The Regina Leader Post has a new columnist named Greg Fingas with his first column published today. The blurb says he writes “about provincial and national issues from a progressive NDP perspective.” Fair enough.
The column, though, is an incredibly bad piece of work. I know because I’ve written similar ones from time to time, and they’re hard to be proud of. I can see Fingas thinking “damn, I haven’t done any research, but I really want to write this. Hmmm, maybe I could spin out a Goldie-Locks style analogy to 700 words?”
Which is what he’s done.
Imagine a Regina home builder just like any other, with one important exception.
Back in 2002, the builder thought long and hard about what prices to charge in a market that hadn’t seen substantial price changes for a long time. And so it developed a price list that it hasn’t changed since…
And so it goes on, painfully making the point that the markets have changed but the Potash royalty formula has remained the same.
A much better report is here. It is almost entirely based on quotes from Potash Corp’s CFO, but I know that Bruce Johnstone would have checked the facts.
What I really want to know, though, is: Based on his long analogy about the problem with depressing building costs, does Finga oppose rent control?
