• Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    People keep saying this but it rings hollow to me. There are plenty of ways to attack the CPC, but this meme is not one of them.

    Poilievre has specific plans on how to force cities to get more housing built. Now, obviously, if you don’t believe in market solutions this sounds dumb, but most people with even the most basic, minimal centrist respect for economics will believe that more housing will help with prices.

    So if you keep saying “he has no plan”, what those voters hear is “leftist media is lying about Poilievre”.

    The LPC could very easily disarm him on this one issue: steal his plan and implement it. Bring out the stick. Start threatening cities that do not greenlight enough housing with cuts to their gas-tax funds. Because while Poilievre’s policy is generally horrifying on a lot of fronts (LGBTQ issues, environment, poverty) his plan on this issue is better than anything anybody else has offered (to be fair, the bar is very low).

    Progressive YIMBY activists and affordable-housing builders have been saying for decades: slow-walking approvals and restrictive zoning are driving up the costs of urban housing. Thid is a spot where PP is on the same side of the issue as Alexandria freaking Ocasio Cortez!

    Yes, there are many publicly-funded ways we should also be fighting the housing crisis, things that PP is not going to do. But on this one specific issue: PP is talking sense, you look stupid to swing voters when you say he isn’t, and you can disarm him by just stealing the idea wholesale. It works against the NDP every time, just do it here to the Conservatives.

    edit: I just took another look and realized that TFA was written by Nora Loreto. Now it all adds up. The woman is a troll. People just get confused because this style of political trolling is almost exclusively conservative chuds, so seeing this kind of over-the-top hot-take nonsense is unfamiliar when it comes from this side of the aisle.

      • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Well, in the case of “reward cities for fixing their processes” actually that’s literally the Housing Generator Fund, which Hussen touted so much as the thing that would fix housing that he completely destroyed its utility as something they could celebrate. The entire media circuit started rolling their eyes at “housing generator fund”. Beyond policy problems, the man had buffoonish political instincts.

        But one thing that Poilievre’s vicious political style works with here is that he wants sticks, not just carrots.

        Municipal governments deserve that stick.