The Real Estate Bubble That Can't Pop

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

In the spring of 2011, a forty-one-year-old software engineer from Fredericton, New Brunswick, named Marcel LeBrun sold the company he had co-founded five years earlier to Salesforce of San Francisco for approximately three hundred and twenty-six million dollars in cash, plus another fifty million dollars in stock. The company was called Radian6. It had become, in five years, one of the largest social-media monitoring platforms in North America. The sale was, at the time, one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the Canadian Maritimes.

LeBrun, who had grown up in the province and earned his electrical and computer engineering degree at the University of New Brunswick, did not move anywhere else. He stayed in Fredericton. He drove an exotic car for a while. He took some racing lessons. He worked for Salesforce for a few years, then for a venture firm, then for a small automotive software company.

Then he looked around his own city.

By the late twenty-tens, the Canadian housing crisis was no longer an abstraction in his hometown. Fredericton, population around sixty-five thousand, had begun to see a significant rise in the number of people sleeping in cars, in tents along the river, and in temporary shelter beds. Most of them were not addicts. Many of them had jobs. They could not, on those jobs, cover what rent now cost in the city. Marcel LeBrun was a wealthy man living in a community where his neighbors were sleeping outside in the New Brunswick winter. He decided that this was a problem with a solution.

He and his wife Sheila, an occupational therapist, spent the next several years researching what worked. They visited social enterprises in American cities, in Calgary, in Winnipeg, and in Ghana. They concluded that what people coming out of homelessness needed first was not a bed in a shelter, but a door of their own that locked.

In 2021, LeBrun bought a stretch of land on Fredericton's north side, near a Walmart parking lot. He converted a former building-supply warehouse into a small factory. He and Sheila put four and a half million dollars of their own money into a non-profit they called 12 Neighbours, and they began building tiny houses.

Each finished house was two hundred and fifty square feet. Each had a small porch, a private bathroom, a compact kitchen, a sleeping area, solar panels on the roof, and walls of tongue-and-groove pine. Each was painted a different bright color. The factory could produce one of these houses, in completed and inspection-ready form, every four days. Each one cost approximately fifty-five thousand dollars to build. The current average cost of a new affordable housing unit in Canada, by LeBrun's own measurement, was around three hundred and fifty thousand.

The first residents, a couple named Melissa and Payton Armstrong, moved into 12 Neighbours in February of 2022. They had been living in a tent on the same north side of Fredericton for the previous ten months. The community grew from one house to forty-five by the end of that year, and to ninety-six by April of 2024, when the last home was strapped to a custom hydraulic trailer at the warehouse and lifted onto its foundation a few kilometers away.

Randy Burtch, a fifty-seven-year-old construction worker who had been living for about a year in his 2004 Chevy Impala because pandemic-era rents in Fredericton had outpaced what his odd jobs could cover, was among the first to move in. A month later, he was hired full-time as one of the carpenters building more tiny houses at the same factory that had built his. He told the Globe and Mail, when a reporter asked him what the difference had been, that if he wanted a shower he could have a shower, and if he wanted something to eat he could go cook it.

In early 2023, the provincial and federal governments contributed thirteen million dollars in additional funding to the project. LeBrun had not asked for the money to start an idea. He had asked for it after he had already demonstrated, in his own backyard, that the idea worked.

In April of 2025, with 12 Neighbours fully occupied, LeBrun launched a second non-profit. He called it Neighbourly Homes. Its product was a smaller and more rapidly deployable transitional housing unit, designed in courtyard clusters of fourteen, costing approximately seventy-five hundred dollars per unit to build and capable of being assembled at one a day. He intended to scale the model across the Maritimes. By January of 2026, the first Neighbourly Homes site, with twenty-seven units, was operating in Fredericton.

Marcel LeBrun is fifty-six years old. He still shows up at the warehouse on the north side of Fredericton every day. He knows the residents of 12 Neighbours by name. When asked, in a Maclean's profile published in early 2024, how he understood his own role in the situation, he said he had won the parent lottery, the education lottery, and the country lottery, and that it would have been arrogant of him to claim that any of the rest of it had been entirely earned.

If his story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Marcel, Fredericton, neighbours, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

[Dr Strangelove]

Housing Policy (0:53 - 4:13): Lewis critiques the federal government’s plan to purchase vacant condos in British Columbia to create affordable housing. While he supports getting families into housing, he argues the plan risks "bailing out developers" rather than investing in non-market or cooperative housing, which he views as the real solution to the housing crisis.
Party Rebuilding & By-elections (4:23 - 8:22): Lewis discusses the importance of the upcoming by-election in Montreal, emphasizing that while it won't change the parliamentary math, it is a critical "beachhead" for the NDP in Quebec. He highlights a surge in local membership and a commitment to grassroots organizing.
Climate & Military Spending (8:22 - 9:30): Lewis criticizes the government's focus on military spending and fossil fuels, contrasting this with what he describes as the ongoing climate emergency, citing recent extreme weather events like heat domes and wildfires.
Foreign Policy (9:30 - 12:08): Lewis calls for a more independent Canadian foreign policy, arguing that Canada has been too aligned with the United States. He discusses the need for humanitarian support in countries like Venezuela and Iran and suggests that Canada should prioritize global humanitarian needs over narrow geopolitical alignment.
24 Sussex Drive (12:10 - 13:28): Lewis comments on the derelict state of the prime minister’s official residence, suggesting that while it is humiliating to see it in disrepair, the focus should potentially shift to other housing solutions rather than massive investments in the historic property.

[testerone]

So long as they only pay the developers for their cost and no profit, it's a faster solution.
Now get the lawyers involved, if the govt bought the units. they are no longer "new" they're resales. Argue that for the end owners to be exempt from GST. The law says new., not that someone gas to live in them.

[Dr Strangelove]

What Poilievre is alleging
Taxpayer-funded bailout: Poilievre argues the plan amounts to using public money to rescue developers, bankers and investors who built too many units at prices the market won’t bear.

Prevents a price correction: He says the program props up high condo prices by preventing developers from being forced to lower them, keeping housing unaffordable for buyers.

Possible conflicts of interest: His letter to the ethics committee questions how the idea originated, noting Carney and B.C. Premier David Eby have given conflicting accounts of who proposed it. He also points to developer attendance at Liberal fundraisers, suggesting Parliament must probe for any “undue benefit.”

What the federal government says
Prime Minister Mark Carney defends the plan as a way to support Canadians who can’t save for a down payment, not developers.
He admits the rollout was poorly communicated, but says the units would be bought at a discount, targeted at distressed condos, and offered under rent‑to‑own models.

Carney says developers did not directly lobby him for the program.

The scale of the program
Total potential acquisition budget: ~$1.45 billion

Federal share: ~10% (~$145 million)

Units targeted: 2,200 unsold condos in “priority growth areas”

Mechanism: Innovative financing tools; rent‑to‑own pathways for buyers

Why this matters for B.C.’s housing market
Poilievre’s core argument is that Vancouver’s housing market needs a correction — meaning prices must fall to reflect real demand.
Buying up unsold units at or near market prices, he says, locks in inflated values, making homes less affordable and shielding developers from losses.

Critics outside politics echo concerns about moral hazard, saying the program risks socializing losses while leaving profits with developers.
Poilievre asks Parliament to probe B.C. 'condo bailout,' says it's blocking 'a price correction'
Moral hazard brought to you by the same clowns that were into satanic panic in the 80's. The people who have no scruples or morals.