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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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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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