence organization, and the activist organization Action4Canada are similarly denigrated for their alleged belief that Canada was founded on Christian values and attempts to reassert such values.

Meanwhile, the CAHN guide advocates “antifascist” doxing, including infiltration of right-leaning organizations. getting people fired, and ending friendships.

Dalton’s Bill C-411 the “Anti-Arson Act” would do more to deter hate-motivated crimes than CAHN ever will. The legislation would punish those who set fires and explosions at religious places. A first offence would get a mandatory five-year jail sentence, while subsequent offenses would prompt seven years.

When respect for the supremacy of God and the rule of law fail, rights give way to wrongs. It’s time to stop the fires and the disputable claims that fuel them, and restore respect for people of faith, their right to worship, and their places of worship.

Lee Harding is a Research Associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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