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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29059 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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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%.

Gonna play a bit of devil's advocate on the subject. Not entirely, just a tad. Because I do think there's some reasonable concepts behind the core idea, that Canada's population needs to increase dramatically. Canada has a lot of open space. To be blunt. So I don't think it's unreasonable to think that over time Canada would be better off on the global stage with a significantly higher population. As well, it's a way to get around demographic surges among older people.

I actually think these are good points.

The problem is that the implementation has been awful. There's a number of problems.

The big one, is that I think that immigration programs needs to be controlled for skills (or desire skills). You need to maintain relatively healthy balances of your entire labor market to ensure that things don't go out of whack and you get shortages in one place or another.

The other side of that coin, is credentialism. That is, various licensing regimens doing their best to keep out outsiders in order to artificially boost wages. Then you put on top of that the role of post-secondary education itself, and their role in massively importing labor.

The end result is just tons of essentially low-skill labor and people locked into that role. Relatively few people are coming over to do construction work, and the barriers to entry for that are massive anyway. Truth be told, I have nothing against people coming over, taking high-end or relatively high-end courses and ending up with good jobs. I don't think that's where the problem is. The problem really is down the line.

There's another part of the problem as well, and that's geographic distribution. Yes, Canada has a LOT of room. We can't have an overwhelming % of people living in a few large cities. I'd argue we need the will and the ability to "upshift" smaller cities into larger ones. Or maybe even building a city from scratch. We can't just keep on dumping people into the Toronto area.

If we want to do the whole 100 million thing (that's the goal), there's going to need to be a plan to address all those things I mentioned above. And as it stands right now, there's absolutely not.

Canada has a lot of open space. To be blunt.

Which parts of Canada do you want to see fill up with more people? Which regions do you think are below their potential and should dramatically expand?

To be clear, this is a classic gotcha question, because I don't think most immigration proponents think all that hard about the specifics of what they're trying to change -- but, at the same time, I mean it sincerely. If you have an argument that Saskatchewan could easily sustain another million people, or that the Canadian shield has rich potential with modest and inexpensive terraforming, I'd like to hear it. My impression has always been that Canada has a lot of open space because nobody wants to live there, because there is very little to be produced in these places. I'd love to hear a different story.

Toronto proper (not even the GTA) would have 17 million people if it were as dense as Paris.

Ok, sure, maybe Toronto can grow, but that's not really filling the open spaces of Canada.

Why wouldn't the open spaces he able to be filled?

You can't just build anywhere as if any space will do. Which space? Prairies, forests, marshland? Is there arable land to grow crops to feed these new people? Or clear land that can support roads to ship food in?

There is a lot of open space in Canada, but a lot of it isn't fit for living. Canadian winter gets prohibitively expensive, especially if you build much further North than where Canada has been built. The Canadian shield runs through middle, making much of Canada's open spaces poor for living.

But, there is a lot of open space in Canada, so I could believe there is a lot of untapped potential. I'm not trying to be unfair here: if you want to bring in millions of immogrants, you need to have an idea of where to put them.

Food can be transported, so you don't need arable land. And there's a lot of arable land anyway. If the land isn't cleared, it can be cleared.

Canadian winter gets prohibitively expensive,

Clearly not, since people live in very cold parts of the country. If Winnipeg exists, then people can build in the ample open spaces of southern Ontario, let alone in the rest of Manitoba.

if you want to bring in millions of immogrants, you need to have an idea of where to put them.

As I said, they could easily fit in the GTA, let alone the many other cities we have and similar environments that haven't been built up.

Which space? Prairies, forests, marshland?

Wherever the developers find building to be profitable, once the onerous zoning regulations are lifted.

Is there arable land to grow crops to feed these new people?

Food can be imported from elsewhere. We are living in the age of containerized cargo transport.

Or clear land that can support roads to ship food in?

I'm sure that the developers and/or governments can buy from farmers sufficient land for roadbuilding.

There is a lot of open space in Canada, but a lot of it isn't fit for living.

Taken together, Wikipedia's maps of climate and population density strongly suggest that the unfilled habitable area remains quite sizable. See also Google Maps.

Vancouver's housing could be made cheaper by allowing single-family houses to be built in the empty "Green Zone" (1 2).

The idea that Vancouver-area residents should suffer the least affordable housing in Canada in order to preserve rural open space in a province that has millions of hectares of open space and some of the lowest population densities in the world would be comical if its results were not so tragic.

rural open space

AKA 'food producing areas' -- the Fraser River delta is fantastically fertile, it would make way more sense to plop the immigrants up in Prince George or somewhere (Rupert if they just like rainy ports I guess) and plough the condos under to grow veggies.

Worth noting that this is true for every city and town in the province: the ALR is an absolutely crooked law and it applies almost everywhere. Sure, 50 years ago it might not have been as big a deal to permanently ban all development in cities that hadn't yet grown to need that land, but they do now, and I don't think that unless the province undergoes a dramatic political shakeup it's going anywhere fast, much like California's Prop 13 (for the same reasons).

Fun quote from a Supreme Court opinion refusing to overturn Prop. 13:

Petitioner and amici argue with some appeal that Article XIIIA frustrates the "American dream" of home ownership for many younger and poorer California families. They argue that Article XIIIA places start up businesses that depend on ownership of property at a severe disadvantage in competing with established businesses. They argue that Article XIIIA dampens demand for and construction of new housing and buildings. And they argue that Article XIIIA constricts local tax revenues at the expense of public education and vital services.

Time and again, however, this Court has made clear in the rational basis context that the "Constitution presumes that, absent some reason to infer antipathy, even improvident decisions will eventually be rectified by the democratic process and that judicial intervention is generally unwarranted no matter how unwisely we may think a political branch has acted". Certainly, California's grand experiment appears to vest benefits in a broad, powerful, and entrenched segment of society, and, as the Court of Appeal surmised, ordinary democratic processes may be unlikely to prompt its reconsideration or repeal. Yet many wise and well intentioned laws suffer from the same malady. Article XIIIA is not palpably arbitrary, and we must decline petitioner's request to upset the will of the people of California.

My impression has always been that Vancouver home prices are kept high by investment from China and other countries (which is basically infinite and totally inelastic). Granted, there is also a lot of green space that could be turned into housing, and a lot of room to build up. (I suspect strongly that Portland and Seattle will go the same way.)

Anything else? Granted we could probably fit a million or more people into Vancouver, but that's only one small part of Canada.

The investment may be virtually infinite but it's very elastic--they are investing because it seems like a good investment. They'll invest elsewhere if the quality of that investment declines (perhaps due to increased housing supply)

The last time I looked into it, many years ago, Canadian real estate was a prime investment for Chinese elites looking to sock money away outside China. Perhaps the calculus haa changed, but it would take a lot of new housing stock to sate this demand.

It appears that similar land-wasting efforts are active in the Toronto area.

Created by legislation passed by the Government of Ontario in 2005, the Greenbelt is considered a prevention of urban development and sprawl on environmentally sensitive land in the province. According to the Greenbelt Foundation, the Greenbelt includes 2,000,000 acres (810,000 ha) of land. That includes 721,000 acres (292,000 ha) of protected wetlands, grasslands, and forests.

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