Canadian Housing Crisis

The Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative  (CHEC) is an independent, university-based research and knowledge mobilization organization that shares evidence, stimulates new research and advises on strategic evidence-informed action. CHEC brings together a network of more than 30 academics from across Canada and beyond who are engaged in independent, in-depth research exploring the connections between income, housing and health.

The pie chart below represents an unscientific allocation of a possible per cent contribution of each bullet point.

CHEC Causes of Housing Crisis (unscientific percents)

 CHEC explains that the rapid escalation in the cost of both home ownership and rental accommodation in Canada and around the world has a multitude of causes, some more important than others.

Fifteen bold bullet points from the web post “What caused the housing crisis?” are summarized below:

1. Low interest rates:

2. Increased money supply: 

3. Financialization of housing:

4. Failure to prepare for population increase:

5. Exit of government from affordable housing: 

6. Failure to protect existing affordable housing: 

7. Slow municipal approval process:

8. Bad forecasting housing inflation and student increases.

9. Cohort of wealthy homeowners who bid up prices.

10. Grow condos over rentals: 

11. Exclusive single-family Nimbyism: 

12. Failure to build new student housing: 

13. Money laundering illegal money: 

14. Foreign investors buying properties in Canada

15. Failure to develop approved properties 

(Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative, n.d.)

The pie chart represents an unscientific allocation of a possible per cent contribution of each bullet point. Consider how you would change the allocation of percentage to causes that would more accurately reflect the situation in your area based on your experience.

References

Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative. (n.d.). What caused the housing crisis. CHEC. Retrieved October 31, 2025, from https://chec-ccrl.ca/what-caused-the-housing-crisis/ 

West Bank Annexation

In a report in the Globe and Mail by Renata Brito And Matthew Lee of the Associated Press in Jerusalem, Vice President JD Vance criticized Israel’s Parliament after a vote passed a motion to encourage Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.

Between the River and the Sea

  

The Palestinians seek the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, for a future independent state. Israeli annexation of the West Bank would all but bury hopes for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians – the outcome supported by most of the world. (Brito & Lee, n.d.)

Analysts like Amichai Cohen, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, say that a “de-facto annexation of very large parts” of the West Bank is already underway, referring to the growing number of Israelis living in settlements in the Palestinian territory – even without any law supporting annexation.

In 2021, the Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer argued that those who saw genocidal ambition in the phrase, (From the River to the Sea), or indeed an unambiguous desire for the destruction of Israel, did so due to their own Islamophobia.

It was instead, he argued, merely a way to express a desire for a state in which “Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them”. (Boffey, 2023)

The context and the intent is key.

The founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party trolls: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (Boffey, 2023)

Amichai Stein writing in the Jerusalem Post reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared there will be no Palestinian state west of the Jordan river even as he was weighing annexation.

One of the sources noted that there was no detailed discussion of what exactly Israel might annex, but rather deliberations over several options - one of which is the annexation of the Jordan Valley. (STEIN, 2025)

In the Ponder Patterns blog, Thursday, September 25, 2025, the post entitled Trump Canada and Greenland presented some parallels between Trump expansion threats and the history of Lebensraum.

The German geographer Friedrich Ratzel first introduced the term Lebensraum in his 1897 book Politische Geographie (Political Geography). According to Ratzel, a nation-state should become self-sufficient by acquiring resources and territories in order to maintain independence and thrive internationally.

 

Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was a German scientist and geographer. He is regarded as the “father” of political geography, which acquired popularity in the 19th century. Ratzel relied on the Darwinian theory of evolution and stated that the characteristics of different nationalities were determined by their geographical environment.

 

Inspired by Darwin’s evolution theory, Ratzel compared the state to a living organism. He claimed that young states needed territories to sustain themselves, just like a living organism needs nutrients to grow. Just as organisms are bound to their environments, Ratzel believed states were also tied to their geographic locations.

 

Ratzel argued that the development of all species, including humans as a race, was influenced by their ability to adapt to geographical circumstances; those who successfully adapt to one location naturally migrate to others. Thriving species strive to expand the territory they occupy. This concept of territorial expansion was linked to the idea of Lebensraum—living space.

 

Three key foreign policy goals of lebensraum were established:

 

• Belief that borders of states were not fixed.

• Certain races were inherently superior and needed more territory to expand and thrive. 

• Lebensraum is utilized to ideologically justify the invasion of foreign territory. Expansion is necessary to accommodate the needs of racially superior people who need vast territories of the rich in resources. (Cussans, 2025)

Byline Supplement is a reader-supported publication covering populism and the global rise of the far right. An article, published Feb 19, 2025, concludes that Trump Isn't Joking About Lebensraum. Trump's plans for Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada and Mexico aren't just idle talk. A senior US insider tells us what to expect.

Trump might appear to be joking, or playing coy about his intentions with Mexico, Panama, Greenland, and Canada. But he’s not. He plans on military action against cartels, and he is dead serious about acquiring the canal, plus Greenland, and annexing Canada. His “jokes” are just thinly veiled desires. Militarily, he could accomplish all of these. Hanging on to them is another matter.

His plans rely on a lot of the same calculi employed by the Germans leading up into World War II, and the Russians before their invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Even if he doesn’t set off a massive conflict, it will result in the US becoming a nuclear armed pariah state. Unlike Germany and (to a lesser extent Russia), the US will have a plethora of ways to anesthetize sentiments in NATO countries that use some of the same social media platforms as the US public. (Trump Isn't Joking About Lebensraum., n.d.)

In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Queen Gertrude protests "The lady doth protest too much, methinks". The phrase is used to suggest that excessive or agitated denials can imply guilt. Does the protest of JD Vance over the West Bank, attempt to hide Trump’s ambition for expansion of his influence in the region?

References

Boffey, D. (2023, October 31). 'From the river to the sea': where does the slogan come from and what does it mean? The Guardian. Retrieved October 24, 2025, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/from-the-river-to-the-sea-where-does-the-slogan-come-from-and-what-does-it-mean-israel-palestine 

Brito, R., & Lee, M. (n.d.). Vance criticizes Israel’s parliament vote on West Bank annexation, calls move ‘political stunt’. Globe and Mail. Retrieved October 23, 2025, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-israel-hamas-gaza-ceasefire-us/ 

Cussans, T. (2025, May 13). What Is “Lebensraum” and Why Did Hitler Promote It? TheCollector. Retrieved October 24, 2025, from https://www.thecollector.com/what-is-lebensraum-why-hitler-promoted/ 

STEIN, A. (2025, September 21). Benjamin Netanyahu: No Palestinian state west of the Jordan. The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved October 24, 2025, from https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-868295 

Trump Isn't Joking About Lebensraum. (2025, February 19). Byline Supplement. Retrieved October 24, 2025, from https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/trump-isnt-joking-about-liebensraum 

On the brink of dictatorship

As President Trump wields more and more control of the Government of the United States, some experienced political analysts have cautioned that the Great Republic may be on the brink of dictatorship.

Neighbour on the Brink?

Andrew Coyne writing for the Globe and Mail opinion column claims Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator and asks if he can be stopped?

At some point, American democracy will find it is caught, immovably, a colossus in quicksand. The question is whether it has reached that point, or, if it has not reached it yet, whether it can still avoid doing so.

The examples pile up by the day. In recent days, weeks and months, Mr. Trump and his officials have:

• Installed National Guard troops and other military forces in the centre of major American cities, first Los Angeles, then Washington, and soon (if Mr. Trump’s threats are to be believed) Chicago, Baltimore and New York, under the guise of fighting crime. Some of the guardsmen are armed; some have been conducting arrests, for which they have neither training nor authority. The D.C. police force was likewise taken under federal control.

• Seized thousands of suspected illegal immigrants off the streets, the snatchings carried out by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents without badges, their victims bundled into cars without markings, to be sent in some cases to barbaric foreign prison camps, in some cases to their domestic counterparts, without trial, without even charges. ICE is increasingly seen as Mr. Trump’s personal police force.

• Initiated criminal investigations into various of Mr. Trump’s antagonists, from Letitia James, the Attorney-General of New York who prosecuted him for fraud, to Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted him for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and for his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, to John Bolton, his own former national security adviser who has since become one of his severest critics, to Adam Schiff, the Democratic Senator and lead manager on his first impeachment, to Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor who stands in the way of his desired takeover of the U.S. central bank.

• Fired or demoted police officers and prosecutors responsible for bringing the Jan. 6 rioters to justice, having earlier issued a blanket pardon for the rioters themselves.

• Threatened television networks whose programs or performers irritated him with suspension of their licences, or adverse regulatory rulings.

• Extorted massive settlements from the same networks, or law firms who had acted for his antagonists, or universities he deemed too liberal, or even corporations, like Intel, he fancied a piece of.

• Demanded Texas, Florida, Indiana and other states redraw their electoral maps, in a transparent attempt to gerrymander more Republican districts into being in time for the midterm elections; at the same time, Mr. Trump talks openly of banning mail-in ballots, while issuing executive orders demanding “proof of citizenship” for voting and requiring federal review of state electoral rolls.

• Fired the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics for issuing unemployment numbers that displeased him; fired the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency for issuing after-action reports on the U.S. bombing of Iran that likewise disagreed with Trumpian dogma.

• Defied court orders with regard to various of the above.

• Defied Congress with regard to the spending of money for the purposes for which it was appropriated by Congress, while imposing tariffs that must constitutionally be approved by Congress.

• Issued a series of executive orders for which he has likewise no constitutional authority.

As if to give visible signs of his intent, Mr. Trump has been furnishing himself with various of the accoutrements of a dictator, from the giant portraits that now hang on government buildings, to the gold-encrusted palace that was once the White House, to the military parade on his birthday, to the endless public displays of sycophancy he requires of his cabinet members. Indeed, he has taken in recent days to musing about dictatorship as a possibility – “a lot of people are saying ‘Maybe we need a dictator’” – as if he were not just trying out the description with the public, but habituating them to it. (Coyne & Drolet, 2025)

Dan Vergano, a senior editor at Scientific American, comments on a May report in Politics & Policy written by political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa.

Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes, one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades. 

The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of the Dresden University of Technology. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.

The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.

The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.

The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.

That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power. (Vergano, 2025)

“If my theory is correct, the U.S. is still in this transition phase between democracy and autocracy,” says Stockemer, by e-mail. 

“If they move more in the direction of autocracy, we would see that the administration tries to defy more court orders.” One key part of the fourth step is the declaration of fabricated emergencies, such as the “red scare” of the McCarthy era, to trample checks and balances, such as the judiciary’s control of the legal system. In May, for example, the White House deputy chief of staff suggested Trump could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, a legal remedy for unlawful detention that dates at least to the Magna Carta and is in the U.S. Constitution, to summarily round up immigrants. He cited an imaginary “invasion”—even though border crossings are at their lowest point in U.S, history, according to Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency—as a reason. (Vergano, 2025)

Sara Dorn, a Forbes news reporter who covers politics, reports on Trump addressing Generals and Top Military about an ‘Invasion From Within’ that necessitates military response to ‘Straighten Out’ major cities. 

• Trump said “we are under invasion from within” that’s "no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms,” as he said he wants the military to focus more on domestic security, including tamping down on crime in major cities and illegal immigration.

• The president made the comments as he addressed top military generals gathered at Quantico for a last-minute meeting called by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who separately blasted what he described as “fat generals” and an out-of-shape military).

• Trump said previous presidents “used the armed forces to keep domestic order and peace,” lamenting “now they say you aren’t allowed to use the military.”

• The remarks build on Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to cities including Memphis, Portland and Washington, D.C., in what he says is an effort to reduce crime there. (Dorn, n.d.)

Observers of politics in the western democracies are raising alarms about the descent of the Great Republic into dictatorship. The public actions and plans of the figurehead of this movement, when analysed scientifically, support our need for concern and collective opposition to dictatorship that will make “the land of the free” a footnote in history.

References

Coyne, A., & Drolet, G. (2025, August 29). Opinion: Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator. Can he be stopped? The Globe and Mail. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-donald-trump-brink-of-dictatorship-can-he-be-stopped/? 

Dorn, S. (n.d.). Invasion From Within. Forbes. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/30/invasion-from-within-trump-tells-generals-military-needed-to-straighten-out-major-cities/ 

Vergano, D. (2025, May 14). Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship. Scientific American. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-tells-us-the-u-s-is-heading-toward-a-dictatorship/