[morkalork]

Canada doesn't feel like it's winning despite what the graph says*. Bringing in tons of working-aged immigrants has caused housing (and other living) costs to explode, which in turn has lead to less people having children, which leads to more immigration to fill the gap and the whole thing has been spiraling. Not fun at all.

* https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=124&type=Probabilis...

[cayleyh]

The problem with just "living by the graph" is that it ignores whether the country has the capacity to provide basics like food, clothing, shelter, and employment to the population. You need to have both to have the working-age population be able to engage productively in the economy.

The problem Canada created is that it tried to reset it's population graph without ensuring that there was an adequate supply of said basics, and in many instances (housing, food prices) had policies that actively undermined what needed to a happen to support a rapidly expanding population. JT and the other liberal leadership read the Century Initiative and all they took away as "we need 100m people!" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative)

It's not that a country couldn't theoretically be successful resetting their population graph through immigration, but that they would also have to do things that would cause housing prices to fall or more competition (ie less corporate profits) in the other sectors to absorb the extra demand generated -- 2 things Canada has been absolutely unwilling to do in any meaningful until late last year.

[3vidence]

Yeah there has been a pretty definitive drop in overall productivity in Canada since the sudden increase in population.

I believe the economic term is population trap, where your society / economy can't expand fast enough to make efficient use of the addition in capital.

It is pretty clear based on the constantly decreasing GDP per capita.

[gravelc]

Australia is 'winning' even more based on the graph:

https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=36&type=Probabilist...

Housing is very expensive, but inflation is largely tamed, unemployment is low, and the government is running surpluses - so things aren't terrible (despite what the Murdoch media say). Birth rates are falling, but I'm not sure how much that really matters given immigration.

[thomassmith65]

Immigration is no excuse for the Canadian housing shortage. Canada is one of the world's largest land masses, and - even in its South - mainly uninhabited.

[kridsdale1]

They’re over regulated. All the geography and materials in the world.

They aren’t building because they can’t do it affordably.

My friends in Vancouver had a vacant lot in a prime area and money. They had to wait for three years to be approved to start.

[gottorf]

This seems to be a problem especially concentrated in the Anglosphere. Britain[0], Canada, Australia, and to a lesser degree in the US due to its libertarian streak. I wonder why that's the case?

[0]: https://ukfoundations.co/

[__turbobrew__]

I don’t know about the others but many in Canada believe they have the right to an unchanging environment. They just want to “get theirs”, kick out the ladder, and everything stops at that point.

Homeowners still make up the majority of the voter base so they will vote for municipal candidates which prioritize not changing things.

My prediction is that things will inevitably flip when the “have not” group becomes larger than the “have” group, but that might not be for a while as home ownership only became truly unbearable maybe 10-15 years ago.

Another factor is that generational wealth plays a big role in home ownership. The dirty secret is those mid 20s couples down the street did not purchase that house on their own, the either got cosigned by another family member with a hefty down payment gift or they inherited wealth from grandma. There is no estate or gift taxes here so families can perpetuate class transfers forever.

[lmm]

It's happening in almost every developed country. Everyone introduced similar planning/zoning regimes following the post-WWII rebuilding (possibly as an overcorrection to unpleasant prefab buildings), and 70 years down the line they're paying the price.

[greenavocado]

Canada is a Calhounian behavioral sink except they stave off the extinction by importing.

Summary with links to various publications at the end: https://notwokedot.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Behavi...

[cyberax]

Canada needs to start a campaign to promote smaller cities, rather than concentrating all the people in Toronto and Vancouver.

[doubled112]

How small are we talking?

One problem is that many Canadians move away from those smaller cities because there aren’t jobs that pay well, yet that smaller city isn’t significantly cheaper to live in.

Nobody I meet is from the major Canadian city I live in now. Maybe it’s a fluke, I have only met so many people, or maybe us outsiders just managed to find each other.

[morkalork]

This is where WFH could have changed the landscape in Canada but alas, even the federal government is getting on the back to office bandwagon. A whole bunch of your taxes are handled in Sudbury because they setup an office for the CRA there. When you call a company, if you're not talking to an agent in India/Philippines, you're probably talking to one in St John's. Unless you need to be physically present to do manual labour, there's a lot of work that can be done remotely outside of the 3 big cities. It could have been the solution to the death spiral many towns out east are facing.

[cyberax]

> One problem is that many Canadians move away from those smaller cities because there aren’t jobs that pay well

Well, duh. See this thread about how this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026920 when "prophets of parking" are allowed to ruin cities.

I'm talking about cities like Kamloops or Calgary.