As a canadian immigrant, I'm actually against the ramping up of so much immigration because we do not have the infrastructure to support it. I liked the slow and steady pace of quality over quantity before liberals came into power.
The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.
I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure.
[1] https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Pl...
And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
The reality is that as a country becomes more developed, it's birth rate plunges. There's a strong negative correlation between income, development and birth rate. [1] This is not an east-vs-west thing, it applies the world over.
In developed countries, women do not want to have more children, and you can't make them. So, you allow immigration
>This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
But this doesn't disprove the prior statement. It's possible that they're incentivizing having children, but not enough. Given the available choices of incentivizing having children even more (eg. free daycare or longer parental leave) or simply admitting more immigrants, Canada went with the latter because it's cheaper. After all, why bother letting the native population produce average workers when you can admit above average workers from across the world?
The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?
I'm not sure how you got the impression that I'm for "forcing" people to have kids.
I would further argue that "bringing in immigrants" isn't the "easy way out" or even likely the "cheap way out" but rather probably more challenging. Creating a society that deals well with the gaijin isn't easy.
I see no evidence that free daycare or longer parental leave actually incentivize adults to have children. The birth rate in Finland is 1.49 and falling rapidly, Sweden and Norway are 1.8ish. Iceland is 1.75. Germany is 1.57. Spain is 1.34. These places have incredibly generous programs and are well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Finland's mat leave is 4.2 months and pat leave is 2.2 months and offers public daycare centers. If that's not long enough or free enough to boost their brith rate over 1.49 I'm not sure what you'd suggest.
Yes, mat/pat leave is great, and should exist. So should free daycare. However, I don't see any evidence that'll move the needle. If anything, it appears that pushes the birth rate further down being correlated broadly with increased development.
It is a world wide issue in all western countries, and it is independent of net 'in or out' immigration. The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
Even if you stopped immigration, people would not be making more babies, as countries that don't have net immigration still don't make more babies. Baby making seems independent with net immigration rates.
Hungary incentivizes its native population to have larger families, a policy of Victor Orban's, and has seen consistent growth in its fertility rate since ~2010. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the way it should be tackled.
> The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
America and the UK's birth rates nose-dived in the mid-60's and hasn't recovered since. I'm failing to draw a connection to these countries being drastically more developed by the end of the 60s than they were at the start of them.
A more productive approach would be to set the cruise control just left of center and not get greedy. If you do that and simultaneously monitor and manage externalities of policies you see as progress, you'll probably see more mileage.
The complete lack of concern for externalities of policies and disregard for second and third order effects is why I've largely abandoned supporting most democrat positions. It's gotten so destructive that I'd rather stick with the devil I know than the devil I don't. And I would rather avoid oscillating between which devil has power since it's at the point in the reversal of political direction that the worst authoritarian abuses from either side happen.
Multiculturalism in Canada is different than in America. Here, there's something bigger for us to assimilate to that actually still holds value as a construct; a greater Canadian archetype that has done extremely well as a common point for newcomers to converge on for the past few decades. However, it would be easy to exceed the rate at which this is workable, and end up with a fractured country where people retain their entire original identity and never "become Canadian". This is a legitimate concern for people that love the country created by people who are Canadian through and through and want to see some of our lesser-known values (such as anticorruption, engineering quality, sustainability, etc) continue to propagate.