Quote:
Originally Posted by thewave46
Try to make cost-of-living much lower without requiring a top-down program to deliver incentive. I have memories of a family of six living across the street growing up. They had a small bungalow and a couple of (older) vehicles in the driveway. It seemed a lot more possible in the 1980s/1990s, even with the high interest rates of the era. Today, it's an upper-middle class, two-income, highly indebted dream.
Instead of just 'more Canada', frame it as 'better Canada'.
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I agree and disagree. We as a society are much more self-absorbed than we were decades ago. We have become conditioned to the norm of a large, detached home in the suburbs with two cars in the driveway (with more bedrooms in the house than people living in the house), to the point that we feel entitled to it. We feel entitled to taking foreign trips down south or to Europe.
60 years ago, most people had much more modestly sized homes. The single income earner was the norm. Very, very few people had more than one car. Vacations were places you could drive to in a day. And families were much larger. Kids would often share a bedroom. People just aspired to different things. We were less materialistic, and more focused on (growing) our families. In many respects, I think we have lost our way as a society.
On the other hand, it takes longer to get to an income level that would sustain a typical middle-class lifestyle. In many cases, you need a university education, which means delaying, by years, entry into the workforce (beyond part-time, short gig, non career types of employment). In many cases, you need two incomes to have that lifestyle, and women's participation in tertiary education has been higher than that of men for three decades. Many women, especially those that are highly educated and with professional careers, are not content to be homemakers. After a couple of years of valiantly trying to do both, my wife gave up her career, to rear our two children, and that meant a
considerable hit to our finances and lifestyle. We've only ever had one car. For many years, our vacations were very modest. We sharply curtailed spending on clothing, entertainment, furniture, upgrades, etc. We have a big house, but my home was purchased before real estate prices got stupid, and I had made some good investments in the years before getting married (late for me at 35, with my first kid arriving when I was 36). She only just reentered the workforce, basically starting all over again (and somehow, my wallet is lighter than ever before). We both wanted more children, but by the time we were ready to contemplate a third (three years after the birth of our second child), we were feeling exhausted, and (with me being in my early forties by then), sort of past our prime (I would do the math about "if we had another kid now, and assuming they stayed at home until they were 25, how old would I be before we were empty nesters?"...I was contemplating being nearly 70 by then). Plus, kids are ABSURDLY expensive (they don't have to be, but the way things are currently set up....it is basically an arms race of extra-curriculars, etc. and of having to pay for things that were formerly paid by the state). As someone else (Acajack?) put it: Ontario treats having children as an extravagant indulgence.
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So you'll attribute the causes to sperm counts, millennials, climate change, and educational attainment; but find it inconceivable that cost of living & housing costs have had any impact? 
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