Why is everything so expensive in Canada?
Thoughts from a technological critique perspective: it's much more than just economic policies
I recently moved to Canada, and the first thing I noticed is that everything is very expensive here. It’s a big shock compared to Australia and especially Brazil – both countries I’ve lived in for two years each. Notably expensive is the property and rent, which is especially interesting considering that Canada has very few people. I will say that Australia is a bit expensive too in the big cities, but it’s a little more affordable there in other areas due to the technological system not being able to exploit the harshness of the cold weather.
Also expensive in Canada is the food and the mobile and telecommunications costs. Indeed, it is well-known that the monopoly of telecommunications companies here has created harsh costs for phone and data plans. For example, one company in Canada charges $10 per month for 1GB of data. In Brazil, about $7 gives you 12GB of data, which is 17 times more expensive. It is true that Canadian salaries are higher than Brazilian ones, but not 17 times as high! Even the United States has cheaper plans than Canada, and you can get paid much more in the United States. Of course, I would prefer a world where phones were not required technology for daily life, as I hate phones, but this was just an example.
I won’t go into detailed economic analysis of why things are expensive in Canada, but I have noticed a few things from someone who is highly critical of technological development. The first is that Canada is very intolerant of alternative ways of living. For example, in the areas with houses, simply everyone has got to have a huge house. There are very few small houses in Canada compared to other countries. There are some mobile home units in special zones that are cheaper, but typically these are on land with very high rental costs or high fees. It seems that in every case, in order for the poorer to get something, somebody richer has to benefit first, such as with high rent extraction.
I was struck by how much smaller houses can be in Brazil and in Australia. If we promoted the development of smaller houses, there could be more space for everyone. Right now in Calgary, I noticed something interesting: everyone here has a gigantic house with a basement, and owners in the area are converting their basements into rentals. While that might be a good option for some looking to live in the suburban areas, what it means is that the richer have more options to build their wealth through rent extraction.
If all houses were restricted to being smaller, then such rent extraction would not be possible or as easy, houses could be cheaper, and more of them could be built. If houses here were restricted to being as small as some houses I’ve seen in Brazil, which would be more than enough room for any family, then a neighbourhood with fifty houses could probably have a hundred and fifty. Even if people don’t want to live in denser regions, fifty small houses would still be better than fifty big ones because they would use less gas for heating, be friendlier on the environment, and also keep prices down because people could not rent them out (more utility for a house and more economic possibilities mean higher prices). Therefore, such houses would be more affordable.
Zoning is another thing that is exceptionally strict in Canada. I used to think zoning was a good thing, but I think there is subtlety here. Zoning can also be a mode of protectionism: for example, by preventing smaller grocery stores from building near certain suburban areas, it means that everyone in the area needs to use their vehicle all the time to do everything. Zoning thus creates a sort of economically-gated community where one must show a minimum amount of wealth (owning a car) to get in. It should definitely be possible to buy a house without buying a car, even if one is rich enough to buy one. Of course, I don’t believe factories should be built near houses, but beyond a certain level of strictness, zoning is just used for protectionism.
I think zoning is also enforced by an emergent property of the technological system. It is in the system’s best interest to promote communities where cars are required, and to use strict zoning to make food and other resources far away from houses and expensive. Indeed, the more you must rely on your car to get basic supplies, the more likely you are to feel the pressure to get a corporate job or other job that promotes technological development. This doesn’t apply to everyone, just the middle- and upper-class who typically get such jobs. With all our intelligence and wisdom, we could easily create cities where housing is more affordable, but that would go against the system. It is much better for the system to have a hierarchy in place where people fight for high-paying jobs that advance technology and are pushed to stay in them for long periods of time so they can afford huge houses.
Canada strikes me as a country where the technological system has essentially won, and has converted the country into something relatively lifeless. That doesn’t mean a low standard of living, of course. Canada has a high standard of living, which is attractive. However, my article was not meant to look at typical economic measures or standard of living, but instead the effects of technology and the lack of basic human essence at a larger scale. A country can have a high standard of living while at the same time have a low standard of humanity and be a detriment to the globe.
So, what Canada has turned into is basically a sort of highly restricted game with rules in which the objective is to consume, consume, consume. People turn inwards, make their life about building a material empire, and they are caught in one of two possibilities: either, they are not able to build a successful empire, or they become obsessed about acquisition, their house, home improvements to their house, and taking their dog out for a walk. That’s not to say that any of these activities are in themselves bad things. Instead, they form part of a narrow path that does not give people many options, and does not allow people to choose paths that are right for them.
There should be the third possibility of being able to live with less consumption and less money. After all, technology has made things very efficient, so with that efficiency we should be able to live with some basic contributions to society instead of working like a machine to scramble to the top. But that’s what technology does: it turns us into machines.
Canada (and probably the U.S.) represents a near-final stage in the technological conversion of humanity. The country has succumbed to a mechanical way of life shrouded in pockets of humanity that blind citizens to the perverted social fabric that makes the country essentially soulless. It is a sort of technological machine that uses economic forces to bend people into narrow categories of functioning. The next stage will be a state of complete restriction when technology no longer needs us due to AI, except for some menial tasks which AI can’t do yet (when it can, we’ll be eradicated or genetically engineered to be faithful computing and manual labor units).
Canada could fix these problems. A lot of people talk about economic measures to reduce living costs. For example, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, has recently introduced some measures to make the building of houses faster. But I think that sort of initiative is the sort of short-term economic initiative that might make housing temporarily more affordable, only to result in a longer list of more unaffordable housing in the future.
And even if such new houses are a bit more affordable, they will still be relatively expensive, and be just cheap enough so that a new generation can be ushered into the steel cell of working for large corporations, doing basically meaningless work so that mafia-style organizations such as big business and some government branches can extract more wealth from the bottom without having to justify their mostly meaningless existence.
In my opinion, real solutions for high living costs must involve more than incremental changes. They must involve the complete dismantling of dead weights such as large monopolies, and a complete societal transformation that shifts the entire country away from excessive consumption and technological addiction and to a new mode of existence where living minimally is possible.
Unfortunately, by now, pretty much the entire population is trapped in a very restricted machine brought on by advanced technology and capitalism and a real solution may be impossible without revolutionary thinking. But don’t be fooled into thinking small token changes by charlatan politicians like Justin Trudeau, Doug Ford, and Pierre Poilievre will do anything. They are just puppets of a broken system whose rise to power is a testament to their impotence. We need serious change, and that will only happen when Canadians rise take their fate into their own hands.