News for Youse: The truth behind Vancouver's high housing prices, earthquake fear-mongering, and a question for Vic Toews

Alright, let’s talk about housing prices. In Vancouver, they’re too high and everybody knows it. Hell, MoneySense bumped our fair city down to 56 (from last year’s 29th-place finish) in its annual look at the best Canadian cities in which to live, based primarily on our overpriced houses. (Did you know that the median house price in Vancouver is now $806,094? $806,094! Do you know how much beef jerky that would buy?)

Well, we’ve figured it out: housing prices are so ridonkulously high because they don’t want us breeding anymore. It makes sense; if people can’t afford to buy a house, they are less likely to pop out a couple of squalling, pooping, noisy, awful babies. The real question is, who are “they”? Who are the evil masterminds so determined to manipulate the very demographics of Vancouver? Real-estate barons? Yoga zombies? The hot-heads who post in the Straight’s Confessions section? (Seriously, some of you people...)

Can we just take a moment to rant about this whole Graham James thing? Specifically, his bullshit sentence? We here at News for Youse are hardly legal geniuses, but even to us, it seems shitty that this former hockey coach only received only a two-year sentence for preying on a pair of kids, and could be out of federal prison as soon as the fall. Oh, and this wasn’t his first offense? Oh, he already spent 18 months (only 18 months!) in prison for sexually abusing two entirely different children? Oh, and the Canadian government saw it fit to pardon James for that initial offence? It’s beyond comforting to know our federal government is obsessed with spying on your average, fairly law-abiding citizen but won’t change the laws to make sure people who molest children are incarcerated for a long, long time (and will, in fact, pardon this type of behaviour!). Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who are you with? The children or Graham James?

Ah well. With Vancouver real-estate prices as high as they are, perhaps people will simply stop breeding altogether and then every problem in the world solved, right?

Just so you know, the big one's going to hit tonight around 9:53 p.m. The Earth's axis will shift five inches, because the planet is passing through a gravity trough, whatever that is. (There is no Wikipedia entry for “gravity trough”, so we are assuming it is a made-up fantasy, like reasonable rent in Vancouver or the federal government’s ability to do anything useful.)

Oh, here’s a charming crackpot video to get you all riled up. (Actually, it’ll probably deeply bore you. It’s a lot of “technical” talk and crude MS Paint graphics, but we watched the whole thing and felt obligated to pass it along.)

Normally News for Youse does not buy into such obvious nonsense. However, on the off-chance there is an earthquake, we'd like to be able to say "WE TOLD YOU SO". You know, while we're dealing with the inevitable tsunami(s), mass panic, flooding/sinking of Richmond, and digging ourselves out from underneath a bunch of rubble. Yes, we are not above feeling smug in the face of widespread tragedy. It's how we cope with being alive.

Wait, there was an earthquake in Mexico yesterday. WAS THAT ALL JUST A WARNING SHOT?

We really should have got started on that end of the world cult we always intended to start a lot sooner.

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