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Notes -
The Creeping Barrage
Canada is currently undergoing a soft awakening to many of the difficulties that are projected in the next fifty years. I have seen a change in the way many talk about the political issues facing our country that even four or five years ago I would have thought impossible.
Inflation hit Canada hard, and the cost of living is reaching unbelievable proportions. Although many have a picture of Canada as this rough outdoorsman like nation, most of the population of Canada live in urban centers. Cities which are becoming almost impossible to live in. In Toronto, the largest city in Canada, the costs of a family of four is $4,515 not including rent. Even people making over $100,000 annually are living paycheck to paycheck.
https://wowa.ca/cost-of-living-canada
Rent and the housing shortage is a compounding problem. The average cost of a home in Canada is $656,625. This is a bubble that has actually been developing since the early 2000’s but got increasingly worse over the lockdown. All attempts by the government to do anything substantial about this has been like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. There is now an understanding by anyone younger than 35 that we will essentially never be able to afford a home, and essentially be rent and debt slaves for the foreseeable future.
All in all, most Canadians have now become inexcusably aware that our country is in serious decline and will not have a greater living standard than our parents. While this isn’t a surprise to everyone (we have had people attempting to pull the brakes on many of the policies that caused this for many years) it seems that political opinions have changed dramatically over the course of what seems like overnight.
Trudeau and the liberal party have been in power for almost ten years, getting elected three times since 2015. His support began high and has steadily decreased until today. While his criticisms when he was first elected surrounded his unserious and dilettante demeanor, he has been plagued with a number of high-profile scandals that he somehow managed to evade, including the SNC Lavelin case, the blackface debacle and the RCMP investigation scandal following the 2020 Nova Scotia shootings.
Trudeau is now extremely unpopular. Recent polls indicate that over 72% of Canadians want him to step down, up 12% from just last month, and the liberal party is significantly trailing the conservative party for the first time in almost 15 years.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-trudeau-far-behind-polls-remains-liberals-best-chance-2023-10-11/
https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/growing-proportion-canadians-want-trudeau-step-down
One of the greatest issues that have cursed the liberal party is their policies regarding mass immigration. For those who don’t understand just how serious the problem is, we have brought in over 430,000 immigrants just in 2022 alone. If you compared the number of immigrants into the country on a per capita basis, it would be the equivalent of America taking in 20 million immigrants over the last two years. This doesn't even include the millions who are let into the country on student visas and then gain their permanent residency after they have graduated.
The opinions towards mass immigration have quickly turned, in a way that has left me equal parts shocked and ecstatic. One of the reasons housing prices are so unreasonable is simply because the demand for homes outweighs the supply we currently can sustain. Canadians are correct in assuming that immigration is a host of all sorts of problems that we are currently experiencing. All of our major social welfare systems are under heavy load, including our infrastructure, education, and health care system.
75% of Canadians are now against mass immigration.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/liberal-mismanagement-turns-canadians-against-immigration
This is not simply a quiet trend as it was before. Even two years ago you had to speak about these things quietly because accusations of prejudice and racism would be enthusiastically thrown out. They still are, but they simply don’t have the bite anymore. I have seen more real-life discussion about this in the last two months than I have in the last five years. Even on places like Reddit and twitter I’m seeing a lot of popular comments I never would have thought I would see on mainstream platforms, many of which are not simply against immigration for it's economic factor, but have taken a more racially charged approach than expected.
Here are some examples
But we are faced with a problem. The government has absolutely no plans to stop this. It has already been announced that Canada will take in another million immigrants in the next two years. In fact they are currently planning to have over 100 million people in Canada by the year 2100, a program they call the century initiative.
https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/about/who-we-are
Without immigration, Canadas economy would go though a historic collapse. 100% of our economic growth is dependent on immigrants, the housing bubble only keeps going because of this scarcity they bring, and they account for 75% of Canada's demographic growth. Now while obviously this collapse would be absolutely worth it, no politician in their right mind wants to be the one who is helming the ship as it goes down. They would be blamed for everything, and the moment a conservative or reactionary did the things necessary to remedy the situation the media conglomerates and leftist politicians would swarm in and poison everyone against him. He would be ousted from power, the government would be given back to some other flavor liberal, and the immigration would flow mightily on again, this time with growth numbers to boot. The conservative party which everyone is now sweet on is not going to stop it either.
That being said, I don’t see how the ruling class thinks they will be able to play this con for damn near 80 years when it is already becoming extremely unpopular and have legitimately no way to remedy the problems without drastically changing domestic policy. That's also not even mentioning things like the crime rate and wage stagnation. I have a nagging feeling in my head that this is all a slow-moving train to disaster in one way or another.
The point is I don’t see any option where Canada can remedy this democratically. We are in for a long time of political stress here in the great white north, and I don’t think anything is off the table at this point in time.
I think you are conflating two issues that are mostly unrelated. Housing costs are probably being driven up slightly by increased demand due to immigration, but the effect is tiny compared to the supply-side problems caused by excessive red tape that makes housing expensive and difficult to build. The population of Houston, Texas is about 20% foreign-born immigrants, yet housing is extremely affordable because there is no zoning, no rent controls, and few regulatory hoops to jump through if you want to build housing.
Nobody worries about immigrants buying up all the food, or all the cars, or all the cell phones. If demand goes up, the economy will just produce more of these things to meet demand. It doesn't make sense to worry about immigrants buying up all the housing either, unless there's a problem on the supply side that makes it impossible to meet demand. Fix the supply side problem if you want to fix the housing problem.
Texas is a special case in that it's, yes, growing extremely quickly, but also has a bare-bones welfare state and is not concerned about the standard of living of poor people. This is not Canada. There's not really a social welfare system to strain; it's up to private charities, some of which are funded by the state, but there's no sense that anyone is entitled to their services. In other first world countries poor immigrants use welfare resources that natives feel entitled to.
This is a much stronger argument for cutting the welfare state than it is of restricting immigration, especially when you have the Texas success example right next to it.
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In my experience, things like low housing costs and a robust economy are far more conducive to poor people's standard of living than a robust wellfare state. Houston, for example, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. The country of Canada has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents, with cities often much higher than that; for example in Toronto the rate seems to be in excess of 322 per 100k.
So while I would agree that Canada is more "concerned" about poor people, it's not at all clear to me that Canada is actually providing a better standard of living for poor people.
I didn't say it was. Obviously being able to rent a spare bedroom for $600/mo(going rate in my large Texas city; there's cheaper out there) beats homelessness by a mile even if it's strictly worse than having your own apartment. Obviously being able to work for $11/hr(where unskilled labor bottoms out here) is a lot better than being unemployed because there are no jobs, but if there were they'd pay $15/hr, even if it's worse than having one of those hypothetical $15/hr jobs. I've lived deep below the poverty line in Texas(although I don't currently) and think I rather prefer it to the same income in Canada. But it's a pretty big difference that the mass migration to Texas has no ability to access welfare resources beyond what a private charity wants to give them, and (at least some portion of)immigrants demanding the state take care of them are, famously, shipped to New York. This is a relevant variable to the feeling of "immigrants are using up resources that should be going to the native poor".
Sure, this is a valid argument, but it's an argument against welfare, not against immigration.
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