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When Gregor Robertson first became Vancouver mayor in 2008, he promised affordable housing, fewer drug overdoses, lower crime and a total end to homelessness by 2015.

All of those problems would become catastrophically worse under his watch. But given that Robertson was just appointed federal housing minister on Tuesday, it’s notable that his most iconic failure was on the issue of housing affordability.

On Robertson’s first day as mayor, the average detached Vancouver home cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of $942,000.

It was the most unaffordable jurisdiction in Canada, but Robertson took the helm of a city in which it was still technically feasible for average Vancouverites to own property.

According to RBC estimates from the time

, the average Vancouver household could still feasibly purchase a townhouse, although it would consume 50 per cent of their income in mortgage costs.

When Robertson left the mayor’s office in 2018, the average cost of a detached house in Vancouver had doubled.

Adjusting for inflation, the benchmark house price on Robertson’s last day was $1.8 million. Across Robertson’s decade-long tenure, the average Vancouver house had surged in price by an average of $84,000 per year, or $230 every 24 hours.

Rents and condo prices had similarly attained record highs, to the point where the City of Vancouver was no longer just the most unaffordable jurisdiction in Canada; it was now one of the most unaffordable cities on earth.

According to a ranking at the time by the California-based Center for Demographics and Policy, Vancouver was now

second only to Hong Kong

in terms of world cities where home ownership was most out of reach for locals.

Shelter costs had become so divorced from local incomes that the mortgage costs of owning just an average home in Vancouver

now represented

87.8 per cent of the typical household income. “It’s increasingly hard to dismiss concerns that housing unaffordability is at crisis levels in Vancouver,” reported RBC at the time.

Robertson had entered office

promising a Vancouver

that would “inspire the world.”

His inaugural speech in December 2008 pledged that in addition to his “audacious” plan to end homelessness, he would “spur the creation of new affordable housing” using everything from zoning reform to tax incentives to “unlock” vacant stock.

“If ever there was a city that can set and reach and exceed courageous goals, it is Vancouver,” said Robertson.

Robertson’s last months, by contrast, were marked by a series of interviews in which he maintained that Vancouver’s cratered unaffordability wasn’t his fault.

“I wouldn’t have dreamed the crisis would get this intense,” he told the U.K.’s The Guardian in 2018, putting the blame on everything from “national governments underinvesting in housing” to “provincial governments not doing enough.”

“The city doesn’t control offshore investment, doesn’t control the real estate industry, doesn’t control what developers can do … we really did have limited tools,” Robertson said

in an outgoing interview

with CBC’s Justin McElroy.

He added, “we recognize this has been a big challenge, but it’s a globally significant perfect storm.”

When defending his record on housing, Robertson usually pointed to subsidized housing programs that had been approved under his tenure. “We are investing $61 million into affordable housing this year — the highest in our history,” he wrote in a 2015 op-ed in The Georgia Straight.

All the while, his administration lagged on addressing many of the prime drivers of the crisis, ranging from zoning constraints to the city’s

sky-high development fees

. The Vancouver Sun would note in 2018 that it wasn’t until Robertson’s

final council meeting as mayor

that the City of Vancouver would

greenlight a basic zoning reform

allowing duplexes to be built in neighbourhoods zoned for single family residential.

“He always knew population growth that was coming — yet everybody acted like this was a surprise,” Vancouver developer Bob Rennie, a onetime supporter of Robertson,

told Postmedia in 2018

.

Perhaps most notably, Robertson had long resisted any notion that Vancouver home prices were being bid up by foreign buyers who were effectively treating the city’s real estate as a financial commodity.

In 2015, urban planning researcher Andy Yan released a groundbreaking case study which analyzed six months’ worth of Vancouver home sales and found that

66 per cent of the buyers

were signing their purchase papers with non-Anglicized Chinese names.

At the time, Robertson was one of several public figures to accuse Yan’s research of being divisive.

“This can’t be about race, it can’t be about dividing people … it needs to get to the core issue about addressing affordability and making sure it’s fair,” the mayor

told CBC in 2015

.

As a Global News profile would note, only three years later Robertson would

be blaming other levels of government

for failing to appropriately curb “offshore investment.”

On Tuesday, a reporter told Prime Minister Mark Carney that his new housing minister had overseen one of the most explosive increases in home prices in the country’s history, and asked whether this was a signal that “you don’t think housing prices should go down.”

Replied Carney, Robertson “brings the type of experience that we need to tackle some aspects of this problem.”

 

IN OTHER NEWS

Prime Minister Mark Carney obviously had his first post-election cabinet sworn in on Tuesday. Despite signals that his government would be taking a hard tack away from the prior Liberal government, almost all of the key posts are occupied by Trudeau government veterans (albeit in different positions).

This includes …

Sean Fraser, Minister of Justice.

As immigration minister under Trudeau, Fraser oversaw a massive unchecked increase in migration to Canada that peaked at more than a million newcomers per year in 2022 and 2023. In the Trudeau government’s last months, they notably admitted error on the immigration file and sought to reverse many of the increases (albeit under a different immigration minister).

Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Transport.

As finance minister, Freeland championed the wildly unpopular capital gains hike, and oversaw

one of the largest and fastest expansions

of the federal debt in Canadian history. In her last weeks as minister of finance, Freeland would orchestrate an

extremely complicated and contradictory holiday GST break

that economist Mike Moffatt would describe as “probably the worst tax policy in a decade.”

Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry.

Joly was Trudeau’s last foreign affairs minister, a tenure marked by her frequent mismanagement of Canada’s response to the Israel-Hamas War. This included multiple instances in which she deviated from Canada’s official line on the conflict, such as a statement in which

she called for

“negotiations at a negotiating table” between Israel and Hamas, a group that Canada (and all its peer countries) regard as a terrorist group.

François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Finance.

As industry minister under Trudeau, Champagne coordinated several multi-billion dollar subsidy packages in order to entice foreign EV-makers to build factories in Ontario and Quebec. Despite claims that the subsidies would pay for themselves within five years, the Parliamentary Budget Officer said

the reality was closer to 20 years

… and that was before many of the subsidy recipients

started running into financial problems

.

Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.

Guilbeault was probably

the single most controversial Trudeau cabinet minister

when he served as Minister of Environment. Not only was he the face of the carbon tax, but he championed a ban on gas-powered cars by 2035, was widely criticized for 2024 comments in which he seemed to pledge to stop building new roads, and has been blamed for forestry mismanagement preceding the partial wildfire destruction of Jasper, Alta.

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• Full list: Mark Carney’s 28 cabinet ministers and 10 secretaries of state
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As readers will no doubt have heard, measles is back — especially in Ontario, which has reported 83 per cent of cases in Canada so far this year; and especially in southwestern Ontario, among

largely unvaccinated Anabaptist communities

, which Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, says account for 70 per cent of cases.

As of April 26,

Health Canada reported 1,506 measles cases nationwide

,

up from just 69 at this time last year

; of those 1,506, only 74 infected individuals are known to have had one or the recommended two doses of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine, while 83 per cent are known to have been completely unvaccinated.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

, between one and three children per 1,000 who contract measles will die from it, or from complications of it, notably pneumonia and encephalitis. And about 20 per cent of unvaccinated sufferers, of all ages, will wind up in hospital.

It’s nothing if not frustrating. One might think the great success of COVID-19 vaccines would encourage people to appreciate better-established vaccines like MMR (mumps, measles and rubella), which has been around longer than I have been alive. Instead, by many accounts, the decline in routine vaccine uptake already occurring before the pandemic has continued to decline.

As worrying as measles is, North America’s nasty flu season this year seems to have received much less attention. And it’s vastly more deadly.

Around this time last spring,

the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

estimated there had been in the United States “at least 34 million illnesses, 380,000 hospitalizations, and 24,000 deaths from flu so far.” Last year was considered a bad year for the flu.

This year so far

: “47 million illnesses, 610,000 hospitalizations, and 27,000 deaths.”

At this time last year, the CDC reported that

164 children had died in the U.S. from the flu

. This year,

the number is 226

.

For comparison’s sake, the most American children who died from COVID-19 in any 18-week period was 944. So obviously COVID was much more dangerous, but the flu is no joke. COVID was all anyone talked about for two years; meanwhile, hardly anyone talks about the flu as a serious threat to life or long-term health, least of all among children.

Canada is so allergic to data that it should carry an EpiPen; so we don’t have anything like as clear a picture of what’s going on here with the flu as they do in the U.S. —

especially with respect to outcomes among children

. But the picture we have suggests Canada has suffered more or less the same problem as the States, as you would expect.

But Statistics Canada’s mortality figures tell an interesting tale: In 2020, 2021 and 2023 combined, 62 Canadian children are recorded as having perished from COVID-19 — and 103 from “influenza and pneumonia,” which is the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code under which Canada reports flu deaths.

During the pandemic, to compare COVID-19 to the flu was to invite the whole world to jump down your throat. And in many senses, indeed, they aren’t worth comparing: 47,000 Americans died of “influenza and pneumonia” in 2022, a year in which COVID-19 killed 271,000.

But recall how often you heard politicians saying during the pandemic that we needed to lock everything down, close schools and playgrounds and skate parks

for the sake of the children

? Very early on in the pandemic, we knew that was a filthy lie: We were keeping kids home not primarily or even significantly for their own safety, but for their parents’ and especially their grandparents’ safety.

Politicians knew that the saving grace of COVID-19 was that it didn’t target otherwise-healthy children for death. But they also knew that “think of the children” was the easiest way to sell restrictions on everyday life, and so that’s what they used.

Now we have a flu season that may well be killing more Canadian children than COVID-19, and there’s absolute silence. No one called for schools to be closed, for Canadian Tire stores to be divided into essential and non-essential goods aisles, for bars and restaurants to be shuttered, for returning travellers to be locked up in hotels for society’s amusement.

These are the sorts of contradictions, conundrums and failures that all the pandemic inquiries we’re not getting should be looking into. Because we clearly haven’t learned anything at all from the pandemic nightmare except that we’re better than Americans … and our superiority complex was more than big enough to begin with.

How little have we learned? Moore, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, took some flak last month for daring to mention that the measles outbreak was hyper-concentrated in certain unvaccinated religious communities.

Dr. Ninh Tran, of Ontario’s Southwestern Public Health District, warned that associating measles cases to certain communities might provide “a false sense of security for the general public.” As if Ontarians actually believe being Mennonite attracts the influenza virus.

“(B)eing part of any particular group or religion doesn’t put you at risk,”

Tran told The Canadian Press

; rather, your vaccination status does.

Remember being told we shouldn’t wear masks because we’re too stupid not to let it provide us with “a false sense of security”? Remember being told we mustn’t associate diseases with certain populations, lest we succumb to prejudice and discrimination? Yeah, we’re back there. Zero lessons learned. Vaccination rates dropping. I just hope I’m already dead by the time the next pandemic comes along.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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