Wrong way up, eh?
Over the years I’ve heard Americans discuss all kinds of things going on in all parts of the world—various parts of Asia, China certainly, Europe, Mexico, you name it. One place I don’t recall anyone talking about much, aside from avid anglers and hunters, is Canada.
I must presume they know that a rather large country exists on the lower 48′s northern border, but honestly I’d be surprised if most Americans know much about the place at all in terms of its politics or methods of governance. They talk funny and call each other “hosers” and they say “eh” a lot, and supposedly they’re pretty laid back—as evidenced by their good-humored response to our flying their flag upside down at the World Series that time.
We don’t know much about their economy either for that matter, though there seems to be a general sense that they did not suffer quite such serious downturns during this last meltdown, in no small part because the Canadians are regarded as “sensible”, and have, people here think, effective banking regulations that prevent the kind of reckless financial derring-do that created so many problems here. That perception may be about to change.
The reality is that housing prices in Canada have doubled since 2000, but wages have been doing exactly what they’ve been doing here, which is remaining relatively flat. That being the case the engine driving this must be debt. It’s a familiar bubble story by now, or should be. Real estate, of course, and dodgy loans;
The Canadian government requires that buyers only pay 5 percent down payments although this rule is not enforced. However, for buyers who do not have 5 percent, the 6 major banks offer no down payment mortgages or cash back mortgages where they loan the buyer the 5 percent down payment, offering 100 percent financing. The banks also give mortgages to the self-employed and new immigrants without verifying income.
If that has a depressingly familiar ring to it, it’s because it’s all depressingly familiar.
According to Garth Turner, a former Conservative Party Cabinet Minister and Member of Parliament, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has deliberately created a housing bubble through low interest rates and down payments and long amortization periods that is beginning to deflate…..
…..The federal government has insured all these low down or no down payment mortgages through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CHMC), a state housing agency whose 10 member Board of Governors is heavily represented by the Housing industry — 3 developers, 1 real estate broker and 1 partner in a plumbing, renovation company. The CHMC would be the Canadian equivalent of the US government backed Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae insurance holders. The banks therefore can lend money to house buyers with zero risk. By removing risk from lenders who do not have to worry about the credit worthiness of the borrower, the government has encouraged imprudent lending practices, according to Turner. The Harper government even increased the agency’s insurable loan limit to $600 billion in 2009, an amount larger than the national debt.
There it is again—”The banks therefore can lend money to house buyers with zero risk.”—that lovely little dynamic of transferring private risk and debt to the public.
Turns out Canadian conservatives are exactly the same as ours, as Greece’s, Spain’s, Italy’s, Everybody’s—privatize the profits, socialize the costs. Even if they do talk funny. They’re all hosers, and we’re the ones getting hosed.
There’s a lot more detail at the link, if you’re in the mood to read it, but I’m not in the mood to write it. This crap is getting to where it virtually writes itself.
Harper is evil. The Liberals collapsed over the last couple of years, but I never understood why. (Not that we get to hear much about Canada over here, either. Probably because they don’t make a fuss, have serious droughts and what-have-you.)
Why do Americans have this thing about Canadians saying ‘eh’? My neighbour is Canadian, and I’ve never heard him say it. And I once had a Canadian girlfriend, and I never heard her say it either. Come to think of it, I don’t hear Brits say it any more.
You want to hear “eh”, the place to go is the upper peninsula of Michigan. Tired of being mocked for it, they’ve turned it into a tourist-baiting bumper sticker: “Say ya to da UP, eh!” But, see, it’s up north — lakes, forests, bears, trout — so it might as well be Canada. Kind of like I’m a Yankee in Georgia…
Isn’t it a hangover from that northern European/Scandinavian (but not English) tic of stating a proposition flatly, then at the end adding a little interogatory: eh? aye? huh? hey? by way of sayin: you agree, right? Because we don’t want to go round disagreeing on too many things, that would be divisive and unsettling.
I’ve heard lots of “eh’s” on CBC radio; they really do say it. Not so much the Canadians who come around here because they’re mostly from Quebec.
I’m surprised at the above because I’d been hearing for years how rock solid the Royal Bank of Canada is, and how conservatively operated. For awhile I was thinking of putting my money there, when I had some actual money.
Bluth;
See, I think the English have that tic also, or at least in the south. It’s common to hear things like: “Its a lovely day, isn’t it?”; “This ice-cream isn’t very good, is it?”; “The Spurs played badly, didn’t they?” etc.
Thus a flat statement is transformed into a tentative question— so less provocative and potentially divisive.
I don’t recall that being anything like so common in the north at all, in fact that particular tic is one of the peculiarities in the southern dialects which became the target of much ridicule in the Lancashire of my own sprouthood. Didn’t it? We would copy it mercilessly when making fun of southerners, wouldn’t we?
You can hear it all over Europe, nicht wahr? I believe they deport people from Marseilles who don’t end every third sentence this way, hein? It’s just the way it is, quoi? (Strangely, “eh” seems to be spelled “eh” in Italian…)
gunny, there is the cockney init, which is much more belligerent. Generally pronounced not as an interrogative but as a challenge. As in, this is what I think, which is to say what everyone else in the room thinks, are you going to disagree with us?
Madame,
I’ve just been reading an article in the new NYRB: ‘How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us’ and it has made me think this is a subject close to your heart?
Bluthner, yes, but I work only on ESL textbooks and since they are inflicted only on those dern immigrants, probably mostly evil criminal illegal ones, I’m sure no one cares how bad they are. I do my best to make them less bad. (Just had to tell an author that terracotta is not “a type of rock.”)
There is no such thing. I have completely pulled a 180 and and for totally open borders across the board now. Come on come all. Tear up your visa applications and come on down. And i am dead serious.
Gunnison:
Eh, did they? Can’t remember myself. I’ve never been able to handle “How-do-you-do”. Never known what you’re supposed to say. Always seemed silly to me saying ‘How do you do” back. Could go on forever and never actually lead anywhere.
But ” ‘Ow’s ta doin’ then?” I can cope with. “Not soa bad.” Or “Mustn’t grumble” or possibly “Eee, well, fair to middlin’ .” Except nobody says that to me down here. But if somebody does say “How are you?” I do still automatically say “Not so bad” or “could be worse” and betray my origins.
Takes me a little while to get to grips with the village in France: “Bonjour” every time you go into the tabac or boucherie and “Bonjour/bonne matin/bon nuit/ Monsieur/Madame” or “Messieu-dame” whenever you pass someone in the street. It surprises me in London if someone actually says “Goodnight” in the street.
Squirrel, the most common greeting—no, that’s not the right word at all—the most common acknowledgement of another’s existence is perhaps better, that I recall from those days was “Ay up.” (“Ay” rhyming with “hay”). It was pretty versatile and said quietly without any particular emphasis, unlike the “Ay up” spoken urgently, and meaning “look out!”, or perhaps “get out of the way!”
It was deployed when passing someone familiar in the street, sitting down next to someone (familiar or not) in a pub or on the bus, almost any casual intercourse at all.
As for actual greetings to someone known well, or to a very frequent acquaintance, the “ay up” would be followed by “or-right?” to which the only really acceptable response was “Aye, you?”
Wordy we weren’t. Twenty miles in any direction made a fair bit of difference in dialect and inflection back in those days. I had a roommate in college from Sunderland, which was a lot more than 20 miles but just an afternoon’s drive by US western standards, and I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about half the time. Really strong and disorienting vowel sounds, almost like German.
Well I think the housing bubble in Vancouver is about to burst. But you have to understand the 1% of the world have put their ill-gotten gains into Vancouver real estate. About 2 weeks ago, I heard the Bo family from China, then in the headlines every day, owned a very large and expensive condo development in Richmond, a Vancouver suburb.
And hardly anyone in Vancouver says “eh?” I think its more of an Alberta thing, but MikeDow could tell you more.
In Leicestershire they add a fowl to the greeting – as in – “Ay up me duck” – or more phonetically – “Ay oop me douck”.
And in Glasgow they often add another fowl – “hen” – when greeting women.
Ducky or ducks was used all the time in the town in Berkshire where I was born and yet 20 miles down the road I never hear it, because it’s a ‘new’ town and was built to re-house Londoners during the fifties early sixties.
I traced a friend last year and became quite emotional when she called me ‘my duck’.
We tacked ennit [isn't it] on the end of a sentence to make it more like a question.
Gunnison: I’d forgotten that. Shows how long I’ve been in exile in the Sarf. I remember the differences in accent though; you could tell if someone came from just four or five miles away sometimes.
So what is the difference between Woonsocket and Athens; Rhode Island and Italy?
Austerity programmes look the same wherever you’re standing. (Except, in so much of the US media when it’s closer to home than Athens, Naples, Madrid, Barcelona or Dublin.)
Squirrel -
I live in RI (but not Woonsocket). The municipal unions aren’t the problem in that particular city. But unemployment is over 13% there. Those jobs aren’t coming back – it was a manufacturing city. It has one of the highest poverty levels in the state. We have some of the highest property taxes in the country, and a 13+% increase in property taxes for the city would be huge. (Chances are would have driven more than a few to foreclosure). The school budget deficit is $10 million (schools here are primarily funded by property taxes). The republicans in this particular state aren’t always the bad guys.
I should have added that it looks like the city will ask the state to take over the school system.
My state is a shithole, i don’t think there’s going to be much to salvage here. The capital city just narrowly averted bankruptcy, that was due to the efforts of a very good Democratic mayor. A good chunk of that is down to pensions though.
Far sadder i think is that i was just reading about Berkeley closing some of its libraries in SFGate. Tommy would probably say that it’s down to too many diversity vice chancellors of something, it seems he may be right going by some of the comments. But that is tragic. They’re closing world class libraries all over the UC campuses apparently.
I’ve been to Woonsocket. It is an old textile town. It was once important enough that Abraham Lincoln spoke at their city hall. Now the mills are gone and if you walk down the main street perhaps half the storefronts are empty. It is more than a bit depressed.
Well, UC libraries eh? I dunno’ – could you save a library if you cut a Dean of Diversity or Self Esteem and all their staff, or is it better to lose the library? The UC system should look at their administrative structure of 40-50 years ago, adjust for inflation and student head count, and try to get back to that. New education departments also need a closer look.
From what some of the commenters on that article said (and most of them seemed to know their shit actually, lost of alumni and residents, relatively troll free thread) was that the nose count of faculty has been relatively constant, but the number of staff has gone up by 4. And there were certainly some gripes about underwater basketweaving courses. Obviously they’re hurting from state cutbacks to the UC system, but the libraries seem to be first rate.
Appparently UCSD is closing down the Scripps, from what they say.
Interesting counter article to that NYT piece on Woonsocket. The details are beyond my paygrade to sift through and sort out though.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-19/joe-nocera-is-wrong-about-woonsocket-s-crisis.html
The issue with housing prices and the real estate bubble that is now present in Canada (really a duplicate of what happened in the US) is really not about the housing market itself, but about much broader problems with the economy as a whole. Quite frankly, the problem is that there just isn’t enough to invest in. When the economy really doesn’t have the depth of opportunities for investment, people will tend to invest in the most basic investment that they can think of, their home. This influx of money into the housing market creates price pressure (upward asset values). Unfortunately it also creates a HUGE imbalance in the economy that is prone to severe deflation.
This isn’t specific to Canada, it happened in the US, parts of Europe, etc… And it won’t go away until the opportunities for investment increase in other areas, and start to take some of the demand pressure on the housing market (or until we have a massive bubble burst).
So when Ottawa doesn’t care that there aren’t any investments in the country (real economic investment is either flat or on the decline and has been for more than a decade now) other than say ‘tar sands’, well that creates an imbalance.
Garth Turner can scream and yell all he wants, but he is actually part of the problem, because he is part of the contingent that constantly screamed about government (yes, government needs to invest as well) investments in various economic development programs. Did so for years, and though I haven’t heard much from him lately, has done so every time I read him.
So to Garth et al, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.