General Politics Discussion

[tomh009]

Health care, housing and transportation have become increasingly taxed because in a 3 year period, over half a million people poured into a small urban corridor of the province.

The influx of temporary residents exacerbated the issues, but the problems existed long before. Health care and particularly mental health have been underfunded for decades. Higher education funding has been cut and tuitions frozen, with the (presumably unintended) consequence that the universities and colleges made a huge effort to increase foreign student enrolment in order to patch up those funding gaps.

Mike Harris was elected 30 years ago; that's really when we started to seriously underfund health care and education. Subsequent provincial governments failed to undo that damage, and the education funding got worse yet when Doug Ford was elected.

And for housing ... that is definitely not a federal responsibility. But housing prices took off shortly after Y2K and just kept rising. Low interest rates were a factor that drove that, and the restriving zoning in cities did its part as well. This chart ends in 2021, before the temporary resident influx, but you can see that the prices were already going crazy at that point.