Opinion
We can relax now, Downtown Calgary and Edmonton have poorer air than Red Deer. What a relief.
There are provincial quality standards for the air we breathe. Since 2010 our air quality has been in the “Requires Immediate Attention” category. The air in Riverside Park is the worst area in Red Deer. I have been writing about it for years.
A report came out, telling us to breathe easy, because downtown Edmonton is a little bit worse and downtown Calgary is worse yet. So Riverside Park is okay because it is only the 3rd worse in Alberta. Fort MacMurray was worse during the forest fires, but as a whole the oilsands city is better than Red Deer.
So, everyone relax, the air is worse in the concrete jungle in our 2 large cities, why worry? Lethbridge, has about the same population, and cleaner air, but we are better than Jasper Avenue by a point.
We can always console ourselves with comparing our air with Toronto.
How can we be so smug by comparing us to a high density area like downtown Calgary. If we wanted to live in an asphalt jungle with poor air, we would move there. If the air quality was better than all of Calgary or all of Edmonton, they would have reported it, but they didn’t. They found 2 areas, high density, high traffic areas that have poorer air and declared; we are not the worse. Let us celebrate.
Leduc has cleaner air, Airdrie has cleaner air, Nisku has cleaner air, and Lethbridge has cleaner air. Standards tell us, and have been for years, that “immediate action required” and I do not think that looking for pockets of poorer air is what they meant.
I guess I will have to be happy, that downtown Calgary and Edmonton have worse air than Red Deer. I am just giddy, not.
Compare apples with apples, and oranges with oranges. We know when we are being sold a line. By the way, the alarms are still going off. Remember” REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION”.
Economy
Meeting Ottawa’s new housing target will require more than $300 billion in additional financing every year until 2030
From the Fraser Institute
Canada Needs to Save Much More to Finance an Ambitious Investment Agenda
To meet Ottawa’s ambitious new housing construction targets in order to restore affordability, the country needs more than $300 billion in additional financing every year from 2025 to 2030, finds a new report published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“To increase home building and restore business investment in key areas like technology to previous levels, Canada needs to become much more attractive to investors, both from within Canada and around the world,” said Steven Globerman, Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of Canada Needs to Save Much More to Finance an Ambitious Investment Agenda.
To restore housing affordability, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a Crown Corporation of the federal government, has estimated that about 3.5 million additional housing units need to be built by 2030 given expected construction rates.
The study finds that for the federal government to meet this housing construction goal, an estimated $331 to $364 billion in additional financing is needed annually from 2025-2030.
If business investment in key areas such as communications and IT are to return to previous levels, another roughly $13 billion is needed annually.
In total, this means Canada needs an additional $343 to $377 billion in financing annually over the next five years. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to increasing the current Canadian savings rate by 50 per cent.
One option to mitigate the need for a drastic increase in the domestic savings rate is to attract more foreign investment, but that will require substantial policy reforms to make Canada a more attractive environment for foreign investors.
“It is very likely that the ambitious targets that have been set for homebuilding and business investment won’t be met, but even so, encouraging increased investment and higher domestic savings is a worthy policy pursuit,” Globerman said.
- Both the Canadian government and policymakers from various organizations including the Bank of Canada have called for ambitious programs to increase capital investment in Canada, particularly investment focused on residential housing and productivity-enhancing business assets.
- The ambitious domestic investment agenda will require a substantial increase in domestic savings in order to finance the necessary increased capital expenditure. The requisite increase has been largely ignored, to date, in policy proposals and surrounding discussion of those proposals.
- The financial capital required to fund major investments in residential housing and even modest increases in business investment will require an increase in the domestic savings rate of as much as 50 percent. Alternatively, much larger inflows of long-term foreign capital investments into Canada beyond what has been realized over the past few decades will be required.
- Such large increases in the domestic savings rate and in foreign capital inflows would require unrealistic and unsustainably high real interest rates. The implication is that the federal government’s investment goals, especially with regard to increasing the supply of residential housing, are unrealizable over the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, implementing policies to encourage increased domestic savings and channeling those savings into high priority investment activities should be a public policy imperative.
Steven Globerman
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