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Notes -
Canada’s decline
Things are not going well in Canada. The hashtag #Canadaisbroken has been going around for a while, but the scale of the decline remains underdiscussed, especially in our media. Canada’s real GDP per capita is 2.5% lower now than it was in 2019. In the U.S. its 6.0% higher. For decades, Canada has had per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power) that was about 80% of the U.S. level, now its 72% and falling. Canada is rapidly becoming a European country in terms of living standards. This understates the problem because in Europe its easier to live on less: cars are not necessary in many places and, crucially, rent is much lower. Canada is in the midst of an unbelievable housing crisis. At current prices and interest rates, the ownership costs of a typical home would consume 60% of the median household's income, the highest ever recorded. I went to the U.S. southwest recently and my overriding impression is how much better off America is than Canada now.
The Liberal government’s response to this has been deficit spending. Their lack of fiscal responsibility was dramatic during Covid, but hidden under the guise of emergency they spent $200+ billion on new entitlements and spending programs which has resulted in Canada running a permanent structural budget deficit. When combined with our provinces (which unlike U.S. states are allowed to borrow) and measured as a % of GDP, the country is running Bush Jr.-tier fiscal deficits without wars. And what are these new programs? Almost all of them are means-tested benefits for behaviours progressives like. A new daycare program aimed at moms working 9-5 jobs (i.e. white collar) that does nothing for SAHMs, a dental care program which is only for families making under 90k (creating a huge marriage penalty and implicit tax rate), a carbon tax rebate which is income redistribution in disguise, replacing the modest but universal child benefit with a generous means tested one, etc. If you put it together, Canada has largely rebuilt our 1970s welfare state but will claw it back from you more than dollar for dollar as you earn more. We variously incentivize poverty and moms to work, stay unmarried and put their kids in daycare. Our taxes are high.
The other big push from our government is immigration. They occasionally frame it as a way to stop inflation, but usually they don’t defend it at all and assume the pro-immigration consensus is unshakable. The levels were shocking last year, but they keep rising. Over just the past 3 months, Canada admitted 430,000 new people. Canada now has an absolute annual level of legal immigration (including temporary migration) of about 1.2 million -- higher than the United States. We get about 500,000 traditional immigrants, but the big change from recent years is about 700,000 net “non-permanent residents” who form a new helot class. Canada now has 2.5 million temporary residents who come to study or work low-paid jobs and it has rapidly transformed the entire country. These people represent 6% of the population, but because they are highly concentrated by age, they are about 20% of adults aged 20-40. I spend time in a small town that is hundreds of kilometers from any major city and nearly every store now employs temporary foreign workers from India. Every worker at McDonalds. Every worker at Tim Hortons. They live 6+ to an apartment and have tightened the rental market pricing locals out. With population growth running at its highest ever pace, homebuilding is unchanged at about 250,000 units creating an incremental housing need of a quarter million units per year. Rent inflation is over 7% compared with approximately 0% month over month in the US.
What the past few years has made plain to me is how deep leftism runs in Canada and how dedicated it is to ignoring the effect of incentives on behaviour: We can just subsidize bad behaviour and punish good behaviour endlessly without actually changing behaviour. In many ways Canada is running on the fumes of vestigial British earnestness, politeness and self discipline which has made this work in the past, but I think we’re rapidly burning up our cultural capital and once its gone, I think we’ll tip into a much worse equilibrium. I have leftist friends whose perspective is: “sure things aren’t great, but would the conservatives do better?” which makes me sad. For most people, even smart people like my friends, seeing the bad consequences of things they support doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of their worldviews. And I didn’t get into spiraling crime and government celebration of the deracination of our traditional culture.
I think part of what is happening is Anglo culture’s seemliness has become our greatest weakness. Its unseemly to ‘punch down’ and blame an avalanche of mostly-poor international students for the rental market, or permissive and ‘anti-racist’ criminal justice policy for a huge increase in crime so we equivocate and people say things like “its so brutal, how sad” while continuing to vote in the same way. There is no transmission from failure in office to electoral results, so we end up with people like Trudeau for three terms. One astute observation I’ve heard about Canadian ‘niceness’ is that its fake: people are very cagey about saying what they think in public about anything controversial. Our entire country is a university campus. Canadians live in a world of feel good pablum as our way of life is destroyed. People rage about it, but there is no honest sensemaking apparatus in Canada – because talking about things plainly is unseemly – so rage is dissipated randomly. Even today, even after its failures, the combined polling share of the LPC-led ruling coalition (i.e. LPC+NDP) is nearly 50%.
I’d heard there was a nullification crisis going on in Canada- is this true, and to what extent is it driven by that stuff?
Yes, its related. In Canada provinces can create carbon pricing schemes, but if they dont, the Federal government imposes a 'backstop' carbon tax. The revenues of that tax get rebated to people per capita, creating a 'climate UBI' of a few hundred bucks. The incidence of that tax falls hardest on rural people who drive the most since in practice the tax is implemented as a tax on gas and various ways of heating homes. The crisis started when the Liberal government removed the carbon tax from home heating oil which is only used in a handful of provinces which vote liberal as a vote buying maneuver. Sounds uncharitable, but a minister came on TV and said that if other provinces wanted carve outs like that they should elect more liberals.
In response, the conservative government of Saskatchewan -- one of our most right-wing provinces -- promised to nullify the carbon tax by refusing to collect it. Its still a live issue, as the nullification starts Jan 1.
This is emblematic of another thing our government loves to do: alienate its conservative citizens. The danger is that many of those people are highly geographically concentrated on the prairies. And the support is overwhelming. In much of the rural west, the Liberals get about 15% of the vote compared to conservatives with 65%. This sort of thing is partly why I think we underestimate the likelihood that western provinces leave in the next few decades.
I'm not that familiar with the culture of western Canada, but don't people there have very shallow roots? Aren't most of them, if they're not foreign, from eastern Canada within a few generations? I find it hard to believe that such people would separate. It's a totally different situation in Quebec.
It would also become harder to sell their oil unless British Columbia left with them.
Well, that depends on where you go in Western Canada- even those provinces are not the same.
For instance, if you go to Manitoba (and to a point, Saskatchewan) there's a significant chunk of that population with native ancestry that goes back to the earliest French contact (which is why the word that describes being a half-breed, 'métis'(1), is French), and this faction was politically powerful enough in the late 1860s to rebel hard enough to force the newly-created government of Canada to create the province as a distinct entity in the first place. So ancestral roots of a non-trivial portion of the people who live there run a bit deeper than those of the average western US state, and that's reflected in its governance even today.
Manitoba doesn't have many resources as the land to its West does, mainly because the province is one giant peat bog whose total theoretical arable land is basically 50% underwater (so... not great for farming)- Minnesota may be the land of 10,000 lakes, but Manitoba's title of the land of 100,000 lakes is actually kind of underselling it given its three largest bodies of water are roughly the size of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined. If you want a better look at where economic activity is possible in Manitoba, it is illustrative to look at its 1870 border... which to this day, still encompasses every city and town in the province with a population over 15000; this further speaks to a shockingly bad distribution of resources.
The land gets easier to work as you go west to Saskatchewan; which had fewer people and was populated later by the typical settler population one would expect to see in western US states. Most of its land is above ground this time (it is the flattest province) and the granite slab ends in this province- plus, it has some oil, so while there are less people they're wealthier on average. Most famous for its universal healthcare system (which would be used as a model for every other province) and competently-run government; traditionally a purple state like the Dakotas and Montana, much like Manitoba, for the same reasons (and the same kind of immigrant population).
Alberta is a different animal since it actually has economic opportunity thanks to its oil fields; both of its major cities contain an order of magnitude more people than those in Saskatchewan. Cold Texas is the right way to describe it- the land in Alberta is 1/6th desert, 1/3rd mountains, and the growing season is much shorter around the major population centers due to their latitude, but the province has managed its wealth well enough to diversify (the existence of non-resource-extraction jobs being something that, along with the relative ease of building homes on its land, have kept prices to reasonable levels while still allowing rapid expansion).
BC is... well, a lot like Washington in that the two major cities on the ocean and the rest of the province tend to find themselves at odds politically, for most of the same reasons.
If push came to shove separation-wise, I think BC could quite easily be torn in half more or less along the 52nd parallel- Vancouver is probably powerful enough, and its culture common enough, to retain both the cities below that line and the various islands that depend on Vancouver to survive, but I don't think it's powerful enough to keep Kitimat (which is currently the sea route Alberta is already using to sell its oil).
I do too, but for the exact opposite reason: it's that significant sections of Upper Canada are generally, by and large, OK with rule by Western Canada. It's both Lower Canada (that is to say, Quebec) and the Maritime provinces that generally aren't- the latter are relevant because they're essentially the Rust Belt of the nation and fully dependent on handouts ever since the Grand Banks were destroyed... which naturally puts them at odds with provinces that would like to keep more of their own economic output. They've been in decline for the past 3 decades and the average resident age of the province that took the brunt of it is pushing 50, with the others not fairing much better at an average of 45.
As far as Quebec goes... well, I defer to Kulak on that one, though I think the bureaucracy in Ottawa (and to a point, Toronto) also counts as intentionally hostile. Perhaps the attempts to inculcate hostility in these power bases against the rest of the country actually was an attempt at long-term strategy?
(1) Pronounced the way a pirate refers to his crew, not "meh-tiss".
Wait, what? I've never heard it this way. (4th gen Western Canadian checking in -- I guess that's more than 'a few' but considering that people were still going overland in wagons 5 generations before my birth it's indeed rare to be much higher without native ancestry)
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If they leave, where do they go? Try to join the US? Create the Dominion of Based Canada?
A smarter US would be trying to get them to join the US.
They would contaminate us with their policies. Our politics would be to some degree merged with theirs.
Western Canada only has about 12 million people compared to the US's 330 million.
Correct. And 3 or so new blue states would each get a couple senators, a few congresspeople and a corresponding amount of electoral votes. Which could drive American politics in a new direction.
It's the idea that if Texas turns blue then the Republicans are finished. A few successive Democratic administrations with supporting congress will rewrite our laws and stack our courts full of judges who will support them. And the Republican path too electoral victory is to narrow to survive a blue Texas (or blue British Columbia plus Albert plus maybe some more).
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Assimilation only happens on US terms. It would quickly overwhelm Canada and bring it in line with US politics.
Most of the distasteful shit (from my perspective anyway - anti-migrant Canadians must hate both parties since I came over in Harper's time...) is Liberal stuff they can get away with because there's no GOP and governmental splits. That changes in the US system.
People keep wrongly thinking the Republican party will be vanquished forever as a contender for president and having a majority of congress if only Texas would drift a bit bluer. The thinking goes that any year now they will be a permanent minority in terms of national elected officials.
If we let large portions of Canada into the US, then eventually they will get to vote for Congressional representatives and president. Then the Republican party will be vanquished forever. Or until they realign in such a way as to capture around half the national level power. Which I characterize as being contaminated by Canadian politics.
Western Canada is HEAVILY covservative, and the most immediate impact would be all the Blue canadians move to blue state for bureaucracy jobs and tons of Red Americans move north for Resource extraction jobs
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Why?
Alberta is cold Texas. Who doesn't want more Texas in the US?
Obligatory reminder that Texas is not actually a bastion of freedom
For non-potheads, Texas is relatively free, and education savings accounts will happen- Greg Abbott is personally campaigning for primary challengers to republicans that voted against it, you’re looking at a much darker red in the Texas state legislature ‘25.
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I'm sorry I promise I will read the full report and treat it with absolute seriousness, as soon as I get over laughing at #Cannabis And Salvia Freedom
If that section doesn't end with the writer becoming a gelatinous 5-dimensional cube falling through an endless universe of mirrors for ten billion years, I will concede that his Salvia Freedom has been Infringed.
Not mocking anyone here: libertarians are my favorite people because they're the only fun political group left.
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It actually is quite free, that source just dings it for stuff like a high incarceration rate which is irrelevant.
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Would help the US in its great power competition with China.
I don't think trying to convince an ally's citizens to secede is generally considered a wise geopolitical move. Would you rather
Seems like an easy choice to me.
If Canada lost some territory to the US, it would become even more dependent on the US.
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Western Canada is much wealthier than eastern Canada. The GDP per capita there is only slightly less than it is in the US.
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Like how Italy ""helped"" the Nazis in WW2. Bad allies are a liability. Unless the plan is for Americans to "drill, baby, drill" Canada for natural resources.
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Does the US really need an additional few (compared to them) poor states added to it? Maybe linking up to Alaska by land would be nice but beyond that?
Alberta is the standout but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are no slouches either: as global warming progresses the US agricultural zones slowly creep northward. All of our Ukrainians have historically lived there, as well.
Alberta and Saskatchewan are richer than the US as result of their natural resources, but Manitoba is well below the Canadian average.
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Alberta is a rich province thanks largely to oil. It is way above the Canadian average and would be in the top half of states.
Fair enough. That would definitely be a good add to the USA. Probably worth the rest of the baggage too if you can get Alberta.
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At least Alberta is a massive subsidy to the rest of Canada, I think.
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Would they still be poor if they were inside the US?
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