Can't Afford a House? The Canadian Military Just Told Its Service Members To Ask Habitat for Humanity

Jared A. Brock, your friendly neighbourhood corruption correspondent here.

As we’ve discussed before, Canada is a wretched country that runs the biggest pyramid scheme in history, poisons its own people, and pretends it’s full of “good” people who are better than Americans, when it’s actually one of the most consumeristic, skinflint, indebted, climate-savaging, wildly corrupt fake democracies in the West.

(Yes, I’m Canadian. But I was smart enough to get out.)

Well, the Great Canadian Real Estate Pyramid Scheme sunk to a new low this week:

The Canadian Armed Forces, which is like the American military but on mooseback, has been getting complaints from their soldiers.

Their militarypersons aren’t complaining that the USD/CAD exchange rate is so bad that their battleships are essentially equal to rifle-mounted canoes.

They aren’t complaining about their pay, their food rations, or their equipment.

They aren’t even complaining that they have to occasionally, you know, go “peace keep” in the Middle East for decades on behalf of American oil monopolies.

For some reason, brave members of the Canadian military are griping about an annoying little problem that they’re facing in droves:

They can’t afford to live indoors.

Charity:Housing

Honestly, friends, you can’t make this stuff up.

House prices in Canada are absolutely off the rocker, so much so that members of the military — those folks who risk their lives so that Canada can continue to be, you know, a country — can’t afford to buy or even rent shelter for themselves and their families in said country.

(Honestly, the fact that this hasn’t seen the Prime Minister ousted gives you an idea of how apathetic and self-centered the Canadian landowner class is.)

So what is the Canadian military telling its servicemembers to do?

Contact Habitat for Humanity.

Seriously.

For those who don’t know, Habitat for Humanity is a Chr!stian charity that helps poor and low-income families build homes at cost.

The Canadian military budget is $32.3 billion per year.

And they’re telling their people to essentially contact a homeless shelter so they don’t die come January in frost-filled, culture-free Canada.

The Department of Defense admits they’re short on housing for at least 4,000–6,000 families, and has a whole list of suggestions for struggling servicemembers to try to keep a roof over their heads, one item of which is the beg Habitat for Humanity to help them build an affordable home.

But it’s not like Canada isn’t paying its soldiers.

The least-paid person in the military, a Private PI 1, makes nearly forty grand a year. Corporals start at $63,840. Sergeants at $73,356. Warrant officers can make up to $181,284. Brigadier-Generals (or is it Brigadiers-General?) make $258,804. In fact, Canada has the second-highest-paid military in the world behind Australia.

Call me outrageously old-fashioned, but anyone working full-time should be able to afford to own a home.

How did we get here?

We all know exactly how we got here.

Even the unfathomably greedy land-lorders who troll me on Twitter know exactly what’s causing housing prices to trend upward with no end in sight:

Financialization.

The turning of a human necessity into a profit-making investment.

Banksters create credit out of thin air, then loan it to real estate investors who bid up house prices… and then rent it back to desperate families for more rent than their mortgage payments would’ve been.

In other words, for-profit land-lording is the monopolization of a human necessity, and it has already rent-trapped 116,261,275 Americans, with 2,654 new Americans slipping into rent-serfdom every day. It is a moral crime against the working contributor class by the passive extraction class. And now this scam is going to the moon in the so-called “great” white north.

Remember:

• When land and resources were free, a hard-working family could build a house of stone for less than 500 hours of work per person and it could last for centuries.

• Our grandparents paid off their homes in less than 5,000 hours of work.

• Our parents paid off their homes in less than 25,000 hours of work.

• We’ll have to work at least 50,000 hours to pay off our homes.

• The next generation will never get a chance to own and will have to work an unlimited number of hours just to keep a roof above their heads.

No wonder bankers and land-lorders are the first to lose their heads in every revolution. It’s just math.

A house should, at most, cost 2–3X the annual income of a single earner.

When you stray beyond that, start sniffing for exploitation and corruption.

It’s time for a gut check

What’s more important: Private profits or a housed military?

What’s better for society: The contributor class keeping their hard-earned wealth, or handing it over to non-contributive real estate monopolists?

What’s more beneficial in the long-run: A society with zero homeowners pay maximal rents, or widest-spread generationally-affordable homeownership?

Should we allow unlimited wealth accumulation while others suffer?

Should Airbnb be allowed to turn family homes into unregulated hotels?

Should multinational monopolies be allowed to outbid local working families and then squeeze them into paying in rent?

Is it societally preferable to let leechlike land-lorders drive working contributors out of homeownership and overseas in search of a decent life?

Are land-lorder profits a human right, or is affordable shelter a human right?

What should Canada do?

Well, for starters, they should give every Canadian two free acres of land.

(Don’t worry, they’d still have more than 2 billion acres of public land left over.)

After that, Canada should ban for-profit land-lording, all other forms of rent-seeking including vampires like Airbnb, and bankster interest.

Banning for-profit rent-seeking is inevitable if we believe indoor shelter is a human right that shouldn’t cost our entire lives.

Then Canada should pre-approve millions of building permits. Yes to all high density on brownfields. Yes to one eco-farmhouse per acre across the entire nation.

(Let’s not pretend materials are an issue either — Canada has 894 million acres of forest, which works out to 8,953 trees per person, the most of any nation on earth.)

Ban the axis of economic exploitation + create sufficient supply = people can stop wasting their lives just to have shelter.

Or…

Corporate-captured Canadian politicians — even the fake “progressive” ones — can continue to do absolutely nothing meaningful to address the crisis.

Which will it be?

My thoughts exactly.

The fact that Canada has the land, resources, and ability to permanently solve their housing crisis, yet still allows tens of millions of renters and borrowers to struggle and suffer for life under banksters and land-lorders — to say nothing of the 235,000+ Canadians who will experience homelessness this year — gives you an idea of how morally bankrupt and cruelly corrupt Canada truly is.

That’s why the average Canadian house will cost $10+ million in our lifetime.

What’s ironic is that there comes an inflection point where, if people in the military can’t afford to not freeze to death, they simply quit the military.

But then who will protect the land-lorders and all their empty houses?

Jared A. Brock is an award-winning biographer, PBS documentarian, and the cell-free founder of the popular futurist blog Surviving Tomorrow, where he provides thoughtful people with contrarian perspectives on the corporatist anti-culture. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Guardian, Smithsonian, USA Today, and TIME Magazine, and he has traveled to more than forty countries including North Korea. Join 21,000+ people who follow him on Medium, Twitter, and Substack.