Canada's so called "wartime" effort to build housing is aiming to build housing that is worse than what was built 70-80 years ago. Should we really be proud to be a country that needs a major program to build rental apartments, multi-plexes, and sheds in the new landed gentry's backyard? We need a little more ambition, even if it means boomers don't get to use their homes as a piggy bank.
It was a little disappointing that the single biggest driver of rising prices was not mentioned: inflated land costs caused by preventing cities from growing out as their populations grow. In some regions (for example Waterloo region) a lot now costs more than the house, and it's not due to physical land scarcity. It's less a problem of whether we can build enough housing than whether we can build enough housing while not giving up constraints that make it deliberately scarce and expensive. Builders already have many of the economies of scale that were kind of a novel invention when we were getting tracts of strawberry box houses, they just don't have the permission.
Even in literal wartime, we recognized decent homes matter for family life are are not solely boxes to warehouse workers. Post-war, there was a heaven and earth effort to build housing that (while modest) was an improvement in standard of living compared to what most had grown up with. Now, we seem to have a "wartime" effort towards managed decline, and are trying to squeak by with the bare minimum to warehouse people and to prevent riots from those locked out. Hard to muster up energy for that.
Great interview with Mike Moffatt but I am now very confused. I hear all the time about the housing crisis in Canada, which I take to mean a housing shortage. We need to build more houses! I can understand that.
But in this interview, Mike talked about the decline in demand for houses. Housing starts are down (and I know what that means now) and housing sales are down.
How can there be a shortage of housing (i.e. a rising demand) and decline in supply (i.e. a falling demand).
Demand in the way economists use it is more like "how many houses are people willing to buy at X price" rather than demand in the more usual sense of the number of people who need homes. The first is majorly affected by credit availability, even if there are people in unsuitable housing or doubled up. If prices fall to the point enough of those people can afford it (or if what they can pay increases), they will start to shoot up again if supply is limited.
What he's getting at is that ordinarily high resale prices (and despite the drop they are still high) drive new construction, which eventually lowers the prices of resale homes as people on the margin opt for the new stuff. The problem is that if the cost to build is too much higher than resale prices, despite those resale prices being unaffordable to people, nothing gets built. (This might be normal if the people left renting just don't have good enough incomes compared to hard building costs, but the argument here seems to be that there are barriers making new supply *unnecessarily* expensive.) So the demographic aspect of "supply shortages" doesn't really improve, and prices might spike again if credit availability or sentiment change demand (in the willingness to buy at X price sense).
Even if the land were free, construction costs for new build houses are ~$200-$300 per square foot. That implies a 2000 square foot house costing $400-$600K, approaching the average Canadian house price of $690K. Trades are in short supply and more expensive than they used to be, and houses are bigger and incorporate more elaborate construction.
A $400K home seems incredibly affordable compared to market prices in Toronto or Vancouver, but that's still a $2300/month mortgage payment and would still require a downpayment of $20,000 even at the 5% CMHC minimum. You'd also need an income of at least $80K to qualify, which is higher than the $68400 *median* Canadian household income.
The fact is that it's going to take decades to build our way out of the current mess: the lack of construction over decades means that we don't have the stock of older housing that used to be the affordable entry point for renters and buyers.
The Altus cost guide has hard costs for single family homes per region ranging from 120-180 per square foot (St. John's) to 190-320 per square foot (Vancouver). 300 is on the high end anywhere. Huge variation based on region that's partially driven by higher-end construction to make better use of (truly or artificially) scarce land, although yes also based on labour costs.
400k is relatively affordable for a new house. That 67k is not only working age families, it includes seniors and students etc which are not representative of people in the market for single-family houses. The median-earning two-income family can absolutely afford 400k. There's also always lower-end options like condos for people buying on one income, and lower land prices (which would result from allowing more suburban expansion) allow smaller homes to pencil out. Houses being bigger is a *result* of scarcity and high prices, more than a cause. It's really hard to see it as being building cost driving the problem when there are still regions that remain affordable.
If you could build a new house for about 60-85% of current average prices (which include homes of all ages and also lower-end options like condos), that's absolutely huge so I don't really see what you're getting at here. But yes, focusing on land availability and development charges would have the most impact in currently-expensive markets; the affordability crisis in say Halifax or somewhere has substantially different causes than Ontario or BC.
My point's pretty simple: even if you could eliminate the cost of real estate (the biggest contributor to cost in most Canadian housing markets), the cost of building housing is still significant. I think you missed the fact that I cited median *household* income - yes, that number is skewed somewhat by seniors, but it's far more representative of what a typical Canadian family is earning than something like median individual income. Bottom line, new build construction is necessary but will not have an immediate impact on making housing affordable for many Canadians, especially because land is *not* free.
Construction costs per square foot are also kind of tricky: the cost per square foot of a smaller house tends to be higher than for a bigger house. Not all cost contributions scale the same way with size (for example, a furnace doesn't double in cost for something twice the capacity, and all the project overhead tends to be pretty consistent whether you're building a 1000 sq ft house or a 3000 sq ft house). You also need to account for whether it's wood frame construction or the concrete construction used in a high rise. Concrete construction is considerably more expensive. Smaller houses or condos can reduce the price of homes, but you're getting a lot less house per dollar.
The number is skewed massively by seniors (who are nearly 30% of adults). The median income for working age households (not separating one and two income families) together is 78k, pretty close to 80k. And again, that median still includes plenty of people (e.g., single without kids) who do not reasonably need a house.
Land is a small portion of housing costs (at least for suburban greenfield) in markets that are functioning properly. Artificial scarcity has meant suburban lots can cost 300k+ in Ontario, but the point is that's policy-related (basically everywhere but Vancouver where there really is a physical scarcity of land). You can literally buy new houses in the low 400s (Edmonton, Halifax) although usually smaller than 2000 sq ft. Actual building costs are not precluding that. The trick is how to get those prices in the expensive markets, and much of that is policy-driven.
Good question! And we have a massive shortage of skilled trades people who construct houses, electrical, plumbing and HVAC. Have to get more people in the trades.
Great point, Sean. There was a huge push a while about for kids to "Learn how to code." There were summer camps that taught coding. By the time those kids are adults, AI will be doing all the programming and immigrants will be doing all the trades.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future but at the time I didn't think the focus on learning how to code made sense.
> But in this interview, Mike talked about the decline in demand for houses. Housing starts are down (and I know what that means now) and housing sales are down.
Housing starts being down does not necessarily reflect demand for homes decreasing because most housing starts are not one family contracting with one designer and one builder to build one home. Housing is built at scale and when you're building at scale, capital markets matter.
> How can there be a shortage of housing (i.e. a rising demand) and decline in supply (i.e. a falling demand).
Strong Towns had an interesting podcast recently that touched on this point. To build homes at scale you need to have capital and to get that the project needs to be able to supply a high enough return given risks etc.... compared with other non-housing projects.
Say a project to build a whack-ton of homes has a return for the capital investment of X percent... but the capital markets could also invest in something else and get X+6 percent.
In that case, the builder is going to struggle to find capital and therefore struggle to build those homes even if there's a serious shortfall in the supply of housing. It's not just an issue of credit which @donthesitate pointed out. It's not even if they can sell the homes at a profit. It's also a matter of getting the capital to build in the first place. If you don't have the capital, you're going to have problems.
Incomes haven't kept up with the cost of housing. The shoebox condos that investors have financed over the last two decades are not desirable. People who can't afford to buy or rent don't. Stay with mom and dad for a few more years. Rent a mattress in a flophouse. Pitch a tent in the park. Rent a small office unit and shower at the gym.
The WW1 Halifax explosion of 1917 was the beginning of federal housing policy, when the federal government financed the rebuilding of the devastated city. In the 1940's and 50's, the CMHC funded a huge surge of wartime homebuilding by providing cheap construction loans, purchase guarantees, and priority for scarce wartime building materials, in exchange for price caps ($5000) and fast building deadlines (roofed within four months).
The housing trilemma is as follows: You can have plentiful housing supply, low housing costs, or low government subsidies. Pick two. Much of the post-war era relied on government construction subsidies to provide plentiful cheap housing for citizens, while the past 30 years have seen invisible government guarantees for private mortgage lending, which has raised costs beyond what incomes can support.
Now that the private mortgage market is collapsing, government construction subsidies must fill the hole, or we're going to have a bigger crisis than we've yet seen. Get used to larger deficits - we're going to need them.
yah, please don't sell your house(s) in Toronto and come buy up the stock out west. That might help an individual maximize their personal equity, but it won't help those of us who live here. In my tourist town this is currently a big problem. There's nowhere for the middle class to live.
On the housing side given that political leaders are elected and financed by people with a vested interest in maintaining the value of their housing stock high by restricting supply, don’t expect any policies leading to building supply surges any time soon. And as the current boomer demographic surge dies off they will be replaced by their heirs. So the gap between the housed and unhoused will continue. A perfect recipe for social unrest. Hence the need for an expanded military. Supported by most Canadians except Quebec as usual.
In Canada the Quebec French have had whatever belligerence and courage and personal initiative they had in the 1700s ground down by centuries of Anglo and Catholic Church domination. So as long as that segment of the population continues to have political influence far exceeding their population relative to the rest of Canada, do not expect the current support for the military to continue. Unless of course a protracted armed conflict with First Nations arises. Oka II anyone?
Not sure you end up with the same dynamics from people inheriting. The whole deal with boomers is they want to both live in the home and preserve its value. People who inherit at 50 or 60 are probably just going to cash out. Bakes in wealth inequality quasi-permanently, but doesn't necessarily lead to support for high prices in the same way.
Anecdotally I also feel like even fairly comfortable millennials are more likely to recognize threats to social stability and therefore their own comfort from the status quo than boomers are, given they're less socially insulated from (and may have once been) people locked out.
Good point cashing out will not have as much effect on prices as just inheriting and living in the house. And with homes with several children cashing out (forced or not) is often the best solution if an equal division is required.
Drone warfare in Ukraine has received a lot of attention, but it's still unclear how much it reflects the future of warfare. For one thing, the actual utility and effectiveness of a lot of the drones seems overstated. We see the "greatest hits" videos of FPV drones flying into open hatches of tanks, not the more frequent loss of signal events where the operator loses control due to jamming or a break in the control wire or where the tiny warhead has no effect. For more context, I recommend this article from "War on the Rocks" by a former Ukrainian drone operator: https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fought-in-ukraine-and-heres-why-fpv-drones-kind-of-suck/
A lot of the rapid iteration in Ukraine is a response to electronic warfare: one side learns how to jam or spoof the other side's drones, requiring a tweak to hardware and software to counter, which then leads to a further iteration of the EW gear. That's all possible because it's software and relatively low cost electronic components on the drones. (In fact, this echoes previous experience with EW going as far back as WW2.) The real killing in Ukraine is still being done with artillery, tanks, and machine guns. That's all traditional kit requiring heavy industry with significant capital investment, and is far less amenable to rapid change.
It's also interesting that Ukraine is something of a special case in that neither side has anything like a modern Western air force, nor do they employ NATO-style combined arms tactics. Drones are kind of a poor man's air force for both Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine's strike on Russian bomber bases was impressive; it was far less impressive or effective than what Israel's done to Iran using a Western-style air force.
The current moment makes me think of how people tried to figure out the future of warfare based on the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. One was a prolonged slog involving sieges, trench warfare, and was ultimately determined by production capacity of the respective economies; the other was a short war characterized by maneuver and decisive battles. The European militaries seized on the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War; the next great European war in 1914 ended up looking much more like the Civil War.
One thing's for certain: Canada and other western militaries need to significantly adapt their procurement systems to align with how software and electronics are developed. The current approaches are sluggish and bloated, but they're closer to the LEAN management methodologies used by capital-intensive industries like automotive where you worry about getting everything right because it implicates multi-billion dollar investments in tooling and design. The software development paradigm is Agile/Sprint, where you iterate quickly because it's too damned hard and slow to nail down a full requirement set for something as complex as software, and it's cheap to make the changes. The military needs to be prepared to continually update and develop software-driven systems, and that cannot include decade-long procurement cycles. On the other hand, you're still going to require more scrutiny of software updates for something like the weapons system on a frigate than for a first person drone. If an update fails on a $2000 drone, it's much less of a problem than bricking a hundred million dollar ship. Also, that drone doesn't have the same lethality if it mistargets something. We've already seen a preview of what happens when a software-based system screws up when the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988.
Matt, I really enjoyed this episode ,both of your guests seem to have a real insight to the topics discussed, I particularly enjoyed the interview with Glenn Cowan, he definitely has a perspective and knowledge about the military and world events that the average person doesn’t get to hear about in the mainstream media, and he articulated very well.
So, my conclusion from this is as before, that Canada will not return to being a country viable for ordinary people until Liebrano Laurentian Corruptocrats are permanently kicked out of the political power, the likes of Mark Carney included.
Canada's so called "wartime" effort to build housing is aiming to build housing that is worse than what was built 70-80 years ago. Should we really be proud to be a country that needs a major program to build rental apartments, multi-plexes, and sheds in the new landed gentry's backyard? We need a little more ambition, even if it means boomers don't get to use their homes as a piggy bank.
It was a little disappointing that the single biggest driver of rising prices was not mentioned: inflated land costs caused by preventing cities from growing out as their populations grow. In some regions (for example Waterloo region) a lot now costs more than the house, and it's not due to physical land scarcity. It's less a problem of whether we can build enough housing than whether we can build enough housing while not giving up constraints that make it deliberately scarce and expensive. Builders already have many of the economies of scale that were kind of a novel invention when we were getting tracts of strawberry box houses, they just don't have the permission.
Even in literal wartime, we recognized decent homes matter for family life are are not solely boxes to warehouse workers. Post-war, there was a heaven and earth effort to build housing that (while modest) was an improvement in standard of living compared to what most had grown up with. Now, we seem to have a "wartime" effort towards managed decline, and are trying to squeak by with the bare minimum to warehouse people and to prevent riots from those locked out. Hard to muster up energy for that.
Great interview with Mike Moffatt but I am now very confused. I hear all the time about the housing crisis in Canada, which I take to mean a housing shortage. We need to build more houses! I can understand that.
But in this interview, Mike talked about the decline in demand for houses. Housing starts are down (and I know what that means now) and housing sales are down.
How can there be a shortage of housing (i.e. a rising demand) and decline in supply (i.e. a falling demand).
Or am I just missing something obvious?
Demand in the way economists use it is more like "how many houses are people willing to buy at X price" rather than demand in the more usual sense of the number of people who need homes. The first is majorly affected by credit availability, even if there are people in unsuitable housing or doubled up. If prices fall to the point enough of those people can afford it (or if what they can pay increases), they will start to shoot up again if supply is limited.
What he's getting at is that ordinarily high resale prices (and despite the drop they are still high) drive new construction, which eventually lowers the prices of resale homes as people on the margin opt for the new stuff. The problem is that if the cost to build is too much higher than resale prices, despite those resale prices being unaffordable to people, nothing gets built. (This might be normal if the people left renting just don't have good enough incomes compared to hard building costs, but the argument here seems to be that there are barriers making new supply *unnecessarily* expensive.) So the demographic aspect of "supply shortages" doesn't really improve, and prices might spike again if credit availability or sentiment change demand (in the willingness to buy at X price sense).
Even if the land were free, construction costs for new build houses are ~$200-$300 per square foot. That implies a 2000 square foot house costing $400-$600K, approaching the average Canadian house price of $690K. Trades are in short supply and more expensive than they used to be, and houses are bigger and incorporate more elaborate construction.
A $400K home seems incredibly affordable compared to market prices in Toronto or Vancouver, but that's still a $2300/month mortgage payment and would still require a downpayment of $20,000 even at the 5% CMHC minimum. You'd also need an income of at least $80K to qualify, which is higher than the $68400 *median* Canadian household income.
The fact is that it's going to take decades to build our way out of the current mess: the lack of construction over decades means that we don't have the stock of older housing that used to be the affordable entry point for renters and buyers.
The Altus cost guide has hard costs for single family homes per region ranging from 120-180 per square foot (St. John's) to 190-320 per square foot (Vancouver). 300 is on the high end anywhere. Huge variation based on region that's partially driven by higher-end construction to make better use of (truly or artificially) scarce land, although yes also based on labour costs.
400k is relatively affordable for a new house. That 67k is not only working age families, it includes seniors and students etc which are not representative of people in the market for single-family houses. The median-earning two-income family can absolutely afford 400k. There's also always lower-end options like condos for people buying on one income, and lower land prices (which would result from allowing more suburban expansion) allow smaller homes to pencil out. Houses being bigger is a *result* of scarcity and high prices, more than a cause. It's really hard to see it as being building cost driving the problem when there are still regions that remain affordable.
If you could build a new house for about 60-85% of current average prices (which include homes of all ages and also lower-end options like condos), that's absolutely huge so I don't really see what you're getting at here. But yes, focusing on land availability and development charges would have the most impact in currently-expensive markets; the affordability crisis in say Halifax or somewhere has substantially different causes than Ontario or BC.
My point's pretty simple: even if you could eliminate the cost of real estate (the biggest contributor to cost in most Canadian housing markets), the cost of building housing is still significant. I think you missed the fact that I cited median *household* income - yes, that number is skewed somewhat by seniors, but it's far more representative of what a typical Canadian family is earning than something like median individual income. Bottom line, new build construction is necessary but will not have an immediate impact on making housing affordable for many Canadians, especially because land is *not* free.
Construction costs per square foot are also kind of tricky: the cost per square foot of a smaller house tends to be higher than for a bigger house. Not all cost contributions scale the same way with size (for example, a furnace doesn't double in cost for something twice the capacity, and all the project overhead tends to be pretty consistent whether you're building a 1000 sq ft house or a 3000 sq ft house). You also need to account for whether it's wood frame construction or the concrete construction used in a high rise. Concrete construction is considerably more expensive. Smaller houses or condos can reduce the price of homes, but you're getting a lot less house per dollar.
The number is skewed massively by seniors (who are nearly 30% of adults). The median income for working age households (not separating one and two income families) together is 78k, pretty close to 80k. And again, that median still includes plenty of people (e.g., single without kids) who do not reasonably need a house.
Land is a small portion of housing costs (at least for suburban greenfield) in markets that are functioning properly. Artificial scarcity has meant suburban lots can cost 300k+ in Ontario, but the point is that's policy-related (basically everywhere but Vancouver where there really is a physical scarcity of land). You can literally buy new houses in the low 400s (Edmonton, Halifax) although usually smaller than 2000 sq ft. Actual building costs are not precluding that. The trick is how to get those prices in the expensive markets, and much of that is policy-driven.
Good question! And we have a massive shortage of skilled trades people who construct houses, electrical, plumbing and HVAC. Have to get more people in the trades.
Great point, Sean. There was a huge push a while about for kids to "Learn how to code." There were summer camps that taught coding. By the time those kids are adults, AI will be doing all the programming and immigrants will be doing all the trades.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future but at the time I didn't think the focus on learning how to code made sense.
Plot twist: "learn how to code" was actually code for "make sure the utilities are up to code".
Or maybe it was my bad hearing and people were saying "learn the [building] code."
Apprentice four years, pass your exam and red seal. No student debt and you're making more than $40/hour.
As both my nephew and his brother-in-law have done. They are electricians not coders. Their jobs will not be outsourced to AI or China.
> But in this interview, Mike talked about the decline in demand for houses. Housing starts are down (and I know what that means now) and housing sales are down.
Housing starts being down does not necessarily reflect demand for homes decreasing because most housing starts are not one family contracting with one designer and one builder to build one home. Housing is built at scale and when you're building at scale, capital markets matter.
> How can there be a shortage of housing (i.e. a rising demand) and decline in supply (i.e. a falling demand).
Strong Towns had an interesting podcast recently that touched on this point. To build homes at scale you need to have capital and to get that the project needs to be able to supply a high enough return given risks etc.... compared with other non-housing projects.
Say a project to build a whack-ton of homes has a return for the capital investment of X percent... but the capital markets could also invest in something else and get X+6 percent.
In that case, the builder is going to struggle to find capital and therefore struggle to build those homes even if there's a serious shortfall in the supply of housing. It's not just an issue of credit which @donthesitate pointed out. It's not even if they can sell the homes at a profit. It's also a matter of getting the capital to build in the first place. If you don't have the capital, you're going to have problems.
Incomes haven't kept up with the cost of housing. The shoebox condos that investors have financed over the last two decades are not desirable. People who can't afford to buy or rent don't. Stay with mom and dad for a few more years. Rent a mattress in a flophouse. Pitch a tent in the park. Rent a small office unit and shower at the gym.
Could be a lot of demand from people who just can't afford these insane prices. If they can't afford it and actually make a bid they won't be counted.
The WW1 Halifax explosion of 1917 was the beginning of federal housing policy, when the federal government financed the rebuilding of the devastated city. In the 1940's and 50's, the CMHC funded a huge surge of wartime homebuilding by providing cheap construction loans, purchase guarantees, and priority for scarce wartime building materials, in exchange for price caps ($5000) and fast building deadlines (roofed within four months).
The housing trilemma is as follows: You can have plentiful housing supply, low housing costs, or low government subsidies. Pick two. Much of the post-war era relied on government construction subsidies to provide plentiful cheap housing for citizens, while the past 30 years have seen invisible government guarantees for private mortgage lending, which has raised costs beyond what incomes can support.
Now that the private mortgage market is collapsing, government construction subsidies must fill the hole, or we're going to have a bigger crisis than we've yet seen. Get used to larger deficits - we're going to need them.
yah, please don't sell your house(s) in Toronto and come buy up the stock out west. That might help an individual maximize their personal equity, but it won't help those of us who live here. In my tourist town this is currently a big problem. There's nowhere for the middle class to live.
On the housing side given that political leaders are elected and financed by people with a vested interest in maintaining the value of their housing stock high by restricting supply, don’t expect any policies leading to building supply surges any time soon. And as the current boomer demographic surge dies off they will be replaced by their heirs. So the gap between the housed and unhoused will continue. A perfect recipe for social unrest. Hence the need for an expanded military. Supported by most Canadians except Quebec as usual.
In Canada the Quebec French have had whatever belligerence and courage and personal initiative they had in the 1700s ground down by centuries of Anglo and Catholic Church domination. So as long as that segment of the population continues to have political influence far exceeding their population relative to the rest of Canada, do not expect the current support for the military to continue. Unless of course a protracted armed conflict with First Nations arises. Oka II anyone?
Not sure you end up with the same dynamics from people inheriting. The whole deal with boomers is they want to both live in the home and preserve its value. People who inherit at 50 or 60 are probably just going to cash out. Bakes in wealth inequality quasi-permanently, but doesn't necessarily lead to support for high prices in the same way.
Anecdotally I also feel like even fairly comfortable millennials are more likely to recognize threats to social stability and therefore their own comfort from the status quo than boomers are, given they're less socially insulated from (and may have once been) people locked out.
Good point cashing out will not have as much effect on prices as just inheriting and living in the house. And with homes with several children cashing out (forced or not) is often the best solution if an equal division is required.
Drone warfare in Ukraine has received a lot of attention, but it's still unclear how much it reflects the future of warfare. For one thing, the actual utility and effectiveness of a lot of the drones seems overstated. We see the "greatest hits" videos of FPV drones flying into open hatches of tanks, not the more frequent loss of signal events where the operator loses control due to jamming or a break in the control wire or where the tiny warhead has no effect. For more context, I recommend this article from "War on the Rocks" by a former Ukrainian drone operator: https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fought-in-ukraine-and-heres-why-fpv-drones-kind-of-suck/
A lot of the rapid iteration in Ukraine is a response to electronic warfare: one side learns how to jam or spoof the other side's drones, requiring a tweak to hardware and software to counter, which then leads to a further iteration of the EW gear. That's all possible because it's software and relatively low cost electronic components on the drones. (In fact, this echoes previous experience with EW going as far back as WW2.) The real killing in Ukraine is still being done with artillery, tanks, and machine guns. That's all traditional kit requiring heavy industry with significant capital investment, and is far less amenable to rapid change.
It's also interesting that Ukraine is something of a special case in that neither side has anything like a modern Western air force, nor do they employ NATO-style combined arms tactics. Drones are kind of a poor man's air force for both Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine's strike on Russian bomber bases was impressive; it was far less impressive or effective than what Israel's done to Iran using a Western-style air force.
The current moment makes me think of how people tried to figure out the future of warfare based on the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. One was a prolonged slog involving sieges, trench warfare, and was ultimately determined by production capacity of the respective economies; the other was a short war characterized by maneuver and decisive battles. The European militaries seized on the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War; the next great European war in 1914 ended up looking much more like the Civil War.
One thing's for certain: Canada and other western militaries need to significantly adapt their procurement systems to align with how software and electronics are developed. The current approaches are sluggish and bloated, but they're closer to the LEAN management methodologies used by capital-intensive industries like automotive where you worry about getting everything right because it implicates multi-billion dollar investments in tooling and design. The software development paradigm is Agile/Sprint, where you iterate quickly because it's too damned hard and slow to nail down a full requirement set for something as complex as software, and it's cheap to make the changes. The military needs to be prepared to continually update and develop software-driven systems, and that cannot include decade-long procurement cycles. On the other hand, you're still going to require more scrutiny of software updates for something like the weapons system on a frigate than for a first person drone. If an update fails on a $2000 drone, it's much less of a problem than bricking a hundred million dollar ship. Also, that drone doesn't have the same lethality if it mistargets something. We've already seen a preview of what happens when a software-based system screws up when the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988.
Matt, I really enjoyed this episode ,both of your guests seem to have a real insight to the topics discussed, I particularly enjoyed the interview with Glenn Cowan, he definitely has a perspective and knowledge about the military and world events that the average person doesn’t get to hear about in the mainstream media, and he articulated very well.
Good show
If the goal for our defense is sovereign capability, we must carefully assess the strings that are attached to any purchase.
So, my conclusion from this is as before, that Canada will not return to being a country viable for ordinary people until Liebrano Laurentian Corruptocrats are permanently kicked out of the political power, the likes of Mark Carney included.