At the Canada West Forum website, you’ll find a video contrasting two very different responses to homelessness. It shows formerly unhoused people in Finland now living securely and comfortably in permanent homes — a testament to that country’s commitment to long-term solutions.
The video also examines American efforts to provide compact, temporary shelters — an approach that may offer short-term relief but is far less effective for people facing chronic housing instability.
The Finnish model is explained by Juha Kahila, who will be a featured participant in the upcoming online Canada West Forum event, Housing: The Affordability Challenge.
Mr. Kahila noted:
Finland has been awarded happiest country in the world eight years in a row now. I think it comes to this basic thing: that we take care of each other, and that we don’t demand too much. When we have a home and health, when we can can buy groceries from the store, family or boat, We are quite happy to be honest. Yeah, this is why we are there.
The New York Times published an article titled: The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough. Writer Penelope Colston quoted Professor Arto O. Salonen of the University of Eastern Finland:
When you know what is enough, you are happy.
The article mentions:
The high quality of life in Finland is deeply rooted in the nation’s welfare system, Mr. Kiiski, 47, who lives in Turku, said. “It makes people feel safe and secure, to not be left out of society.”
…Public funding for education and the arts, including individual artist grants, gives people like his wife, Hertta, a mixed-media artist, the freedom to pursue their creative passions…
The conventional wisdom is that it’s easier to be happy in a country like Finland where the government ensures a secure foundation on which to build a fulfilling life and a promising future…
Many of our subjects cited the abundance of nature as crucial to Finnish happiness: Nearly 75 percent of Finland is covered by forest, and all of it is open to everyone thanks to a law known as “jokamiehen oikeudet,” or “everyman’s right,” that entitles people to roam freely throughout any natural areas, on public or privately owned land…
Maybe it isn’t that Finns are so much happier than everyone else. Maybe it’s that their expectations for contentment are more reasonable, and if they aren’t met, in the spirit of sisu, they persevere.
“We don’t whine,” Ms. Eerikainen said. “We just do.”
The Finnish language is full of sayings and wisdom. Here are some of them:
| In Finnish | English Equivalent |
| Aamu on iltaa viisaampi. | The morning is wiser than the evening. |
| Ei kysyvä tieltä eksy. | Who asks for the road doesn’t get lost. |
| Työ tekijäänsä neuvoo. | Work teaches the worker. |
| Rohkea rokan syö. | The brave eats the soup. |
| Hätä keinon keksii. | Emergency finds the way. |
| Niin metsä vastaa, kuin sinne huudetaan. | The forest answers in the same way one shouts at it. |
| Mikä laulaen tulee, se viheltäen menee. | Easy come, easy go. |
| Joka vanhoja muistelee, sitä tikulla silmään. | A poke in the eye for the one, who dwells on the past. |
| Pata kattilaa soimaa, musta kylki kummallakin. | The pot blames the kettle, yet both have a black side. |
| Konstit on monet, sano mummo kun kissalla pöytää pyyhki. | There are more than one ways to skin a cat. |
| Tyvestä puuhun noustaan. | Learn to walk before you can run. |
| Ei ole koiraa karvoihin katsominen. | Don’t judge a book by its cover. |
| Hätä ei lue lakia. | Desperate times call for desperate actions. |
| Kell’ onni on se onnen kätkeköön. | A warning to not boast about possessions and drawing attention to inequality. |
| Ei se pelaa, joka pelkää. | No guts, no glory. |
| Hädässä ystävä tunnetaan. | A friend in need is a friend indeed. |
| Ei nimi miestä pahenna, jos ei mies nimeä. | A name doesn’t make a man worse if the man doesn’t make the name worse. |
| Päivä on pulkassa. | The day is in the tally stick. |
| Rahalla saa ja hevosella pääsee. | Money makes the world go around. |
| Oppia ikä kaikki. | All the years are full of learning. |
| Eteenpäin sanoi mummo lumessa. | Keep going through difficulties with determination. |
| Vakka kantensa valitsee. | Birds of a feather flock together. |
| Tyhjästä on paha nyhjästä. | You can’t grab something from nothing. |
| Ei kukaan ole seppä syntyessään. | You can only master something through learning and experience. It’s okay to make mistakes as you learn. |
| Vahinko ei tule kello kaulassa. | You won’t get a warning beforehand when bad things happen. |
| Ei vara venettä kaada. | Better safe than sorry. |
| Älä nuolaise ennenkuin tipahtaa. | Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. |
| Jokainen on oman onnensa seppä. | Good or bad, everyone is the smith of their own fortune. |
| Ei auta itku markkinoilla. | It’s no use crying over spilled milk. |
| Luja tahto vie läpi harmaan kiven. | Where there’s a will, there’s a way. |
| Kaksi kärpästä yhdellä iskulla. | Two flies with one hit. |
| SOURCE: Her Finland |
The New York website adds the following advice on being happy. It notes that happiness can predict health and longevity, but it doesn’t just happen.
- Want to feel happier? One proven strategy is to strengthen what psychologists call your reward sensitivity.
- Small changes in your behavior and surroundings can set you on course for happiness. Here’s how.
- Our seven-day Happiness Challenge will help you focus on a crucial element of living a good life — your relationships.
- Finland has been ranked the happiest country on earth for six consecutive years. What’s the secret? The answer is complicated.
- Cultivating a sense of wonder can be a salve for a turbulent mind. Here is how to make it part of your everyday life.
- It can seem impossible to be optimistic about the future. But these questions will help you understand what all optimists have in common.
Categories: Housing, Human Rights
in-sights.ca 
Canada took some of the Finnish happiness away in the semi-finals of the Olympic men’s hockey this morning. I’m sure they’ll recover and I wish them luck for the bronze. Eteenpäin sanoi mummo lumessa.
I note some objection on the Canada West Forum site to the fact there was a US component to the video. Until we reach a point where proven Canadian solutions for housing are the subject of video documentaries like this, and homelessness is not an issue here, we should be examining best practices wherever we find them. In any event, novel and workable solutions arising in the US, even if short-term, will have been developed in spite of Trumpism, not because of it.
The facilities operated under Y-Säätiö and the short term US models in the video are leagues ahead of the SRO solutions here under BC Housing. Uplifting vs depressing.
Nationally, Prime Minister Carney’s Build Canada Homes project has progressed to the stage where there is a “Request For Information” process underway “to engage Canadian firms specializing in modern methods of construction (MMC)—including modular, panelized, and prefabricated systems. The RFI aims to gather insights from industry leaders on capabilities, business models, and delivery approaches.”
There are also two solicitations out to prequalify firms to be invited to bid in the future for a 1,000-unit housing project in Longueuil, and a 600-unit project in Dartmouth. These are part of the $13 Billion plan to “Build Canada Homes” on federal lands across the country. Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Edmonton are apparently next. No mention of BC.
Despite the use in press releases of almost the entire thesaurus to describe how rapidly they’re moving, it will be at least one or two elections from now before any politicians get sore fingers from ribbon cutting.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2025/09/14/prime-minister-carney-launches-build-canada-homes
Interesting to note that the initial CEO of Build Canada Homes came to her post after a three-month stint as Head of Affordable Housing & Public Affairs with the private developer Dream Unlimited Corporation. She resigned just before a major controversy involving a tenants’ rent strike in Toronto at one of their projects broke out over rent increase and maintenance issues. Her background prior to that leads me to believe that she was not in favour of the increases.
As for the current homeless population, there’s this:
“Build Canada Homes will deploy $1 billion to build transitional and supportive housing for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. It will collaborate with key provincial, territorial, municipal, and Indigenous partners to pair these federal investments with employment and health care supports.”
The last sentence of that paragraph is bureaucracy writ large, and despite Ms Bailão’s undoubted skill and keenness for the task, I believe we’re looking at later rather than sooner.
But at least we’re moving.
LikeLiked by 1 person
If the question is how to bolster public support with new ideas maybe The UK needs some advice from Spain and Mexico. Such advice could lift our governments back to where they are trusted.
Advice? A cap on prices by government? That would be different. But impossible unless Mexico and Spain show the UK how.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/27/governments-controlling-prices-inevitable-mexico-spain-cost-of-living
In Mexico and Spain, leaders who have capped public costs have been rewarded at the ballot box. As another cost of living surge arrives, it may be a policy our leaders are unable to resist
Politicians are not supposed to meddle with prices. Even though much of politics is about whether voters can afford things – especially in an era of recurring inflationary shocks – ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s planned economy four decades ago, the orthodoxy across much of the world has been that only markets should decide what things cost.
As the hugely influential Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argued, in a complex modern society, information is too dispersed among potential sellers and buyers of goods or services for government to make informed and correct decisions about the prices of those goods. Hence, his disciples say, the inefficiency of state-run economies, from post-colonial Africa to the eastern bloc.
Yet as the 21st century has gone on, and market economies have proved ever less able to provide essentials such as energy and housing at an affordable cost – while also generating their own huge inefficiencies, such as soaring salaries for failing executives, and privatised utilities that don’t provide a functional service – so interest in the state regulating and even setting prices has started to grow again.
Sudden bursts of inflation from wars, the pandemic and agriculture’s disruption by the climate crisis have prompted governments to make economic interventions that would until recently have been considered hopelessly old-fashioned, unnatural and even immoral. Even the Tories, one of the most stubbornly pro-market parties in the world, introduced the energy price cap, having previously called this Labour policy “Marxist”.
Few elected governments have survived long in the feverish climate created by this decade’s high prices. Inflation may have complex global causes, but its consequences are often brutally simple, and blamed on national politicians, as Keir Starmer may soon find out, despite not being responsible for the war with Iran.
Even after decades of pro-market propaganda, many voters across the world still believe that protecting living standards is the first duty of government: maintaining national security in an everyday, economic sense rather than the rarer, military one.
Strikingly, two democracies with large economies have managed to avoid much of the inflation-driven, anti-incumbency rage of recent years, and have seen their governments re-elected. In Mexico, the leftwing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, have capped the total price of a basket of two dozen essential goods, such as chicken, rice and toilet paper.
At weekly televised press conferences, they have praised or criticised specific companies for cooperating or not cooperating with the scheme: an unsubtle but effective form of commercial and political pressure.
At the 2024 presidential election, Obrador and Sheinbaum’s party, Morena, raised its vote share from 55% to 61%.
Meanwhile in Spain, the more centre-left government of Pedro Sánchez has responded to the Iran war with a national rent freeze. During the previous cost of living crisis, his government imposed an energy price cap, temporarily made many train tickets free and created a state body, the Business Margins Observatory, to watch for and deter profiteering, since some companies use inflation panics to smuggle through extra price rises alongside unavoidable ones. These assertive policies have helped keep Sánchez in office for eight years so far, through three general elections.
Other centre-left premiers would love such a lifespan.
This week, Zack Polanski said Starmer’s government “should follow the example set by Spain”, and freeze rents. The Green party leader also advocates a wider price reset. “We live in rip-off Britain,” he said in a typically populist recent speech about reforming the economy. “The things we rely on to build the foundations of a good life [have] been … sold for profit – and then sold or rented back to us at crushing rates … Let’s stop paying the privatisation penalty and lining the pockets of shareholders – starting with [nationalising] the water companies.”
Polanski sceptics may think that he is unlikely ever to be in the position to do these things.
However, there is an unnoticed similarity between his economic critique and that of a possible Labour leadership candidate, whom Polanski has suggested he could work with in a coalition government: Andy Burnham. “Thatcher’s deregulation and privatisation,” wrote Burnham in January, “left people and businesses paying way over the odds for the essentials and are the root cause of today’s cost of living crisis.” Like Polanski, he wants more state involvement in the economy in order to reduce prices.
Supporting Burnham’s increasingly ambitious arguments are his experiences as mayor of Greater Manchester, where he has brought buses back under public control, lowering fares while raising usage and punctuality; and also a growing body of evidence about the inflationary business models of Britain’s privatised utilities, much of it gathered and publicised by the leftwing thinktank Common Wealth. Last year, it calculated that almost £200bn had been paid by these utilities to shareholders, foreign owners and private equity companies since most of this country’s uniquely extensive privatisation programme was completed in the early 1990s.
From the Thatcher government onwards, Britain has been a leading laboratory for the experiment by modern capitalism and its political enablers in maximising profits and prices, regardless of the wider social and economic consequences. With the coming wave of inflation, on top of the seemingly endless cost of living surge since the early 2020s, it’s possible that the pressure for Britain to finally pull out of that experiment, and imitate the broad price caps of countries such as Spain and Mexico instead, will become too strong to resist. A majority of British voters have long shared the view of Burnham, Polanski and Common Wealth that nationalisations are needed to get prices under control..
LikeLike