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Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

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Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#121
post #55
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the point of the scheme is that the government wants to stop providing services to Nowheresville, then they basically have four options: 1. status quo 2. pay 85 people to relocate, keep paying to provide services for 10 people 3. pay 95 people to relocate; 10 of them really strongly do not want to relocate, but force them to do so anyway 4. pay 85 people to relocate, leave ten people to the wolves None of these ar…

What about stopping the services as well a stop taxing them? Then if it is viable they can stay.

yea, right!:) that would create a dangerous precedent, when people may suddenly realize that they can organize their life perfectly well without any government. that reminds me an episode during government shutdown in US a few years ago. local services stopped cutting grass in one of the war memorials. so some veteran brought his own lawn mower and started cutting the grass. the cops showed up! they were very angry and threw the veteran out. instinctively they understood that the illusion that government is indispensable, should be maintained at all cost.

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because Toronto is in a state of transition. No one complains about NY, London, HK real-estate because it's already understood to be expensive in the mainstream. But Toronto real-estate being expensive is relatively new such that you have people who grew up in Toronto not being able to afford it in adulthood. People are slowly realizing that TO is now just another global city out of reach to the middle class unl…

It's so cold there, who needs a backyard? You can only use it 2 weeks a year, and you'd be better off sailing.

For folks with kids, if it is cold, the backyard becomes more useful because you can then make a backyard ice rink pretty easily.

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#123
post #6

I actually live in Toronto and I agree real estate here is expensive. What I don't get is WAY more expensive in places like London, Hong Kong, New York and San Francisco but I don't hear as many complaints or alarms going off in those areas. Why? Is this just me being oblivious?

I'm an American, so take what I say with a grain of salt... but maybe part of it is that Canada has a small population but a large land area. There's basically four major cities a Millenial would consider: Vancouver, Toronto, Monteal, and Ottawa. (And I've heard the latter crapped on even by Canadians.) Montreal is lovely, but if you're an Anglophone. Compare with the United States: New York is a large city, but I co…

There's possibly a couple of other cities. Kitchener-Waterloo (which is close enough to Toronto) and maybe Calgary. KW has the University of Waterloo which has spawned a number of companies including Blackberry, although SF (and Microsoft in Seattle) have been luring people south. Google did start an office here, though.

I've lived in Ottawa and it's big selling point for me is the various national museums. I used to love going to the National Art Gallery simply because of its architecture, but I did see an excellent retrospective on Escher (including a presentation by a guy who tried to take picture of places where Escher did drawings of) and one on Renoir's portraits. Skating on the canal is pretty big in the winter in Ottawa. A friend of mine commutes to work by skating on it. You're right in that it's not as busy as London or DC, though. I consider that a plus, but that's just me.

Montreal is beautiful, but you'd better learn to at least attempt French as you'll be treated better by the shops and restaurants for it. Other pluses are: the jazz festival, the comedy festival, and the F1 race. My sister and her family moved there in January as their jobs in Toronto were being phased out.

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#124
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some people with houses near the coast are retired, they just want to live a peaceful life near the sea, they don't want to relocate, What about social services? We have public health care in Canada and seniors are the most expensive. Plus, with no industry where are they going to get medication and food? And it's not all seniors, the person in the article isn't leaving because he scared he won't be able to find wo…

>What about social services? This a pretty strong argument against social services. These people who have paid their share into society are now being to forced to move because it's convenient for the government.

Canada isn't the typical country when it comes to social services. While much of the population is concentrated in cities the rest of the country is vast, Mongolia or Siberia vast. Some areas, while not vast, are extremely rugged. The west coast of BC is thousands of islands and tiny inlets.

For perspective, draw a line between Vancouver BC and Alaska. 800km and you cross 2 connected roads, one of which being the highway to Whistler. Note all the unconnected little towns along the way. Those are the areas at issue.

https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8144629,-123.3765517,7z

Regardless of funding, there are practical limitations. Nobody could ever deliver something like 10-minute ambulance services to every resident. There probably aren't enough ambulances on the planet to station one within ten minutes of every Canadian. And a good number of those would have to be airborne. Roads are not the norm for much of the north.

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to visit relatives in Kenora, Ontario a couple of times a year. On day 1-3 of the visit I'd think of buying property and running a remote software company. By day 5 or so, I'd be homesick. Really remote communities are quite different. Nature actively tries to kill you and you spend a lot of your time just dealing with that. Also, with respect to kids, everyone's in the same school. So, you can't really segreg…

> Nature actively tries to kill you and you spend a lot of your time just dealing with that. Hahahaha that's what makes it awesome! :D I'm presently adjusting to the complete lack of decent internet speeds. That has been my single biggest issue with moving to the country. As soon as I figure out alternate methods to delivering my work, I'll be a much happier person.

My parents live about a half hour from Belleville which itself has decent Internet. But, where they are they're basically stuck with cellular. They have a WiFi-Cellular modem that they use. Unfortunately, they have a tiny data cap for people who would use it as their main Internet service. I think they upped it to 10GB.

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of stories of people flipping pre-construction units, waiting in line for days to put a deposit down on new construction This has to be one of the strangest complaints, along with shadow flipping, that's come out of the real-estate debacle here in Vancouver. Builders need to achieve 100% or near 100% sell-through on units in a project. Doing that through a pre-sell is hard, so they've traditionally offered a sma…

If a pre-sell buyer decides to flip the property immediately, what harm is there in that http://www2.jurock.com/articles/columnist.asp?id=9370 But in 2008, worldwide financial markets tanked and with it condo markets in Vancouver. By December 2008, some 200 presale unit owners were offering their contracts on Craigslist - often at a loss. (On March 20, 2012 there were just 39.) When that did not work, many simply did…

I don't quite understand; this column simply re-iterates what I said.

Needless to say, developers once burned have now tightened up the contracts. Buyers must realize that developers get their financing on the basis of pre-sales and rightfully expect and deserve all pre-sales in their development to complete.

So, the pre-sale game changed. But probably for the better.

Builders offer the 'pre-sale discount' because they're trading return for security; they need to sell-through on the units they're building. If a bunch of the pre-sell buyers then flake-out and decide not to pay, the builders are in a hole.

The point that I'm making is that this has no effect on the trajectory of prices; its merely a small discount on the market price for those units. Pretending that this is a key driver of prevailing market prices doesn't help anyone; if the market wasn't already rising feverishly then 'shadow-flipping' and 'pre-sale flipping' would carry more risk and you'd lose money as often as you made it.

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#127
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is holding people from Vancouver off to move to Portland?

Social services like health care, I'd assume.

It's not as easy as you'd think to immigrate from Canada to the US. (Especially since it's difficult to be considered a rockstar ninja whatever if you went to a very good school like University of Toronto instead of Stanford)

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#128
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a province... government? Might not be the State/Federal government, but yet surely it's government one way or another?

> Isn't a province... government? Might not be the State/Federal government, but yet surely it's government one way or another? To me, saying " The Canadian government is doing X", is a statement about the activities of the Federal government. The use of the definite article implies singularity. A provincial government is not the Canadian government -- it's one of many in a federal system. It might in some narrow sen…

Texas is a bad example. The US is a federation of what are essentially 50 different countries, or at least different sovereign governments. Texas is not part of the US federal government, not even a subset. It's its own government with its own constitution and areas of absolute authority (See 'states rights'). Canada is under a single sovereign, with the provincial governments being smaller pieces without absolute authorities. So to describe a provincial government as "the government of Canada" is far more accurate than calling Texas part of the US government.

Re: Can payments persuade Canadian residents to move away from dying villages?

#129
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vancouver real estate is the way it is because it has been targeted by Chinese ponzi schemes, bank fraud schemes, and money laundering: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/out-of-... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/canadia... http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/chinese-police-run-...

It's fascinating watching the carnage on mls now, with the 15% tax in place. No one can sell their houses now. And everyone seems to have a story about holding an open house that no one attends. The money is just gone. It's just like the market collapse back in the late 80's when interest rates climbed into the double-digits; no discretionary seller wants to lower their price from $1.3 million when that was a feasibl…

It doesn't look like TO will implement the foreigner tax. Just hear talk but no action. Frankly, the amount of the tax is so tiny, it makes me believe that there is something else afoot. In any case, I'm dreaming of the day housing becomes affordable in Canada once again.
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