Gerald Butts
speaker
1,669 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
US and uh people who had to work for a living got less and less.
And over that entire time period, their housing prices kept going up and up and up.
And now we're in a position i here in Canada to move back home for a second.
Um, where we have the largest, I think, the um the worst ratio of household income to housing prices in the OECD.
That's an amazing thing when you think about it.
And part of that is uh generation of free money when interest rates were relatively relatively low and by historical standards.
Certainly, Peter, you would recall when interest rates were twelve, thirteen, fourteen percent in the in the early eighties.
Uh uh, so people invested all of the policy signals, all the sign signals in the economy were telling people to invest in their own homes.
And so you have a whole generation, two, maybe even three generations of Canadians who are comfortable in their own homes and therefore comfortable with their economic status.
But if you're trying to break into it now, it's hell.
Um, but those are problems that you can't fix with one budget or one uh pol there's no magic wand that anybody in Canada can wave and make housing affordable for everybody again.
No, I I would say go you go, Jerry.
Uh well, I first of all I think you have to start with empathizing with where they are and realizing that it's a you know it's a real thing.
And I remember when this issue first popped up in the United States and a generation of older pundits and politicians said, Well, stop spending so much money on avocado toast and maybe you'll be able to uh afford a down payment for a house.
So, you know, first of all you gotta realize
That this crisis is real.
And it's something that I've been thinking about a lot, certainly since the last campaign where I watched, you know, 30, 40 focus groups of young Canadians over the course of a couple of months.
These people are in total despair.
And they uh they, you're right, they worry about whether or not they're going to be able to afford a house or have the um number of kids they want to have, or just in general, lead what.
we would have called in the oldie timey days, as my kids would call it, uh, a regular middle class life.
Showing 381–400 of 1,669 · page 20 of 84
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