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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.
Maybe a silly question, but given that Canada is a massive country concentrated in a few urban areas, why aren’t there more initiatives to build new cities and associated infrastructure, with migration plans explicitly focused on bringing migrants to the new cities rather than existing overcrowded urban areas?
Because people don't want to live there. We already have lots of affordable towns and small cities. But they're affordable because there is little demand for people to live there, and there is little demand for people to live there because there are no good jobs. Many of these places are actually populated mainly by old people and have shrinking populations.
The high demand areas aren't even overcrowded. There is nothing like Manhattan in Canada, let alone a denser city like Paris or Tokyo. Canadian cities usually have a small dense downtown core surrounded by miles and miles of low density neighbourhoods of single detached houses.
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My wife's family is from a more rural part of Canada. We went back to visit not too long ago. They're building apartments everywhere out there, all for the immigrants. All sorts of pockets that used to be empty now have a bunch of big apartment buildings and a small number of shops that are popping up nearby to serve them. Most of the people I talked to were natives, friends of the family. Everyone is definitely too polite blue to say anything outright negative, but in nearly every single conversation I had, it came up at some point. I wasn't bringing it up. But there would almost always be a moment where they'd kinda hesitate, think about what they're saying, give a little breath almost as if, "I'm not sure I'm quite allowed to say this, but I'm going to word it this way, and maybe it'll be okay," followed by some form of, "There are a lot of immigrants now. Especially since COVID. The local culture is changing. It's not the way it used to be anymore." They're not saying the follow-up, "...and I think that's bad," but I repeatedly got the impression that they sure were thinking something like that.
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This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
Which Canadian officials say that the purpose of immigration is keeping up housing prices?
It's usually framed using words like "resilience and strength" or "vibrant". The leading newspapers regularly feature columns from or interviewing people with incentives to encourage immigration with little critical analysis applied. Here's an example. Great emphasis is placed on the importance of housing prices continuing to rise in perpetuity.
I think you got over your skis here. The first link is just a factual report about prices rising and doesn't seem to mention immigration. The second is essentially a realtor's opinion (no surprise that realtors are in favor of continued scarcity). The third and fourth get closer but I still don't see any officials out and out saying that the purpose of immigration is to keep housing prices high.
I do agree that the third and fourth articles curiously assume that high housing costs are a good thing in a way that I haven't seen in American media though.
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I would guess it's because that's not where they need workers. If you keep the country just the same as it is but a new city appears somewhere in it then that doesn't do much for the existing country except by raising overall GDP.
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