This rightfully derided answer by Canada’s new housing minister is evidently based not on economic reality (of course home prices need to plummet) but on a political reality: About 70% of adults already own a home, and only a fraction of the 30% plan to purchase one. BUT —

https://twitter.com/gray_mackenzie/status/1922667874126106746

… the idea that a sharp fall in the market value of your home, and thus your net worth, is some horror that cannot be mentioned is a political fiction.

For most homeowners, it makes no difference. It might even lower your property taxes. It needs to happen!

But for the few…

Heartbroken to lose Stevie Cameron, my friend and the journalist who launched my career when she took me in, at 25, as a researcher on her book On the Take, which unveiled one of Canada’s major prime ministerial corruption scandals. Let me tell the story

theglobeandmail.com/canada/article… I was living in Ottawa in 1992, earning $19,000 a year as a student-press wire service editor. How could I cover the federal election? I had a then-novel Mac laptop and a lot of spare time, so I went down to Elections Canada to look into campaign donations.

All of tonight's German election debate so far has been devoted to the question of which parties you would or wouldn't form a coalition with. And really, it's the underlying question of the whole thing Laschet: Finger-wagging and indignant. Scholz: Bemused and unflappable. Baerbock: Smiling and collegial

Given that a) we’ll all need proof of vaccination to do just about anything by end of year, if not of summer and b) a mishmash of paper/email proofs is privacy-invading and insecure and c) a standardized secure electronic document isn’t — why are we delaying on vax passports? I mean, if even **FOX NEWS** has implemented a vaccination passport, I don’t think the political hurdles are going to be that hard to clear

cnn.com/2021/07/19/med…

There were a lot of good album covers in the '60s, but did anyone have a better string of them during their own lifetime than Monk? I mean, this doesn't look like 1957 graphic design, and it sure didn't sound like 1950s music either

I spent the week looking at countries that did well pandemic-wise and then didn’t, and the sole determining factor isn’t lockdowns or testing but...vacation travel. Those that prevented it, or made hotel quarantine universal, were safe. Those that allowed it had 2nd and 3rd waves Canada and Germany really stand out here — both countries got ALL their Covid-19, from winter 2020 onward, from southbound vacation travel without enforced quarantine. Both got a second wave from allowing people to go south post-summer. And both have a third now from this.

Last year the Geneva-based Mixed Migration Centre commissioned me to look into the effects of the pandemic on urban migrants. Months of research showed me that COVID-19 is an "arrival city" disease like no other before.

Allow me to discuss what I found.
mixedmigration.org/articles/hot-z… After drawing on large-scale data from the IOM, OECD, the World Bank and national- or local-level data from hundreds of sources and studies, here's what I found: Pandemics have always hit the nexus of migration and cities, but none to the extent, or in the manner, of this one

Those who are skeptical of the value of reducing the role of police forces in cities -- such as Minneapolis appears just to have done -- really ought to read the work of Patrick Sharkey. I got into this two years ago, and will discuss it a bit...

theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl… Sharkey studied the role of police in crime rates in his important study Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence. It looked at "broken windows" theories and found that having more police on the streets DOES reduce crime. BUT

The park behind our apartment is absolutely jammed with people, every surface covered. The police just came in, got on their megaphone, and loudly read everyone the riot act re social-distancing rules. Then thanked everyone for following them.

The whole park then applauded I actually just wrote a column about the need to keep parks open and tolerating closeness there as a pandemic-management priority, and mentioned stories of police thanking crowds in other parks. As usual, the perfect anecdote appears before your eyes the day after you file

Toilet paper panic-buying mystified me at first. Of things you need in great volume if you’re quarantined for 2 weeks, it’s not high on the list. (You can fire up your bidet in a pinch). But there are two things I now realize about it: 1. As a commodity of uniquely high physical volume, TP offers very few units per metre of shelf space. Supermarkets are just-in-time stocked, with minimal back room warehousing — when you’re out, the distributor restocks.

This easily creates a visual perception of scarcity

Here’s an area where both UK and Canada ought to think of investing, and maybe fast

https://twitter.com/peterdonaghy/status/1237841334330744834

The above graph is really serious. The Hong Kong and Italy reports show that the main thing varying the Coronavirus death rate is availability of ICU beds and ventilators. A very large % of those hospitalized require these for average of ~4 weeks each.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

For those abroad trying to understand today's Canadian election, here's an underlying fact: For the past quarter century, in every election, about 60% have voted for a candidate from a left-leaning party

The outcome depends only on how that vote divides among parties Both Canada's left-wing vote and its right-wing vote are remarkably consistent; there is little movement between polarities, just among parties within those polarities. Here's that data in tabular form: