You are failing to take into account wind chill. In SK, with our high winds, a -15C day can turn into a -25C day pretty easily. I am a big baby when it comes to the cold and I fully accept this. But when the wind chill puts things into “frost bite in 5 minutes” territory, I’m sorry, but I’m not riding my bike to the grocery store and risking frost bite on my fingers and nose. Nor do I want to stand at an outdoor bus stop waiting who knows how long for a bus. Now if zoning wasn’t so dumb and put my grocery store so far out of residential areas, it wouldn’t be so bad. But city planning is centered around having a car, sadly.
If you aren’t going to give us walkable cities or really efficient public transit, then we need cars and therefore need the parking. There is no way in this or any world that I am hauling $300 worth of groceries to a bus stop, just to sit there and wait half an hour (at -20C) for a dilapidated bus that may or may not even run on time and has the risk of someone stealing some of those overpriced groceries on the 30 minute ride it would take to get home.
I live in Saskatchewan and it will very frequently get to -30 or below. I cannot ride a bike in that safely without risk of frost bite, so cycling is out of the question (at least in the winter). I drive as small of a car as I could buy, but even small cars are dwindling now in favor of the giant SUV’s and pickup trucks that seem to think they own both the road and the parking lots. The public transit in my city is so inefficient that it would take me an hour worth of riding the bus, and a transfer, just to get downtown. I can drive that in 10 minutes. Getting to the other side of the city? 90 minutes to 2 hours and multiple transfers. Or 15 to 20 minutes by car.
Our public transit and walk-ability needs to be remedied long before you start building over parking lots. Businesses with no parking will suffer a lack of business if there is no parking and no change to the current systems.
This needed to be said a long time ago. People can’t seem to grasp that lower interest rates mean that average Joe qualifies for a bigger mortgage. Bigger mortgage qualifications = bigger housing prices since people can overbid, etc. driving up housing prices. Lower interest rates are the opposite of what we need!
The only people that are helped by lower interest rates are people that spent way more than they should have and are in debt up to their scalp. Those people need debt counseling/consolidation services to manage their debt individually. Don’t fuck up the rest of the housing market because you are in too much debt.
Of course they are. In this desolate wasteland called the prairies, finding any sort of mental health professionals is damn near impossible, much less properly structured support. Allowing this would just illustrate the failings of these provinces to properly fund and structure mental health supports.
We used to have them. They were called Crown Corporations and were in the hands of the provinces that they resided in. However, almost all of them have been sold to private companies instead of being maintained as publicly/government owned services. Saskatchewan still has a few left, but there is a push within the Sask Party to sell them out from under the province.