Below are the slides from my opening speech and some of my notes:

As every politician and talking head will tell you this month, it’s a critical time for the economy and this province. We’re in the midst of a trade war, and that comes on top of significant infrastructure constraints and a housing crisis that’s lasted far too long.

Recent immigration drawbacks have fooled some people into believing that the status quo is working on housing. It’s not.

We have a crisis and if we cut government spending now, we risk making that even worse.

The parks, beaches, and community centres throughout Vancouver are the things people really love about living here. Do we really want to give all that up, just because we’re too scared to try something new?

If the other team gets their way and we cut spending, the only parks and trees we’ll have left will be in photos like this one.

As happy as Mayor Mike Hurley looks here, I’d like to avoid that if possible.

Developer charges are out-of-sight and out-of-mind for most municipal voters. If you buy a new home, you don’t even see the charge in the price like buyers do in Ontario.

Ultimately, housing is expensive in Vancouver, so we need someone to blame for that. And tax.

Developers fit the bill. And we even got to name the charge after them.

There’s a mantra out there that “growth pays for growth,” and it’s incredibly catchy. But newcomers don’t pay for the charge. It’s on the housing. And the housing is bought by whoever needs a home next, newcomer or not.

How do development charges compare to property taxes? Here, the development charges on a new home are converted into years of property tax a home like that would pay, using 2026 rates and CMHC’s average new-home price for the region.

That’s what “growth pays for growth” actually looks like. What would be fair here? 3 years? 5? 30?

It’s not that apartments cost more to serve. Metro Vancouver’s own study says they need about a fifth of the initial infrastructure of a house. Most municipalities in Metro Vancouver don’t even charge a new house its own infrastructure cost. Apartments pay up to seven times theirs.

Vancouver is supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the country. And yet new multi-million-dollar houses have their infrastructure subsidized by everyone else, while new apartments pay five times the cost per unit.

As a heartless economist, I believe development charges are bad because they’re inefficient.

Can you imagine if we charged new parents at the hospital, up front, for 10–20 years of toys? It might be a little tricky to convince people to have kids. And we wouldn’t get as many new toys made as a result.

But charges aren't bad just because they're inefficient. They're also bad because they're unfair.

Imagine charging newcomers $50,000 to move to Vancouver. People would be up in arms. But put a fee like that on new housing, call it a “developer charge,” and nobody blinks.

We've spent a decade trying to enforce equity through housing taxes, and we did it in the least equitable way we could think of: by targeting the smallest homes that cost the least to serve. If this is the progressive region we say it is, the way we treat new housing should reflect that.

In the midst of a campaign season last year that featured Mike Myers, hockey jerseys, and a bunch of Canadian flags, you might have missed one of Carney’s most revealing quotes right before it wrapped up:

• “You’re supposed to campaign in poetry and govern in prose… I campaigned in prose. So I’m going to govern in econometrics.”

It’s no surprise the quote didn’t get more analysis. It’s pretty much the most boring thing an aspiring Prime Minister can say on the campaign trail. But it’s the best way to understand how he wants to govern.

So, what does it actually mean? And has it held up?

Econometrics is the closest thing economics has to a science. Instead of relying on vibes, you collect data and carefully evaluate how well policies worked out, or didn’t.

In theory, the numbers you see at the end of every spending announcement are a form of econometrics. Not the most accurate form, but still. Just last month, Ottawa announced the largest shipbuilding contract in Québec’s history, allegedly “creating nearly 5,000 good jobs in the construction phase alone.” Now, you might be impressed by the government’s ability to create so many good jobs without a single bad one, but I guess you allow for some margin for error when you spend $11 billion.

That framing was silly, but the number wasn’t pulled out of thin air. An analyst fed the proposed budget into a model, and that model spat out an estimate of how many jobs it would create. Good econometrics also uses models, but it requires a lot more transparency about the whole process.

For example, every five years the Bank of Canada releases an official review of its Monetary Policy Framework. The final document is just a high-level summary, but it’s detailed and technical enough to make your eyes glaze over almost instantly. The Bank spends the years in between those reviews empirically testing the leading alternatives against their own approach, and then releases the results publicly.

When you say you’re going to govern in econometrics, that’s the type of approach I’d expect. Especially from a former Bank of Canada Governor, who spent years overseeing that same process. New policies grounded in data and transparency, so the public can actually follow along and see what holds up over time.

So, is that how he’s governed?

In March 2026, Carney launched one of his government’s biggest housing policies yet, with an $8.8 billion deal to reduce development charges in Ontario. British Columbia got its own $3.2 billion version of the deal in June. There’s no mystery about why those two provinces were picked:

Development charges are the fees that municipalities charge on new housing. They were initially designed to pay for the new infrastructure that housing needs, but that’s not always how they work in practice:

BC’s program isn’t finalized yet, but Ontario’s is already in progress. Their program funds infrastructure in municipalities that cut charges by at least 30% and keep them down for three years. The bet is that lower charges will help jumpstart housing construction, or “get more homes built faster,” as the federal Minister of Finance put it.

It’s hard to argue with speculative results like that. But something about the whole rollout bugged me… Where were the numbers we got used to earlier? The March announcement had them for everything else:

• 8,000 additional housing starts and up to 21,000 jobs from the HST rebate

• 75,000 homes enabled by the Waterfront East transit line

What about the development charge cuts? How many good jobs or good homes would they create?

Maybe those initial government estimates were always meaningless anyways. But weren’t they an important part of our fancy new Government by Econometrics?

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No Dataset

Cutting development charges to get more homes built faster sounds great, but it isn’t econometrics if nobody has the data. And nobody really does. Which makes the data analysis, and the whole econometrics part, a little tricky.

CMHC, the federal Crown corporation and self-described “foundation of Canada’s housing system,” published its first development charge dataset last December. The initial extract covered just 30 municipalities. They’ve added ten more since then, but it’s still a spreadsheet of current rates with different units and no standardized way to compare cities now or over time.

CMHC’s Chief Economist has publicly complained that the data was so messy for some cities it was “unusable,” with different categories, units, and bylaw formats. And he’s not wrong. The data is extremely messy. But the mess is part of the failure too. Development charge data is only “unusable” because the charges were left to grow unchecked for over a decade.

It’s not like they snuck up on anyone either. CMHC first surveyed them back in 1996! Follow-ups came in 2002, 2006, and 2009, and then the series just stopped. CMHC also commissioned econometric research on development charges back in 1999. But that research didn’t even use the survey data CMHC had collected a few years earlier. It just picked some hypothetical fee levels, added them to home prices, and assumed every dollar got passed straight through to buyers.

If the charges were already worth surveying and modelling decades ago, why did CMHC wait until last year to start tracking them again?

Maybe I’m being too harsh. A dataset to evaluate a $12 billion investment is handy, but is it really necessary? They could have just relied on existing research.

The issue is that there isn’t much to rely on. At least not for the question Ottawa’s invested in. Study after study looks at what the charges do to home prices. Hardly any look at construction. CMHC’s own literature review last year didn’t either. Their focus was on who ends up paying, not what gets built.

In Canada, there’s even less to work with. The last time CMHC published econometrics on the charges was that 1999 study, with no real data. Everything since then has been sporadic fee surveys, cost breakdowns, and one viability model in June that assumed the effect rather than measuring it1. Just like the 1999 study.

Nobody has tested what these charges do to construction in Canada, because there’s no good data to work with. That’s why I spent the last year collecting it myself.

Making It Up as We Go

If the data gap were the only issue, you could just call it bad luck. The kind that always seems to haunt people who keep making the same mistakes. But it’s not just that. Take a look at how the program has been run so far:

• It was announced in March, but Ontario didn’t publish the actual terms until the day applications opened in June. That gave municipalities eighteen days to decide whether to give up a core piece of revenue for three years.

• The fund originally set a portion aside for municipalities without any development charges, to avoid punishing the places that never relied on them. But the carve-out’s size and design didn’t show up until August, nearly two months after initial applications closed. The rollout even confused the minister who announced it. He told reporters the $1 billion was “over and above” the original $8.8 billion fund, but his office had to correct him.

Governments announce programs and then sort out the details later all the time. It’s practically a tradition. But Carney promised us something different.

Decision-Based Evidence-Making

I wish I could tell you that this development charge program was an outlier, but it’s not. Especially in housing.

In 2022, the Auditor General found that CMHC and Infrastructure Canada had spent roughly $5.9 billion between them under the National Housing Strategy without knowing what they got for it. Infrastructure Canada couldn’t say whether chronic homelessness had gone up or down, and CMHC couldn’t say who its money was helping. It was worse than just a lack of data:

“Despite being the lead for the National Housing Strategy and overseeing the majority of its funding, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation took the position that it was not directly accountable for addressing chronic homelessness. Infrastructure Canada was also of the view that while it contributed to reducing chronic homelessness, it was not solely accountable for achieving the strategy’s target of reducing chronic homelessness. This meant that despite being a federally established target, there was minimal federal accountability for its achievement.”

That audit came out before Carney took over as PM, but he’s the one who promised to break the pattern. In some ways, he did.

In 2022, the problem was a target nobody would own. Now there isn’t even a target.

Ottawa and the provinces have put a combined $12 billion on the table to reduce development charges, with no research to justify it, no data to track it, and no public plan to evaluate how it all works out.

If this is econometrics, I must have slept through all my classes.

Govern in Econometrics

Carney promised us something different. When he said those three incredibly boring words on the campaign trail, economists everywhere dared to dream of something better. But that technocratic utopia hasn’t materialized yet. At least not in housing.

If we actually want this country to change, we have to start with the way we make policy. Especially the boring stuff: how we collect data, set goals, and judge the results. Anyone can do that kind of groundbreaking work after a policy’s launched. What makes it valuable and unique is planning it out in public before the policy starts.

We don’t get to do business as usual anymore. We no longer have the privilege of letting problems fester for years. Now that our lovely next-door neighbour has turned trade policy into a weapon, Canada needs to channel its existential angst into something more than fiery speeches.

Maybe Carney was a fool to promise anything different. This country still governs in poetry after all. But boy oh boy, how beautiful it sounds.

“[Eby] may remain premier, but not because British Columbians want him there.” 

“Because [of] the Opium War… Chinese Canadians are very scared of the negative impact of drugs.” 

“The NDP was brought to its knees by a BC Conservative party it argued was full of racist, homophobic, science-denying whackos, unfit to even run for public office, let alone hold it. Turns out, not everyone sees the world through the lens of moral superiority that New Democrats do.”

All of these explanations may have elements of truth. But they all rely much more heavily on truthiness. 

Part of this is the way we consume news these days. Everything needs an instant reaction. Everything needs immediate analysis. But the reality is that these things take time to dig down into. If the Conservatives end up with 150 more votes spread across two ridings, they’ll have a majority. Would those extra 150 votes fundamentally change your analysis about the will of the voters? 

Well, not if you're Rob Shaw: 

“But we already know the bottom line: David Eby lost this election, even if he won.” 

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Some of the pundits amongst us are blessed with the rare ability to read the will of the voters, regardless of how people actually vote! If only I were so lucky. 

But this question is serious. Voting day is just a snapshot in time. We don’t know exactly why each individual person voted. That doesn’t mean that elections are irrelevant. But it does mean that it’s a lot trickier to unleash accurate takes about why people voted the way they did.   

So what were the real takeaways from the election?

1. Land doesn’t vote, but lots of empty land around you can make your vote look way more important. Especially compared to the votes of those pesky city folks.

2. Despite all the negative press about the NDP’s significant new housing changes, the areas most affected were still dominated by the NDP.

   1. This includes all five Burnaby ridings, where the city just ignored the province’s second deadline to implement upzoning near transit stations. 

   2. This was even notable in wealthier ridings that currently lack housing options (like Kitsilano & Oak Bay).

3. Drug policy didn’t seem to be an issue for the NDP anywhere near the DTES, but it was reportedly significant in Richmond. Interestingly, Richmond had amongst the lowest overdoses per capita of any Metro Vancouver city in 2023. 

   

4. The age-old trick of promising brand new infrastructure looks like it was successful. But there hasn’t been much (or any?) analysis of the electoral effect of these commitments. Why? There’s nothing ideological about people wanting new infrastructure. The pundit takes-economy thrives on broad and conclusive statements about what people think and believe. It’s not as fun to say that “the Conservatives nearly won the election by effectively targeting spending promises in electorally valuable areas.” 

   1. Were voters in the Surrey-Panorama & Surrey-Newton ridings influenced by the uncosted promise to extend the Skytrain to Newton?

   2. What about the, again, uncosted promise to build a new children’s hospital in Surrey? Or the promise1 to expand the Patullo Bridge to six lanes?

   3. In Maple Ridge East, Bob D’Eith and the NDP are currently losing by ~300 votes. How big of a factor was the Conservative’s promise to expand Mission Memorial Hospital with a new maternity ward?

   4. Did voters in the Fraser Valley want privatized healthcare? Or did they just want their nearby hospital to stop closing down once a week? 

I’m not saying that Elections are all about new spending promises. But they absolutely do matter! It’s crazy how quickly everyone’s moved on to discussing ideology and crime and drugs and the “moral superiority” of the NDP without first digging into any of these huge spending promises and their potential effects. 

Elections are critically important. But understanding them and why people vote the way they do takes patience. You can’t just stand up on a soapbox partway through the counting of votes and make broad, definitive statements on which ideas WON, and which ones LOST. That’s just not the way our democracy is set up. I’m sorry if that makes your punditry a little more difficult. 

It’s enough for an election to just happen. It doesn’t have to mean something definitive about the human race. I’m as guilty as anyone of throwing wild takes out there, but the media has a responsibility to be better than random private citizens. Especially compared to an anonymous blogger with a goofy George Carlin profile pic. 

Ultimately, when the media gets into these kinds of proclamations, they promote baseless criticisms of whichever ideas lost (according to them), without ever stopping to consider why they, as pundits, have been granted this divine gift to read the will of the people. 

All I’m asking for is a little patience. Is that really so crazy?

“If BC had a government that took economic growth seriously, we’d have over $10 billion more per year for the services we need – at no cost to taxpayers.” 

The BC Conservatives are nothing if not serious. To suggest otherwise would be condescending. 

You might be going crazy reading some of the recent BC Conservative platform analysis. These numbers don’t even pass the smell test:

These listed estimates total $3.1B not $2.3B! They’re also mixing together spending from different years. I’m not even trying to criticize Global News here. There’s no actual cost breakdown of the deficit in the Conservative platform, or the appendix of their platform. What we have there is more of a concept of a plan. A vague notion of common sense change that hasn’t quite materialized into anything more than a catchy slogan.

In the absence of all this critical financial information from a political party attempting to lead a province of 5 million people in three days, I have spent a ridiculous amount of time calculating my own estimates based on the limited information they did provide.

The current government’s projected deficit for 2025/26 is $6.7B1. I believe the Conservatives are starting instead with the ~$9B NDP deficit for 2024/25. From there, they have about $1.5B in new expenses in 2025/26. That gets you to the widely reported “deficit forecast of nearing $11 billion” for 2025/26. After combing through way too many press releases, government documents, and political platforms last night — I’m pretty sure that’s how they got there. 

The issue is that when you add up the expenses that they explicitly listed out in the appendix of their platform, as I did below, it adds up to ~$4.3B over the two years. That’s almost double what they even listed out at the beginning of the costing! 

“Common Sense Change for BC calls for new additions to BC’s operating budget that total $2.3 billion across Budget 2025 and Budget 2026”

So they can’t do basic math. That’s okay. We all have those moments. Especially late at night when you’re cramming to finish that project you promised your boss last week (at the latest). 

What gets a little more nefarious is that this “costing” fails to include any of the significant tax cuts that the Conservatives have proposed. The Cons assumed that "eliminating the Carbon Tax" would “return $3B to British Columbians” in 2025. Just to keep things simple, let’s assume the same exact number for 2026/27. 

What we end up with here is a net increase to the deficit of $11.3B in just the next two years. That’s nearly five times as much as the $2.3B they listed out in the appendix of their platform. 

That would bring the deficit to ~$13.5B in 2025/26, and $13.1B in 2026/27. That’s a bit of a problem, especially considering they’ve committed to a rule that requires them to have a referendum whenever they want to institute a new tax. 

Out of simplicity and time, I’m excluding a lot of their other significant “commitments” that simply weren’t costed at all:

• “Build a new Children's Hospital in Surrey, provide Eagle Ridge Hospital with its first MRI machine, expand the Nanaimo Regional General Hospital with a new tower and cath lab, construct a new patient care tower at UHNBC, expand Mission Memorial Hospital with a new maternity ward.

• Extend SkyTrain to Newton in Surrey, commit to a new bridge across Okanagan Lake, commit to a new Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, expand the new Patullo Bridge to six lanes as soon as possible, expand Hwy 1 to six lanes to Chilliwack, rebuild Highway 19 in Nanaimo, rebuild the Red Bridge in Kamloops, replace the aging Taylor Bridge across the Peace River”

So, not only are they predicted to have significantly higher deficits than the NDP, but those projections don’t even include the cost of all the new hospitals, Skytrain, highways, and bridges they've “promised” in their platform.

Obviously, they’ll just end up cutting lots of programs instead. Which ones, you may ask? Well, don’t expect answers anytime soon. 

Aside from this basic budget malpractice for the “costing” of new expenses, the whole Conservative plan to eliminate the deficit relies on ridiculous assumptions about economic growth. 

The Cons argue that they will never have to raise taxes because they’ve decided to start taking economic growth seriously. Despite cutting $4B in taxes annually, the Conservatives project that this commitment to seriousness will generate an extra $10B in government revenue for them in 2030. 

The Cons “generously” assumed the NDP would have a significantly lower growth rate than them (3.1% vs. 5.4%). I found this a tad ironic, since the NDP have had consistently higher growth rates (by nominal or real GDP) than Rustad did when he was in government with the BC Liberals. In fact, the only year that the NDP grew less than 3.9% was when the Covid pandemic started in 2020. So it’s a little disingenuous to say that the 3.1% average nominal GDP growth rate is “significantly higher” than what the NDP have achieved in recent years. Especially since the last three years had nominal growth rates of 3.7%, 11%, and 15.8%, respectively. 

You may think this is stupid. Does it really make sense to compare based on nominal GDP at a time when inflation was surging? Good point, person in the peanut gallery. Well the average real GDP growth rate since the NDP have been in power has also been higher than when Rustad was in government. And that includes the unprecedented Covid economic hit in 2020. 

Now, personally, I think this hyper-focus on top-level deficit numbers is a little outdated. It's way more meaningful to compare debt-to-GDP levels (of which BC is still amongst the lowest in Canada). That being said, words still matter! Especially when we’re talking about billions of dollars.

When you dig into the serious common sense change economic policies of the Cons, you see the world for what it could be, rather than what it is. You too can free yourself from the shackles of reality, ideology, and facts and embrace what could be. Then — and only then — can you set yourself free.