> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4] He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.[5] Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.[6]
The rest of AB is basically smaller agricultural towns, with a few oil towns that are basically glorified work-camps (Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray) and then a few mountain towns that have their own crazy dynamic due to national park regulations.
It's not just money laundering, but an entire "industry" of investment and tax fraud schemes:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/out-of...
The essay falls on its face with its central thesis that 2010's Canada = 1970's Soviet Union, which beyond being absurd on its face the author fails to make any case for other than observing, correctly, that bureaucracy exists in Canada and that individuals that are established in a social hierarchy take advantage of it. The underlying motivation for this screed seems to boil down to 1) rents are too high in Vancouver, and 2) firms don't want to pay techies enough in Vancouver. This is then extrapolated linearly to mean 'Canada'.
As for the observation on the housing situation, this is recognized generally as a problem in many markets, but his actual argument here is that these high rents thus smother "wealth creation". This may be true in Vancouver, but doesn't seem to be true in other areas like the Valley or NYC, which remain hotbeds of economic activity. Vancouver's specific problem seems to be that the Soviet leadership in British Columbia has been unable to curb the very capitalist problem of money laundering profits from the People's Republic of China into Canadian real estate.