The Case for 100 Million Canadians
The Case for 100 Million Canadians
If the country wants to survive, it needs a lot more people
We've neglected our infrastructure for decades. Both the physical stuff like housing, transit, community centers, and sewers; but also the human side, like doctors, nurses, and skilled trades.
Once we get ourselves to the point where everyone has a doc, people can get around easily, and schools have enough space/teachers, we'll be ready to invite a significant number of people in.
The article discusses this issue specifically and provides a pretty balanced perspective on it. I don't personally blame immigration for the issues we see today and there is a compelling argument that immigration could help us out of these problems, but it really does require adequate government investment in the sectors that need labour (like healthcare)
I wish Carney had straight-up promised that governments would build affordable housing instead of relying on private enterprise doing it.
The problem is that our governments are shit planners. They've allocated funds poorly, failed to train enough healthcare workers, failed to expand transit, financialized housing, and basically just paid attention to the next election cycle.
The article kinda mentions that, but doesn't go into it. Recently, politicians used immigration as a stopgap to cover for our terrible productivity and aging demographics (don't forget post secondary funding!).
Do you trust the current crop of politicians to suddenly find competence and be able to pull off a smooth doubling of our population when they screwed up the 30% increase of the past free decades?
I don't.
Wow, extremely not a good time to bring up that particular bullshit. I had to double-check that the date on it wasn't April 1.
It’s an interesting proposition but the current areas everyone wants to settle to can’t sustain it anymore. Government needs to start spreading their dollars, and by association people, to other parts of the country which the room for growth. I don’t it will happen.
The article thankfully mentions what I believe is the main issue. Housing is a commodity now not a need to be filled.
Housing is now considered an investment. And investments are expected to go up in value. Since the majority of our population have adopted this stance, any policy that may lower the cost of housing gets torpedoed because a large amount of the population either owns property or thinks they will own property soon. People don't vote against their own interests.
This problem is compounded by the fact that people with land have more power, they can borrow against their assets to acquire more capital. People with more capital can lobby the government more effectively.
Of course my stance is that these people can get by with LESS money so that the people with almost NO money can survive. Convincing them of this though may prove to be nearly impossible and without their cooperation it's going to be a real uphill battle.
All this to say that until we NEED to get the cost of living under control. Immigration is necessary to keep our economy growing at the rate we'd like it to grow but it also is exasperating the cost of living crisis. It's complicated.
The one good thing about this mindset is that building high density housing actually increases the value of any one specific plot of land, since the land is worth like 80% of a home's sales price in the first place nowadays. Even a low-rise apartment will increase the number of units of a single plot of land by a dozen or more, even if each individual unit is worth a tenth of the original plot, it will still come out to an overall higher value. Hundreds of times more if you build a high rise.
So if you can convince people that if you can approve the building of a high rise in any neighborhood at the place of a handful of houses, that those who sell can get double the value of their plot all at once, we can do this.
Even when people think of housing in the insane way as an investment, there are ways to spin things so that they can be convinced it's a good thing even for them. Either that, or we go the way of Japan and China, and the housing prices will collapse to only a quarter of what they are currently worth in less time than they can notice what's going on and sell them.
Hard pass.
Maybe one day, not for another decade or more. Kinda ackward it's even discussed with record amounts of homeless Canadians, high unemployment & a crazy housing/social services mess. Makes me think the people pushing this don't actually care about Canadians.
Laurier/McKensie, then raised again by Trudeau, but went poorly. Absorbing US states as provinces is by far quickest path to far exceed this.