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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'll just put this out there- I think Canada should merge with the US. And arguably should have a long time ago.
No clue how this would shake up politically, but I would think it would make both nations more moderate. The US certainly wouldn't vote for Trudeau.
This is politically impossible. Canadians have a very strong national identity which is based at its core - and on little else - on not being American. Remember, it's the only country in the world that was actually founded in direct opposition to the principles on which the US was founded. The entire point of Canada, for its entire history, has been to not be part of the United States. Furthermore, the Canadian population has been heavily selected over 250 years for people who don't want to be Americans. So despite the cultural similarities, most Canadians very much don't want to be part of the United States.
Most Canadians don't appreciate how much richer the US is, and those who do, mostly think it's only the very richest who are better off. They falsely believe that the average person is richer in Canada.
There are also constitutional issues. Quebec's language laws would violate the first amendment, and nothing is more important to French speaking Quebeckers than protecting their language. They would far sooner become independent than give up control over what language speak in order to join the US.
Our gun control laws would violate the second amendment, and most Canadians have no interest in giving up their safety in order to have that right. There are lots of Canadians who like to hunt and are upset and some of the recent changes to the gun laws, but there is nothing like the broad support that the second amendment has among American conservatives. The gun situation in the US is seen by most Canadians as crazy. and it would be top of mind in any discussion about joining the US.
Most Canadians wouldn't see this as a good thing and would prefer to keep them here where they can support our local industry.
Is there something preventing them from doing this now? The environmentalist movement is very strong in Canada, and outside Alberta, most people don't actually want the oil industry to be further developed.
Quebec isn't persecuted in any way and has much more autonomy than it would as part of the United States, in particular, regarding laws on language usage and immigration. It would also face more pressure to assimilate into anglophone culture. Canada has a lot of federal laws enforcing bilingualism in the rest of the country. These wouldn't exist if it were part of the US, and Quebec's exposure to anglophone culture would increase. Quebec also receives large subsidies from the richer parts of the country as part of Canada's equalization payment system, which the US doesn't have.
It would also lose its ability to separate. US states don't have the right to secede, whereas in Canada, it is not clear, but they likely can if there is enough support among the province's residents. Quebec separatism may be dormant, but francophone Quebeckers do not really see themselves as Canadian and it's quite possible Quebec will try to separate again in the future if it's relationship with the rest of Canada worsens. It would not want to give up that option.
What does this mean?
For most of history, Canadians could just move to the US. There were no immigration restrictions. And even today, it's one of the easier countries to move to the US from. It also used to be easier and more attractive to move to the US than to move to Canada. So most Canadians are descended from people who either chose to move to Canada over the US or chose to stay in Canada and not move to the US, generation after generation, despite the worse weather and the worse economy.
It also might be worth noting that tens of thousands of loyalists from the 13 colonies moved to Canada during the American Revolutionary War, and this was at a time when the population of what is now Canada was only about 150,000 or so. So a non-trivial fraction of Canada's founding stock were people who fled what ended up becoming the United States for political reasons, sometimes because of well-justified fears of violent repression from the revolutionaries.
Yes, that's part of what I was referring to. In fact, most of the population was French when the loyalists came. The loyalists basically were the founding stock of English Canada, while the French had their own reasons for not joining the US in their rebellion.
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By this logic, shouldn't they still be part of the UK? They were founded on staying loyal to the British Crown, the US didn't even exist at that time.
Otherwise you make good points.
It was never part of the UK, but I understand what you mean. The reasons for being anti-American have changed, but there is still a strong anti-American feeling.
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Well, they never were "part" of the UK, they were a collection of separate colonies in the Empire and then a Dominion.
And they're still loyal to the crown, it's just that all the imperial dominions that liked Elizabeth just pinkie-promised each other it wasn't the British monarch ruling them any more, it was the monarch of Canada, or Australia, etc. Except they all so happen to be the same monarch.
Personal union isn't so uncommon historically, but I still find the situation where all the countries have to agree to change the line of succession or affirm a new monarch to be a bit clunky and silly. Honestly, that's probably my take on constitutional monarchy itself, though I go back and forth between thinking it's kind of a neat thing to have a symbolic figurehead people can unite behind, and thinking it's insane and inhuman that Charles has all this power on paper but in practice he's damn near a slave-by-birth to the prime ministers of the countries he supposedly rules. I somewhat respect Edward for having the gumption to just say 'no,' and nope out, but that admiration is tempered by the part where he probably tried to get the Nazis to reinstate him if they conquered the UK. I kind of like the Sweden thing where they rewrote the constitution to remove the king from governance while maintaining him as a cultural figure.
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