A friend of mine is building four high-rise condo and rental towers in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, where I live. It is a charming city, founded in the 1840s, its core an almost classic English village around which a modern city was slowly...
Poll Question: January 26, 2023 to January 31, 2023 To make housing more affordable the Ontario government finalized plans last month to open up 7,400 acres of protected Greenbelt land for development in what it said was a bid to build 50,000 homes. Federal...
The cost of actually building a house does not vary that much across Canada The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong...
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has released the 2022 edition of Demographia Housing Affordability in Canada. This article includes the Executive Summary, with a link to the entire report. The report is authored by Wendell Cox, a senior fellow with the Frontier...
The indictment of former U.S. president Donald Trump for crimes invented by his political opponents is the most egregious example yet seen of the weaponizing of the law. The United States is now full of examples. However, in Canada, we also see the law being...
OTTAWA, REGINA - Last week, two things happened that could have profound impacts on natural resources development in Saskatchewan. One is a hint the federal government might want to take control of natural resources away from the provinces, and the other is the...
The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper, reports concerns raised by Magna International, Inc. that proposed provincial labor legislation (the “Fair Workplaces Better Jobs Act”) could result in seriously reduced economic competitiveness for Ontario, Canada’s...
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has today released "Restrictive Land-Use Regulation: Strategies, Effects and Solutions," a new report by Wendell Cox, a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre. The report evaluates currently in-vogue housing regulation strategies...
CBC aired a documentary on Toronto's condo market on November 21st that can be viewed here. It is notable for two reasons. First, it provides a prognosis for Toronto that is much darker than the most negative mainstream sources would suggest. Second, while it hints at...
The Frontier Centre has released the first Canadian Property Rights Index. The March 14th report, written by Joseph Quesnel, was fashioned along the same basis as a U.S. property rights index, rating how each of the 13 jurisdictions in Canada handled property rights.
Dalton McGuinty has had as much of an impact on public policy in Ontario as virtually any of his predecessors. This article summarizes the best and the worst decisions he made as premier.
Planet of Cities looks at the urbanization trend from various dimensions. A sample of 30 urban areas was used to gauge urban expansion and density changes from 1800 to 2000.
“Provincial guidelines intended to contain urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area are choking development, according to the building industry, pushing the value of single-family homes above $500,000 in 2010 as developers struggled to find land they are allowed to build upon.”
If you really want to see urban sprawl, take a look at London. Yes, it's true that Britain has some of the toughest anti-sprawl measures in the world today. But I mean 19th-century London--the miles and miles of brick row houses in Camberwell and Islington. If sprawl...
Certainly no one should be getting their water for free. It’s a resource like any other and deserves to be priced accordingly.