[chrisfosterelli]

Our infrastructure is constrained because of systemic policy decisions, not because we can't practically grow it fast enough. These policy constraints would become significantly more painful under a declining, aging population.

For healthcare, we don't pay our GPs enough and we overwork them. Physicians have been either leaving the profession or moving into non-GP roles (specialists, etc). Since healthcare is taxpayer funded, reducing the number of working age tax payers and increasing the number of aging people in need of health care is going to make this worse.

For housing, we allow too much control of housing at the municipal layer and it's become a complex, bureaucratic mess to build anything anywhere. The dirty secret is that no federal government wants to step in and be the one to fix this because then it would cause housing prices to decrease and a terrifying large percentage of aging, voting population has the majority of their net worth in their house with "downsizing" forming the majority of their retirement plan. Reducing the population isn't going to fix this, we'll end up with less people who can build houses and more people who are either dependent on high house prices for their retirement or poor and in need of taxpayer programs (of which there will be less tax payers to fund) to support themselves.

These are obviously complex issues and I'm simplifying to some degree, but those are at least two key relationships worth really calling out here with respect to population. There's others, but my core point is that simplify cutting off population growth is not going to fix either of these -- it'd probably make them worse.

[Nomentatus]

Things could always be more efficient; but the housing shortage is now Canada wide, throughout jurisdictions. It's systemic, pretty much everywhere. You're right that letting low birthrate rule has problems (see Japan) but not such extreme ones, impoverishing so many.

[chrisfosterelli]

> but the housing shortage is now Canada wide, throughout jurisdictions

Yes. That's what I mean by "systemic" too. The housing policy problems are a result of incentives and the same incentives exist across municipalities in Canada. Municipalities also don't exist in isolation; for example as Vancouver prices out people they move to nearby areas like Kelowna and exacerbate the problem there.

It's not a simple matter of efficiency. The bureaucracy is a symptom of the incentive structure. Councils have the vast majority of control over new buildings and they're not incentivized to approve them. Councils are mostly homeowners and are voted in by mostly homeowners, who mostly don't want to see their neighbourhoods change or the price of their single detached homes decrease.