I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache
Reading the Conservative Party of Canada’s platform is a bit like watching the trailer for a near-future hellscape.
Case in point: the CPC’s plan for housing.
The section begins with:
“It’s time to face the fact: We have a housing crisis in Canada. Affording a home - to rent, let alone to buy - is slipping out of reach of Canadians across our country. The primary cause is that supply simply isn’t keeping up with demand. Governments have not let Canadians build enough housing to keep up with our growing population.
We need action - from all levels of government. We need to treat this like the crisis it is. Years of study and delay will just leave more and more Canadians and newcomers trapped in inadequate or insecure housing. We need shovels in the ground building enough housing not just to keep up with but to get ahead of population growth. We need to ensure that Canadians, first and foremost, can afford the housing that we do have, keeping out foreign speculators, corruption, and laundered money that force up prices. And we need to remove unnecessary roadblocks preventing Canadians from getting mortgages.
Canada’s Conservatives have a plan to make housing more affordable.”
What’s their solution to the housing crisis?
- giving away 15% of the Federal Government’s properties for housing development (rental developers are gonna get lots of property for cheap);
- making it easier to convert public land for private housing development (who’s gonna benefit most? yeah, landlords and rental developers);
- helping more Canadians become landlords;
- encouraging corporations and private landowners to donate land for “affordable” housing initiatives instead of ecological protection (which of course will lead to more landlords, on top of reducing efforts to protect the environment, and of course creating avenues for corporations to convert less profitable lots into more profitable rental properties) ;
- helping companies that own office buildings to convert parts of them into housing units (in effect, helping office-based corporations become landlords);
- drop the Federal Government’s responsibilities in regards to housing for indigenous peoples onto indigenous peoples, while most likely not giving them the resources they will need to address the housing crisis - all the while making it sound like they’re just being nice by not being paternalistic;
- banning ownership of housing in Canada by foreign investors not residing in or moving to Canada for 2 years (supposedly up for review after that period), but also, and more importantly, incentivize foreign development and ownership of RENTAL properties, opening the floodgates to foreign corporations becoming landlords across Canada.
Wanna buy a home in Canada? Too bad. You’re either gonna need enough money to compete with foreign rental property developers, local companies wanting to become landlords, become a landlord yourself (provided you have the money for it), or you’re gonna have to be a renter. Forever.
Oh and have fun being a tenant trying to take your landlord to court when shit hits the fan, because that landlord might well be residing on another continent altogether. Or it’s gonna be a megacorporation like Amazon. With enough money to make your life a living hell if you dare take them on.
Affordable housing? More like “affordable for landlords to purchase, develop, and own land”.
CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it’s part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions
if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators
as an FYI, the people who do computer generated effects for live action projects are called VFX (visual effects) workers, and there is an ACTIVE effort by IATSE, one of the Hollywood unions, to investigate the best way to unionize them. there are some unique difficulties involved, but they are trying.
IATSE also includes the Animation Guild, which negotiates its own contracts and has had a HOST of issues you may have heard about with #NewDeal4Animation, and also for animation writers who often have to straddle between the Animation Guild and the WGA and are treated even WORSE than the WGA are. If you want to help animation workers working for the mouse RIGHT NOW, Disney Animation production workers need signatures on their petition. Various production employees are being prevented from joining their colleagues in the union who work in other capacities, because of the mouse’s union busting tactics, refusing to recognize these workers’ union for over 100 days.
maybe the purpose of life is to fill it with as many positive things as you can. regardless of how bad life gets, don’t let it steal your personality, your hobbies, your style. after coming home from a bad day at work maybe you need to sit down and read a nice book. after studying non-stop for so long, maybe you should finish that crochet project you’ve been putting off because you’re so busy. maybe we should prioritize the things we love, the things that make us happy, and not just the things we’re forced to do to survive. in this society, a little peace from the outside world is important. don’t give up on the things that make you happy. don’t forget about yourself.
I understand the “I will die for you” ship dynamic, but what about the “I will not let you die, I will not let myself die- we will, at any cost,survive” kind of couple?
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will be issuing the long-promised “grocery rebate” payments to eligible Canadians on July 5.
Months after Parliament passed the one-time benefit first unveiled as part of the 2023 federal budget, the payments will be hitting Canadians’ bank accounts on Wednesday.
The food-inflation focused affordability measure is set to roll out to approximately 11 million low- and modest-income Canadians.
Essentially a re-branded GST rebate boost, the payment will be issued through Canada’s GST/HST tax credit system, alongside the regular quarterly GST/HST payments. […]
As if 200-some-odd dollars does ANYTHING for this affordability crisis.
That’s 2 weeks of groceries. Maybe.
The deodorant I’ve been using forever because my skin is super sensitive has sky rocketed from 4.99 (which a few years ago was considered SO expensive) to… 9.99. Ten dollars for a fuckin stick of deodorant in South-Eastern Ontario.
I am employed full time in a field that requires post secondary and my rent takes up 58% of my income. I work in social services and can’t even afford my own basic necessities.
The world is fucked.
Why has the government allowed runaway inflation like this? What are we going to do when the average person cannot afford to be alive and our social safety nets have been stripped of funding and are already over capacity?
What are we supposed to DO?
If you get the maximum rebate amount that would be ~47 loaves of bread. How much would people have saved if we didn’t have a bread price fixing scandal that went on for years?
Also nice of them to say11 million Canadians qualify as if that’s not over a quarter of our population who makes less than $38k for the household or less than $32k for an individual. To me, that’s the bigger thing here, them admitting over a quarter of Canadians are low income and/or below the poverty line. The grocery rebate threshold is extremely low, so low that if you make $15.50/hour and work 40 hours a week you won’t qualify for it.
And yet 9 provinces have a minimum wage that is below that.
So a quarter of Canadians make less than Ontario’s minimum wage at full time hours.
Sure the cost of living differs where you live but it’s still really damning that the government casually mentioned that over a quarter of Canadians make less than $38k/$32k a year as that’s not indicative of social or government issues that go beyond grocery companies jacking up the prices just because they can.
#they may as well have given the rebate directly to the corporations #since those corpos are jacking up prices and that’s where people’s rebates will go anyway
#not that it isn’t nice to be surprised but a couple hundred bucks #but this is very much a repeat of the bread rebate for the bread price fixing scandal #sure it’s nice but there’s zero consequences or regulations to those who caused it #and just like now back then much of that money went straight back into that corporation’s pocket #because you can’t really shop elsewhere for food here#even many small/local stores are owned by empire/loblaw/jim pattison/metro
Your tags on this are pretty important as well. We are in a stranglehold of corporate greed and a rebate is not going to solve anything. It will only allow this to continue as that money gets snatched back by the companies who took so much in the first place.
Why the fuck should we be beholden to this corporations as though no other grocer would take their place if they failed? Why have we allowed them to have such a stranglehold on supply and distribution? This is such a fucking disgrace.
the worst is wanting to create and create and create but being trapped in a body that is so so so so tired
create anyway. create tired. create badly. once you finally let yourself create, the dopamine will switch on. you’ll find things you want to do better. and when you inevitably create badly, again and again and again, well that’s just practice.
dont deprive yourself of the experience of creation, unless you are literally sleeping. prioritize the things that make life worth living.
