Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released a 15-minute video Saturday morning that more closely resembles a PBS Frontline documentary than the short, slogan-heavy ads Canadians are used to.

[…]The video, released in both French and English, is a slick, graphics-heavy adaptation of the stump speeches that Poilievre has been delivering as he tours the country. Poilievre announced on Friday via X (formerly Twitter) that he’d be releasing “a groundbreaking documentary on Canada’s housing hell.”

It spells out, using dozens of graphics and charts, a step-by-step case for why the Conservatives believe government spending and borrowing under the Trudeau Liberals has fuelled inflation along with the unprecedented rise in housing costs, pricing hundreds of thousands of families and millions of younger Canadians out of the housing market.

[…]In an almost-academic breakdown of housing prices, Poilievre’s documentary uses a series of economic explanations — from relative population density to quantitative easing — to make the case that soaring housing prices are largely the fault of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policies. Poilievre traces most problems back to 2015, the year the Liberals were elected.

He also highlights an inability to build houses for the problem. He blames municipal governments for blocking development, but associates that with economic incentives created by the federal government. By adding up all the inputs in a house, like labour, lumber and land, and then subtracting it from the final sale price, Poilievre calculates what he calls the “gatekeeper gap,” or the premium that government red tape and other bureaucracy adds to the cost of homes.

“Consider this: In 1972, Canada’s population was 22 million, and we built about 230,000 homes. In 2022, Canada’s population was 39 million, and we built about 220,000 homes,” he says. “In other words, far more people and far less home-building.”

I found the video on YouTube. It’s over 417,000 views in TWO WEEKS since it was released:

Canadians are experiencing two major problems right now. First, their government-run healthcare system is failing catastrophically. I blogged about that with the latest think tank numbers earlier in the week. But the second big problem is inflation. Higher prices on everything from electricity, gas, groceries and especially housing. The Liberal Party has been causing these problems with massive government spending, regulations on energy production and home construction, and mass importation of unskilled people.

The video directly addresses the housing problem:

That is substantiated by nationwide polling. A survey conducted by Ipsos last month found that 73 per cent of Canadians think owning a home in Canada is now only for the rich. Sixty-six percent of Canadians who don’t own a house said they have given up on ever being able to afford a home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these trends have coincided with polls showing the Conservatives thoroughly dominating in support among young voters, with the governing Liberals a distant third behind the NDP.

And more recently, Canadians have started telling pollsters they think the country’s high levels of immigration are worsening the housing crisis.

Under Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau, Canada has been mass-importing millions and millions of unskilled immigrants and refugees. They can’t speak the languages and they have no marketable skills. They can’t get jobs. They can’t pay their own way. But they need places to live. Hence the shortage of housing.

If you watch the video, he explains how government spending causes inflation. He explains clearly how prices are set in a market economy (supply and demand). He links higher population (caused by the Liberal Party’s open borders immigration policy) to higher demand of housing and lower supply. He explains how housing regulations cut off the supply of new homes.

Watching this video reminded me a lot of reading Thomas Sowell’s “The Housing Boom and Bust”. I hope you guys are keeping up with your Thomas Sowell reading, because if you don’t then Pierre will have to come down here and teach Americans, too! Canadian readers, if you want to know why Americans are so conservative, you have to understand that most Republicans learn economics from Thomas Sowell, a black economist with a long list of prestigious publications. You cannot read just one of his books. You read one, and then you keep reading them. He’s pure gold.

It’s nice to see Canadians taking time to learn economics. They want to learn more about economics. They’ve tried voting based on feelings. They’ve tried voting for nice hair. They’ve tried voting for follow your heart. They’ve tried voting for being generous with other people’s money. They’ve tried everything that their teachers and government told them to try. None of it worked. And now they are going to try to understand economics. And they have a very good teacher.