Canada: Snowbird Landlord Nation

I've been back in Canada 2.5 months now with sonny. After 24 years abroad, Canada is not the country I left in the mid 90's, or the mid 2000's.

Instead, it is a land that mixes US consumer culture life goals with Soviet levels of governance, where Neoliberal renting goes hand in hand with progressive media symbolism.

HOW IT WAS vs HOW IT IS

When I lived here in the 90's, getting a cheap apartment downtown anywhere in Canada was the norm. Both the places I had in St. John's and Toronto were a few hundred dollars a month, a princely sum at the time. When I returned in the 2000's, downtowns had started undergoing gentrification, but affordable places still abounded in the suburbs.

Now, there are no accommodations to be had in the city at all, unless you are willing and able to pay top dollar for a fashionable apartment, or steep prices for a basement bed.

What went wrong? First, the government that had invested in affordable housing in earlier decades ceased to do so. In St. John's where I live, a full 20% of public housing are 'unliveable' and have gone years, or even decades, without repair. And there is no ongoing work to build new units, despite an $82 billion housing plan promised in 2020. With demand this high, raising the rents and partitioning houses into rooms was a natural result as owners scrambled to double their money. Add to this that real estate has become a no brainer for investing, a trend which the government is unwilling to tackle.

Add in inflation and you can see how the crunch came to be. But what many don't see is the way Canadian culture has changed to suit this dystopic reality. 

Canadian media has capitalized on the unliveability of Canada and rebranded this land, a place many have chosen to escape TO over its history, whether as the terminus of the Underground Railroad or the new home for refugees and immigrants, to a place you need to (periodically) escape FROM.

For example, take the Canadian idea of travel. In the 90's, going overseas was a once in a lifetime experience, often a necessity for arts and humanities students after graduation to pay student loans and build a nest egg. In the 2000's, a trip abroad was something you did while young, like a language learning summer in Europe, or else reserved for honeymoons.

Now, Canadians are inundated with the message that a year without a trip to Florida or some Caribbean beach locale is a dreary, mentally-damaging time. From commercials to air miles ads, travel abroad has become an escapable part of the Canadian identity, another consumer cultural bauble we have greedily emulated from our southern neighbors.

CANADA - THE PLACE NOT TO BE

Nowadays, this message of necessary escape is everywhere in the form of ads for Avion credit cards and Aeroplan points. Even buying toilet paper nets you valuable points towards a southern escape, you are constantly told.




screengrab from RWRDS.ca






On a Facebook page for parents I'm in, people complain of not having enough to go to Florida, of kids whining and being driven crazy by them because 'everyone else goes.'

I went to Florida to visit my snowbird brother once, and between the horsefly nets over pools in gated communities, running for groceries so as not to be around long enough for a shooting, and towering progun billboards, it was a surreal, Karfkaesque parody of a vacation.

Yet this is what we Canadians are exhorted to strive for.

'Saving money' in Canada used to mean staying home, and growing and cooking your own food. Now, it is buying the cheaper pre-cooked meals, the cheaper cellphone, getting cash back on credit cards, and shopping at Wallmart. Canadian lifestyle has become firmly entrenched in capitalist supply trains, largely from abroad, and supporting a consumerist, unsustainable way of life.

Canada has become Snowbird Nation. 

SNOWBIRD NATION, LANDLORD LAND

Admittedly, this feeling of wanting to escape Canada, and especially its long winter, has been with us a long time. Anne Murray's hit, Snowbird (1969) set it all out:


Beneath this snowy mantle, cold and clean
The unborn grass lies waiting
For its coat to turn to green
The snowbird sings the song he always sings
And speaks to me of flowers
That will bloom again in spring


As many Canadians are displaced Europeans, this longing for spring is natural. Canada's Inuit and other indigenous groups enjoyed summer, but knew that adapting and thriving in winter was also necessary for survival here. Murray puts her finger on this western malaise:


When I was young
My heart was young then, too
Anything that it would tell me
That's the thing that I would do
But now I feel such emptiness within
For the thing that I want most in life's
The thing that I can't win


As Durkheim warned, "To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness." The media touted goal of owning your own home, and of traveling to warmer climes as soon as the snow falls, is unsustainable for many Canadians, leading to a gloomy atmosphere of unhappiness. It is, in the words of Anne Murray word, the Canadian "thing that I can't win," and Canadian capitalism has latched onto this feeling of insecurity of displaced Europeans. Durkheim labelled this anomie, and we see now in Canada the same malaises - envy, false capitalist hopes, fraying of community - that he saw in industrial France. The imagery of Murray's song reflects this unfullfillable wish:

Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could, you know that I would
Fly away with you


This stanza sounds like an Air Canada ad, with its multiracial couples cavorting on sandy beaches thousands of kilometers away from the snow and ice back home. The 'one I love forever is untrue' could easily apply to Canada itself - a land promising welcome for all, but increasingly only liveable for the landlord class. Murray's next stanza reflects the inevitable result of this subversion of the Canadian social contract:


The breeze along the river seems to say
That he'll only break my heart again
Should I decide to stay

Canada IS heartbreak. If you are middle class, you may scrape together enough for a big backyard as in Canadian Tire barbeque ads, or even a cabin. But if you don't have a space to rent to afford a jaunt to warmer climes, you are not succeeding as Canadian. And the word of this unsustainable congame is spreading, as attests the explosion of YouTube videos explaining 'reasons NOT to come to Canada', both by Canadians and immigrants. Once again, Murray's lyrics foretell this reality:


So, little snowbird
Take me with you when you go
To that land of gentle breezes
Where the peaceful waters flow


"Where the peaceful waters flow" sounds like the name of an all included resort, one of the bland beaches where Canadians consume copious amounts of alcohol while burning their sunlight starved flesh. These are often oases surrounded by nations suffering from waves of crime and poverty themselves, where Canadians can easily become victims if they stray outside the confines of their constructed fantasy vacation.

Murray's plaintive lyrics foresaw a new voice of Canadians - that of the renter left behind as their landlord becomes a snowbird and flies away to warmer climes, without any thought or pity for those who they profit off of.

LANDLORDISM = CLASS WARFARE

Where is this all headed? How will the competing interests of disenfranchised desperate low earner Canadians trapped in snowhell collide with pitiless high earner snowbird landlords?

The confrontation of these opposing forces, and subsequent unraveling of Canadian society, seems to have already started. A married couple in Hamilton, Ontario were gunned down by their landlord on the lawn of the property they rented. Economic violence easily morphed into real violence, and the landlord, in his turn, was killed after a standoff with police, who ironically are the usual agents of economic violence via eviction. Reporting this, Vice put single quotations around the word 'innocent', as if to say, how innocent can deadbeat tenants really be?

But the Canadian dream is also proving an unattainable illusion for landlords as well. In the same province where the landlord killed his tenants, it has been discovered that half of Toronto condomunium investors are losing money on the properties they own. 

How long will the government, and average Canadians, stand still while consumerism pits us against each other for the sake of fantasy?


SOURCES
Landlord kills tenants
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epvz94/hamilton-canadian-landlord-shot-and-killed-two-innocent-tenants-on-their-front-lawn?utm_medium=social&utm_source=vice_facebook&fbclid=IwAR0w8DBtY9DeEYlt2HPthqD6oy9eXZqA8W7Ect-Yt0BFvpQgdPEwZG2Kcqs



Toronto Condo Investors Losing Money
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/toronto-condo-investors-losing-money-5308153/?fbclid=IwAR3r2fILFYpl9MQVDci5eDbROwjIgXxUjBD_n08Rg5y9-0JTgckSLeLFKZU



Housing Crunch vs 20% Units Down
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/empty-rental-units-stjohns-1.6506618#:~:text=cent%20of%20St.-,John's%20units%20are%20empty,fill%20its%20vacant%20public%20units.

Housing Crisis Unpacked

https://theindependent.ca/commentary/analysis/unpacking-the-housing-crisis-in-st-johns/