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"
Nobody’s building in the great wilderness above.