Business
Trudeau launches assault on property rights to answer housing shortage

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute
By Aaron Wudrick and Jon Hartley
Liberals crack down on short-term rental owners in fiscal update — while ignoring the need for mass-scale construction of private builds
In Tuesday’s fiscal update, the Trudeau government found itself trying to bury the lede in a bad news story of bigger deficits, higher debt payments and a weakened economy.
Following a slew of opinion polls that show the Liberals trailing the opposition Conservatives by a widening margin, the update also exuded a palpable sense of urgency as the government scrambles to address a critical issue on which they were caught completely off guard: housing.
Housing has emerged, in recent months, as arguably the single biggest political concern in Canada. It impacts middle- and lower-income Canadians most severely and is a significant part of why the Liberals have been bleeding support amongst these key constituencies, which disproportionately include younger Canadians.
In response to their slide in the polls, the Liberals have belatedly started to act on the file — by removing the GST on new rental builds and dedicating $4 billion to a housing accelerator program that aims to incentivize municipalities to remove prohibitive zoning barriers. The fiscal update boasted that this fund has already signed agreements with nine cities to build 21,000 homes over the next three years, which sounds impressive until you consider that Canada needs approximately 3.5 million new homes by 2030 to fix the affordability crisis.
While any new housing supply will be welcome, the measures amount to knee-jerk reactions by a government that tries to solve problems by hastily showering them with money. While the Housing Accelerator Fund correctly focuses on scrapping restrictive zoning, the real goal should be to incentivize the construction of privately built housing on a mass scale, rather than simply subsidize additional public housing. The real cause of Canada’s housing shortage is not market failure but a series of policy failures on multiple fronts and levels.
Perhaps most alarming is the government’s assault on short-term rental housing by reducing tax deductions available to property owners, framed as a crusade against greedy landlords profiting from tourists while everyday Canadians scramble to keep a roof over their heads. The implicit assumption seems to be that, by making short-term rentals less attractive, these units will be magically transformed into long-term rental accommodations (which is wishful thinking, to say the least). In so doing, the government overlooks the diverse array of reasons Canadians choose to rent out properties on a short-term basis.
Flexibility — as facilitated by platforms like Airbnb — is essential for those who do not wish to commit to full-time landlord responsibilities. Additionally, Canadians may have family members who intermittently require housing, such as aging parents or university students. Long-term tenancy, burdened with compliance issues and eviction challenges, is unappealing to many property owners. If the government instead chose to make the work of a landlord more attractive, it wouldn’t need to make short-term rentals less appealing.
Even more troubling is the broader trend of the government encroaching on Canadians’ property rights, ostensibly to compensate for its own housing policy failures. Dictating how citizens use their own property raises serious concerns about the government overstepping its bounds. In a country with well-established property rights, it is inappropriate and misguided for the government to meddle in the choices of families seeking to make ends meet by renting out their properties.
On a practical level, the government’s chosen channels to tackle housing — relying on more government subsidies, undermining the short-term rental market, discouraging institutional investors from buying single-family homes and foreign buyer taxes or bans — will ultimately be too small to meaningfully grow the total stock of housing but will cause a number of harmful unintended consequences.
The bottom line is this: to make any kind of impact on housing affordability at scale, especially for individuals living below the median income, Canada needs a much larger housing supply — and the amount of capital investment this requires can only come from private developers.
All in all, the fiscal update shows the slapdash nature of the Trudeau government’s frantic attempts to address housing concerns, as well as its unfortunate inclination to resort to heavy-handed interventions, particularly in the realm of short-term rentals. The government’s indifference to infringing on private property rights underscores the need for a more supply-oriented approach to housing policy — one that works with, rather than against, the rights of property owners.
Aaron Wudrick is the domestic policy director at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Jon Hartley is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a research fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.
Business
Saskatchewan becomes first Canadian province to fully eliminate carbon tax

From LifeSiteNews
Saskatchewan has become the first Canadian province to free itself entirely of the carbon tax.
On March 27, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced the removal of the provincial industrial carbon tax beginning April 1, boosting the province’s industry and making Saskatchewan the first carbon tax free province.
Under Moe’s direction, Saskatchewan has dropped the industrial carbon tax which he says will allow Saskatchewan to thrive under a “tariff environment.”
“I would hope that all of the parties running in the federal election would agree with those objectives and allow the provinces to regulate in this area without imposing the federal backstop,” he continued.
The removal of the tax is estimated to save Saskatchewan residents up to 18 cents a liter in gas prices.
The removal of the tax will take place on April 1, the same day the consumer carbon tax will reduce to 0 percent under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s direction. Notably, Carney did not scrap the carbon tax legislation: he just reduced its current rate to zero. This means it could come back at any time.
Furthermore, while Carney has dropped the consumer carbon tax, he has previously revealed that he wishes to implement a corporation carbon tax, the effects of which many argued would trickle down to all Canadians.
The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) celebrated Moe’s move, noting that the carbon tax was especially difficult on farmers.
“I think the carbon tax has been in place for approximately six years now coming up in April and the cost keeps going up every year,” SARM president Bill Huber said.
“It puts our farming community and our business people in rural municipalities at a competitive disadvantage, having to pay this and compete on the world stage,” he continued.
“We’ve got a carbon tax on power — and that’s going to be gone now — and propane and natural gas and we use them more and more every year, with grain drying and different things in our farming operations,” he explained.
“I know most producers that have grain drying systems have three-phase power. If they haven’t got natural gas, they have propane to fire those dryers. And that cost goes on and on at a high level, and it’s made us more noncompetitive on a world stage,” Huber decalred.
The carbon tax is wildly unpopular and blamed for the rising cost of living throughout Canada. Currently, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $80 per tonne.
Automotive
Electric cars just another poor climate policy

From the Fraser Institute
The electric car is widely seen as a symbol of a simple, clean solution to climate change. In reality, it’s inefficient, reliant on massive subsidies, and leaves behind a trail of pollution and death that is seldom acknowledged.
We are constantly reminded by climate activists and politicians that electric cars are cleaner, cheaper, and better. Canada and many other countries have promised to prohibit the sale of new gas and diesel cars within a decade. But if electric cars are really so good, why would we need to ban the alternatives?
And why has Canada needed to subsidize each electric car with a minimum $5,000 from the federal government and more from provincial governments to get them bought? Many people are not sold on the idea of an electric car because they worry about having to plan out where and when to recharge. They don’t want to wait for an uncomfortable amount of time while recharging; they don’t want to pay significantly more for the electric car and then see its used-car value decline much faster. For people not privileged to own their own house, recharging is a real challenge. Surveys show that only 15 per cent of Canadians and 11 per cent of Americans want to buy an electric car.
The main environmental selling point of an electric car is that it doesn’t pollute. It is true that its engine doesn’t produce any CO₂ while driving, but it still emits carbon in other ways. Manufacturing the car generates emissions—especially producing the battery which requires a large amount of energy, mostly achieved with coal in China. So even when an electric car is being recharged with clean power in BC, over its lifetime it will emit about one-third of an equivalent gasoline car. When recharged in Alberta, it will emit almost three-quarters.
In some parts of the world, like India, so much of the power comes from coal that electric cars end up emitting more CO₂ than gasoline cars. Across the world, on average, the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car using the global average mix of power sources over its lifetime will emit nearly half as much CO₂ as a gasoline-driven car, saving about 22 tonnes of CO₂.
But using an electric car to cut emissions is incredibly ineffective. On America’s longest-established carbon trading system, you could buy 22 tonnes of carbon emission cuts for about $660 (US$460). Yet, Ottawa is subsidizing every electric car to the tune of $5,000 or nearly ten times as much, which increases even more if provincial subsidies are included. And since about half of those electrical vehicles would have been bought anyway, it is likely that Canada has spent nearly twenty-times too much cutting CO₂ with electric cars than it could have. To put it differently, Canada could have cut twenty-times more CO₂ for the same amount of money.
Moreover, all these estimates assume that electric cars are driven as far as gasoline cars. They are not. In the US, nine-in-ten households with an electric car actually have one, two or more non-electric cars, with most including an SUV, truck or minivan. Moreover, the electric car is usually driven less than half as much as the other vehicles, which means the CO₂ emission reduction is much smaller. Subsidized electric cars are typically a ‘second’ car for rich people to show off their environmental credentials.
Electric cars are also 320–440 kilograms heavier than equivalent gasoline cars because of their enormous batteries. This means they will wear down roads faster, and cost societies more. They will also cause more air pollution by shredding more particulates from tire and road wear along with their brakes. Now, gasoline cars also pollute through combustion, but electric cars in total pollute more, both from tire and road wear and from forcing more power stations online, often the most polluting ones. The latest meta-study shows that overall electric cars are worse on particulate air pollution. Another study found that in two-thirds of US states, electric cars cause more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars.
These heavy electric cars are also more dangerous when involved in accidents, because heavy cars more often kill the other party. A study in Nature shows that in total, heavier electric cars will cause so many more deaths that the toll could outweigh the total climate benefits from reduced CO₂ emissions.
Many pundits suggest electric car sales will dominate gasoline cars within a few decades, but the reality is starkly different. A 2023-estimate from the Biden Administration shows that even in 2050, more than two-thirds of all cars globally will still be powered by gas or diesel.
Source: US Energy Information Administration, reference scenario, October 2023
Fossil fuel cars, vast majority is gasoline, also some diesel, all light duty vehicles, the remaining % is mostly LPG.
Electric vehicles will only take over when innovation has made them better and cheaper for real. For now, electric cars run not mostly on electricity but on bad policy and subsidies, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, blocking consumers from choosing the cars they want, and achieving virtually nothing for climate change.
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