I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future. Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming.
>I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future.
Unlikely. The parts of Canada that aren't settled (and aren't actually in or near the Arctic Circle) are that way not because of temperature, but because the soil is almost entirely unsuitable for farming: Either rocky Canadian Shield, or "swallows locomotives overnight" muskeg (plus infinite numbers of mosquitos).
>Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming.
Canada will net benefit from global warming, yes, because the Northwest Passage will become navigable. But it is not true that temperature is the only thing keeping Canada from being able to support as many people as the US, which has almost identically sized geography.
I think our Canadian cabal is doing everything it can to speed up global warming. We have the dirtiest oil in the world (Alberta Oil Sands) and we essentially based our economy on extraction.
We have the forth largest oil reserves in the world and they are coming out of the ground at some point because the need for it is unlikely to
go away. We should be investing in becoming the best at oil extraction and doing it as safely and cleanly as possible. Hamstringing the industry is bad for our country.
I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that eco-terrorists set them, but I would 100% endorse this kind of behaviour if that’s what it takes to shake our society from complacency. It’s totally wild that we are slouching toward ecosystem collapse and it hasn’t become the key talking point in every human interaction the way COVID was.
Canada is both dense and sparse. It’s paradoxical. Huge landmass. Almost everyone living in a thin slice near the U.S. border. We have massive housing issues all over the place.
Yeah pump the brakes, there’s pllllleeeeeeeentyyyyy of physical space available in Canada for settlement still, if you don’t mind the poor weather further north.
You don’t have to go that much farther north and still have similar weather. Look at the interior of BC from Vernon to Prince George - huge amount of undeveloped land with moderate winters. Same with Calgary to Edmonton (both have crappy weather IMO but tons of space to develop and fill with people who would otherwise accept Calgary / Edmonton winters), etc etc etc.
Canada currently has about 8M people (20%) born in other countries. If you add another 2 million immigrants then you need to build 5% more houses, need 5% more cars, need 5% more electricity, need 5% more infrastructure,
Capitalistically I would be interested to backtest the returns for a global macro fund that invested in countries with high immigration.
I live in New Zealand where ~30% of our population is people that were not born here (New Zealand is quite picky about who gets to come here, so we have less structural problems than some European countries that accept large numbers of refugees with little opportunity to filter for the most suitable people).
New Zealand has been building housing at a fast pace to keep up with the ~50% increase in population over the “native” population.
It's the second largest country in the world. It has half the population of Germany and ~28x the land mass. Their problem will be actually building houses and making them affordable, not "sparseness"
Edit: As expected, the Century Initiative is chaired by corporate lobbyists, and closely tied to Blackrock, that has massive investments in Canadian real-estate and would benefit from making housing more expensive:
This is not Canadians making babies, which they do below the replacement limit as in other developed countries. This is massive levels of immigration. Canadians do have a bigger per capita environment footprint, but still it’s really just moving people around.
Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.
> Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.
Canadian immigration quotas are simply out of control, about 10x per capita what the US allows.
And it's just the beginning, apparently the current ruling party is planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0]
It creates an interesting dynamic in tech.
Anecdotally, it seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. Yet it seems the opposite happened. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US. Canada maintains a net brain drain to the US [1]
Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary. The city of Vancouver even bragged about its devs being worth 50K less than their American counterparts! [2]
I witnessed it first hand. Back when we opened a satellite location in Toronto. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.
As an immigrant in the US, I don't understand this talk about higher bar for US immigration. The US selects immigrants by luck and persistence rather than by talent. Anyone with a professional job offer is qualified for an H-1B visa, but it usually takes luck to get one. Similarly, anyone with a professional job offer can get a green card, but the process is long, expensive, and unpredictable.
I left Vancouver. The combination of high home prices, high taxes, and low salaries chased me away. I solved the last problem by working remote, but that just really made me think hard about why I was still living in Vancouver.
I was born in Canada, and I would have preferred to stay. The country is a great opportunity for immigrants, but it’s an opportunity cost for me.
Doug Sanders (International-Affairs Columnist, The Globe and Mail) has a good book on this:
* http://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/