We're not even close to ready for the population growth we're getting | Hacker News Reader

We're not even close to ready for the population growth we're getting

nationalpost.com

29 pointstarakat39 comments

I don’t understand the article. If population growth will strain scarce housing resources, why not just cut immigration? It seems like a knob you can turn to make things balance?

> I have seen no coverage that presents this as a problem — not even from Quebec, which is hopelessly consumed with linguistic and ethnic political diversions and where StatCan projections present a different kind of scenario: Smaller cities like Trois-Rivières and Saguenay are projected to see their visible-minority populations rise even as their total populations decline, and not just by a little.

I just got back from a cousin’s wedding in Toronto. Quite a bit of my family from Bangladesh has moved there. The number of south Asians in the city is remarkable. It was nice in some ways. (Obviously nice to see family, but also to be around other folks from a similar background.) But I wonder if they can in the long term avoid the fate that’s befallen Anglo and French Canadian.

The Canadian government has been targeting increased immigration for the past several years [0]. There has been a lot of bipartisan lobbying in support of this by the Century Initiative [1]. Imo the Canadian immigration system is a pretty streamlined system that the US could take a couple pages from, while also keeping the INS's strong background checking infrastructure. Sadly I know a number of people who abused the system (fake asylum claims, fake documents), but Immigration Canada doesn't seem to take background checks as seriously as the US.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-14/trudeau-p...

[1] - https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/

But if the population growth is a problem, why?

Mostly because despite the massive growth in population and immigration, there isn't the equivalent in housing or jobs. Salaries still suck back in Canada, and if you're a White Collar Canadian citizen, it's better to just work in the Bay Area or Seattle indefinetly on a TN Visa (clearly you can see which part of Canada we used to live). The US can easily absorb the amount of immigration Canada is seeing, but a country that has around 10% of the US's population and a GDP that's around 5-10% of the US can't

In Canada immigrants vote for the Liberal party who are currently in power. It doesn't take long before many of those immigrants forget their past and vote against their best interest for the Conservative party.

The Libaral party (which is actually the moderate of the three parties) pushes for immigration.

Immigrants are a source of cheap labour to be exploited. There is a real shortage of jobs here that pay a living wage.

Immigration raising the population is good for the housing investors who want to see prices continue to climb. Many of our politicians are either real estate investors or have ties to real estate investors.

Canada is a huge country but most people live along the southern border. Services and infrastructure even a few hundred kilometers north are bare to non-existent. Much of the land in Ontario, for instance, is flood plane, conservation controlled, native land or greenbelt farmland which cannot be divided (until a mega rich development company somehow manages it). This means crowding.

Most people think Canada has no corruption and is stable, well that is not really true. Corruption here is just at a much higher level.

> There is a real shortage of jobs here that pay a living wage

This is a strange sentiment to hear about a country that has among the highest GDP per capita and HDI in the world. What countries would you describe as having an abundance of jobs that pay living wages?

The average median household income is ~$75k the average house in Canada is $700,000

> In Canada immigrants vote for the Liberal party who are currently in power. It doesn't take long before many of those immigrants forget their past and vote against their best interest for the Conservative party

I suspect these folks know what’s in their own best interest, and the problem is instead that you fail to perceive that brown people aren’t all the same and don’t all have the same interests.

Yep! There are a lot of other internal concerns at least among Punjabi Canadians back in BC. One interesting thing I saw though was that Jats tended to lean Liberal or NDP, but Chamars tended to lean Conservative. We have our own internal politics from the insurgency in the 1980s-90s that never got resolved and continue to fester.

The GP rayiner himself, immigrated from Bangladesh, was liberal and has now forgotten his past to oppose immigration now and vote conservative.

Because Canada is woefully underpopulated and the South Asians basically create a massively disproportionate amount of our wealth. It would be the dumbest fix to the problem considering building new housing is easy.

The South Asian aspect is false. Desi Canadians tend to be blue collar. Chinese Canadians tend to be way more white collar than us.

That doesn’t mesh well with the fact that the average Indo-Canadian family makes $90k, way above the national average.

> The weekly earnings of men in five other designated visible minority categories were not significantly different from those of White men, while the weekly earnings of South Asian men were 2% higher [0]

Also, [1]

[0] - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220126/dq220...

[1] - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210521/cg-b0...

Also, South Asian numbers tend to be slightly higher simply due to our community's bias towards living in cities with a strong community presence.

And coming from my lived experience as a Punjabi North American, our best and brightest ain't coming to Canada - it's a backup option. Go to Sector 17 in Chandigarh or the Jalandhar Bus Depot, and you'll see rows upon rows of IELTS coaching centers and immigration coaches that'll help you find a way to get fudged work documents or high school diplomas for 3-4 Lakh or help get you asylum documents. If you were good enough in Punjab to get into a medical program, accounting program, or engineering program you'd move to Delhi or Chandigarh to work. If you're some loser numbskull who failed high school or didn't get into a half decent college, you take the Kaneda route.

On a completely side note how does an Indian apply for asylum, feels like it would be very hard to prove hardship in India.

There was an ethnoreligious insurgency in Punjab back in the 1980s-90s [0] that also leaked into Canada with the Air India bombings, some journalist assasinations, and the future Premier (Govenor) of British Columbia getting beaten with an iron rod. There is still institutional knowledge about that in Canada, plus Police in India do still do forms of brutality, plus Gurdawaras and Sabhas still play a major role in elections in Canada - piss off the wrong Uncle and an entire Gurdawara may vote for the Conservative Party or the NDP or whoever for city elections, Provincial Parliament, or Parliament instead of you. Add to that if you "donate" to the right MLAs or Activist orgs in Punjab, you can get a referal that said person was an activist who was threatened by Militants or Landlords or Oppositions Parties or Police. A relative of mine did that in the early 2000s even though they had a decent white collar government job in Chandigarh (a very developed city in North India). Even if you get to Canada and your asylum is rejected, you can still sneak over the border and work in one of the various Indian restaurants. Lots of the cooks and servers in Punjabi owned restaurants did that here in California. We have our own social and community structures through Gurdawaras, Mandirs, Masjids, and Clans.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurgency_in_Punjab

>If population growth will strain scarce housing resources, why not just cut immigration? It seems like a knob you can turn to make things balance?

Many consider any limit on immigration a human rights abuse. Others who pretend they consider immigration restrictions a human rights abuse want to keep importing cheap labor to drive down wages.

> But I wonder if they can in the long term avoid the fate that’s befallen Anglo and French Canadian.

What long term fate? Being displaced?

I don’t have the exact statistics on hand, but from various reports it seems as though there’s a substantial (and increasing) proportion of Canadians retiring and Canadians are having fewer children. Once retirees exit the work force, there will naturally be gaps in the labor force. Who fills those gaps? What’re the economic consequences if those gaps aren’t filled?

Canada’s Express Entry immigration system prioritizes young, healthy, skilled and/or qualified people.

To me it seems Canada needs both to be able to continue to function effectively: immigration and housing (and healthcare, access to education, municipal services, green spaces, etc.)

Healthcare in Canada is another catastrophe in the making at present.

Qualified is a stretch. Seemingly qualified without performance goals nor measurements of kpi would better encapsulate the situation. There are excellent permanent resident that I am in awe of, and there are fraudsters who do nothing when employed and get fired a couple months in a new job, rinse and repeat.

People have been predicting this for centuries. It hasn't gotten any more correct.

We know what happen when countries modernize--they invariably fall below replacement rate. So, the "solution" is to modernize the places that immigrants flee from.

The real issue "modern" societies are starting to have is that everything is based on a pyramid scheme (more young people than old people) that is beginning to unravel everywhere. That is something nobody is ready for.

> The real issue "modern" societies are starting to have is that everything is based on a pyramid scheme (more young people than old people) that is beginning to unravel everywhere. That is something nobody is ready for.

Keep an eye out on South Korea to see what happens when the pyramid scheme unravels. Our birthrate has fallen to 0.75 and we are in for a huge shock in 10 years. Yet our politicians are just fighting each other :))

I'll speak about Toronto, since it's the city I know the best. You could easily resolve the housing scarcity by densifying the suburbs, but it's artifically constrained because:

(a) It's legitimately hard to retroactively densify suburban areas, especially the newer suburbs like Markham, where the inefficient use of space combines with the restricted mixed-use zoning, would make re-densified residential areas difficult to support with the sparse commercial/public/transportation resources. I think it's possible, but requires some aggressive changes.

(b) Politicians don't want to risk angering the elderly, NIMBY, home-owning middle-class that compose the voting base.

I think it can be done, but the political incentives are not appealing. Still, we are seeing some hopeful signs from increasingly radicalized youth, cut off from the housing market, being converted into potential political capital by the NDP.

Perhaps Canada could use a new planned city or two on the BC coast. That area must be among the most underpopulated in the world, accounting for the mild weather and presence of fresh water.

Jobs would be even better. Richmond, Burnaby, Langley, and the Lower Delta are all newish built (1980s-2000s), but a large enough white collar job base simply isn't there.

What on earth does it mean for an area to be "underpopulated"? Must every living patch of earth be paved over, before we learn to value nature left to its own devices?

Seems like a good article. Stable, wealthy countries like Canada are in the best position to build more housing and absorb migration from poorer regions.

But doing such a thing would turn Canada into a not-stable, not-wealthy country by changing the average genetic makeup of the country.

Then we probably need to stop immigration until we can get a handle on it.

Stop the professionals that create a vast majority of the wealth or build more housing? It’s not really a tough decision.

How does that lower the population?

I guess the assumption is the lower earning natives will leave and go somewhere else?

It doesn’t, it improves the situation so a massively underpopulated land can support more and grow.

How can land be underpopulated? What happens when you don’t have much labor is the labor prices go up (wages increase).

I can’t help but suspect from your other comments in this thread you are just trying to justify your a priori want for more immigration, why?

I think we can safely say a place that has an extremely low population density and actively pays people to go inhabit parts of it is very underpopulated relative to other places in the world.

You’re saying this same thing all up and down this thread but have already been disproven on the “professionals that create the vast majority of the wealth”.

So in two places on the thread and specific responses? Are you purporting that professionals don’t create value and generate wealth for society, where exactly has this been disproven. Not to mention, across the border in the US where we have statistics for this- Indian Americans have founded 90 of the top 500 unicorns in the US and generated $430 billion dollars of wealth for the economy. There’s no reason it wouldn’t hold up in Canada as well.

Just think about that 3% of the population starting 1/5th of all US billion dollar+ companies

Malthus anyone?

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