Affordable housing, water laws can’t wait
Getting serious about affordable housing The latest report, last week, by Royal Bank of Canada on housing affordability is yet another warning that the GTA continues to become ever less affordable. Housing costs are gobbling up an alarming 63.7 per cent of disposable income for GTA homeowners. Shelter costs ideally should not exceed one-third of income.
For Toronto, which takes roughly half of new Canadians each year, keeping up with shelter demand will only become tougher now that Ottawa has raised Canada’s annual intake of immigrants to a targeted 300,000, up from 275,000.
The affordable-shelter scarcity also risks a scenario in which Toronto eventually prices itself out of the market for the best and brightest immigrants. The Trudeau government talks a good game about spurring growth in “social housing,” the shortage of which also drives up the cost of rental property for lowerincome residents. But so far, Ottawa has not provided a plan for the number of affordable-housing units it expects to finance, or the all-important fixed targets for achieving that goal.
In year-end interviews, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau identified social housing as a top priority for next year. But that overdue policy might fall short of what’s required. Watch for affordable housing advocates, impatient with Ottawa, to pressure municipalities to apply surtaxes on permits for the luxury housing that developers have fixated on for the past decade, and to fasttrack developer permits for the reasonably priced shelter the industry used to build.
Taps for bottled water?
Jurisdictions across Canada will be pondering whether to follow Ontario’s example of a moratorium on selling fresh-water access after Kathleen Wynne’s government last week proposed a two-year ban on permits for new or expanded water rights.
The action by Queen’s Park should be seen as part of the larger crisis of growing global shortages of fresh water.
World demand for fresh water will jump at least 50 per cent by middecade, in tandem with the expected one-third increase in global population, to about 10 billion people by mid-century. Demand for food will obviously skyrocket. And it takes 1,250 litres of fresh water to grow one kilogram of wheat, and 15,000 litres to produce one kilogram of beef.
Yet fresh-water supplies everywhere are under pressure — from climate change, urban sprawl that destroys farmland, and the droughts of increasing frequency and longer duration that in recent years have afflicted B.C., California and Australia, among other breadbasket regions.
Another source of growing freshwater demand is the bottled-water industry. Ontario recently cut a deal in which Nestlé S.A., the world’s biggest marketer of bottled water, will pay just $3.71 per 1 million litres of fresh water the company draws for its bottling plant near Guelph.
The giant Swiss firm, with revenues last year of $125 billion, is paying the equivalent of the price of a Starbucks espresso for a colossal amount of fresh water for its Perrier, San Pellegrino, Montclair, Poland Spring and Pure Life brands.
The resolve behind Wynne’s moratorium arises from the outrage caused by the Nestlé deal. In yearend interviews, Wynne has asked why people need to drink bottled water in the first place.
Good question. With doctors warning that most North Americans are dehydrated, sufficient personal consumption is required. But reusable containers and fluoridated tap water that consistently tops taste tests is a money-saving, environment-improving and health-enhancing alternative.
Last rites for Trump’s tweets
It appears as though Donald Trump is intent to govern by tweet. That cannot stand. Sooner than later, Trump’s Twitter account will be hacked. Trump will open another account. It, too, will be hacked.
Impostors claiming to be Trump will force the world to react — as it did last week to Trump’s avowal to ramp up America’s already formidable nuclear arsenal, in a knee-jerk reaction to Vladimir Putin’s intent to do the same.
There won’t be time for the Trump Administration to clarify that the latest supposed Trump tweet was inauthentic. The world will have already reacted.
As Mark Twain said, falsehoods race across the planet while the truth is still tying its shoelaces. That’s vastly more true in the Information Age. After all, there is nothing so outrageous that Trump might not have said it.
Meanwhile, Twitter Inc. is a nearzombie enterprise, a firm on the auction block due to its consistent inability to turn a profit. Twitter has lost $1.7 billion (U.S.) in the past three fiscal years, and spilled another $289 million in red ink in the first three quarters of FY 2016. What does that say about Twitter’s ability to thwart cyberattacks, when more than one billion accounts at the much bigger and somewhat healthier Yahoo Inc. were hacked in 2013 alone? In fact, by now it’s difficult to identify any large enterprises, public- and private-sector, that haven’t been hacked.
That includes America’s democratic system, hacked with impunity by Russia, according to a rare consensus among all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. Either Trump will have to resolve to use tweets as others do, for anodyne comments — or prepare to have all of his tweets dismissed as the inauthentic work of parties unknown, likely malevolent. Trump as a target for hackers is more alluring than any other. The bragging rights for 17-year-old hackers in Croatia or Bangladesh to be the first to impersonate the president of the U.S. are tempting beyond description. dolive@thestar.ca