i had an extremely solid legal argument to overhaul the landlord and tenant board, but they threw a right-wing libertarian judge at me, and her order is entirely incoherent. she ignored my legal argument entirely, speciously claimed i was arguing about facts, inserted demonstrably wrong "facts" from the initial order that are being disputed on review and then used a judicial review argument to quash an appeal, which is all wrong. i did everything right; she even told me my presentation was outstanding, but she wasn't responding to the argument, but trying to generate a predetermined outcome, and i don't know if there was money involved. the judge actually openly admitted to conversing with the lawyer over twitter, which is not allowed and demonstrates the point. so i have to appeal it to a panel of three judges in london, ontario and am trying to schedule it for april. there's no other way to appeal it faster or better (i tried and got blocked by the court of appeal in a case i'd probably win on appeal but don't have the self-interest to push. the rules say i can do what i tried to do, but there's apparently a convention not to. fuck conventions. the court of appeal is supposed to be a creature of statute. if the convention contradicts the statute, you do away with the convention, but you have to get the supreme court to do it and the point is i wanted a faster appeal path not 15 years fighting a supreme court case). in the mean time, i'm fighting off an imminent eviction on april 1st and preparing for a major hearing on april 3rd where i should be awarded major damages for the harassment i've suffered through over the last two years. i'm trying to get an urgent injunction of the bullshit order in place on the grounds that the facts it relies on are demonstrably false, but the court staff appears to have been instructed to send everything to the gatekeeper, and she's just shutting me right down. i'm not being allowed to win this case. i don't know the extent of it.
now, there's a new gatekeeper. i need to try to get some things to him this morning.
if i can get a large enough award on april 3rd, looking for a cheap bungalow or small house in windsor for under 200K might be the most affordable and smartest option. i went over this a few months ago; it's actually cheaper to buy a house right now than it is to rent an apartment because the hike in interest rates got shifted to renters. as a renter, i'm being forced to pay the interest rate hike on the apartment i'm looking to rent, and i can't. it makes more sense to try to cut the middleman out if you're on the very bottom of the market. if you can sign a 40 year mortgage with enough of a downpayment. your mortgage will be less than market rent, on the same or comparable properties. but i need enough to put down.
i don't think the analysis gets it right, and i think the tariffs are only a part of it. i do agree that the tariffs are contributing to and may extend and deepen the downturn. however, i was expecting this and planned around it before the tariffs were announced. it's partly due to gravity - there's a vicious bubble in canada's housing market that just won't burst and prices have to come down - but partly due to the changes in immigration policy. a lot of these sales, especially in student markets, are indian or chinese or arab investors selling houses they can't rent to students. they will cram 30 kids into one house, and they get here and don't understand how awful that is; to them, it's just like home. if you can't own this old rickety mouldy house in downtown wherever at 0% interest and rent it out at 5000% profit to failing immigrant students anymore, what's the point? you sell it at whatever price you can, just to get rid of it, so somebody else can do maintenance on it. and that's good - these are the kinds of properties we needed back on the market to create more low income housing and the outcome that the shift in immigration policy was intended to create. when doug ford or justin trudeau talks about building housing, they mean building mansions in suburbia, and that's not what we need right now at all, we need more basement apartments, more apartment buildings, etc.