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Comment by Jemm | Hacker News Reader

Canada is also bringing in one million immigrants a year to feed the exploitative low paying job market and to try to stave off recession. These immigrants tend to gravitate in either Toronto or Vancouver.

Meanwhile corporate and rich investors are snapping up any property they can get their hands one.

In Ontario the Premiere is reclassifying conservation land owner by his buddies to allow them to build developments. In Toronto they tore down a vital section of the main highway to allow their buddies to build condos. The also allowed polluted lands to be developed a residential by simply putting a thin layer of top cover over the industrial pollution.

The foreign ban is only for high density areas. Small towns and rural land have become unaffordably for the people who grew up there.

It is a major catasrophe that is not being solved, just postponed by a year.

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It’s nowhere near 1 million per year. The record from 2021 was 405,000 and the plan for the next 3 years is < 1.5 million in total.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

That's 405,000 permanent residents only. Add to that hundreds of thousands international students + hundreds of thousands temporary workers + tens of thousands asylum seekers + etc + etc

Based on a Google search, Canada builds 200k homes, condos and other dwellings in a year. Looks like the pace needs to be doubled.

I’m not disagreeing that a lot more should be done on the supply side but the suggestion of it needing to double comes across as the additional demand equaling 1 home per immigrant which is simply not the case. I would like to see the hard numbers but I would expect a significant proportion to be 2+ families.

Yep, there's a huge amount of international students in Canada and many of them are here for the purpose of eventually getting permanent residency. We are also extremely generous when it comes to granting asylum. My dad actually gamed the asylum process to immigrate to Canada.

Those are mostly temporary by definition so I don’t see that as a source of the longer term shortages at the macro level unless it is shown that the size of the student and temporary worker pool is growing significantly every year? Sure, many of those eventually go onto permanent residency but that’s still included in the 400k annual figure is it not?

The number of asylum claimants is overstated in my opinion. Even if 100% are granted, which is unlikely, it is a very small number in terms of population growth.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

Why does temporary vs permanent status matter? Whoever is coming to Canada needs a place to live in.

My assumption is that temporary residents no longer consume housing at the end of their stay in the country so, provided the rate of growth in the number of temporary residents is low, their net consumption of the available housing stock over time would also be low. I haven’t seen the growth figures to judge.

Where we stand today, the absolute number of temporary residents are consuming some percentage of housing but I suggest that is the current baseline and is less useful discussing how to solve the problem going forward, unless anyone is advocating for a net reduction in the absolute number going forward. However, I haven’t seen that as part of the discourse and would consider that an extremely short term measure with its own set of ramifications.

Right, what we need is a net number of temporary residents leaving subtracted from temporary residents coming in. Given that Canada's model is to encourage immigration though, it would be good to have that number.

"The foreign ban is only for high density areas."

Is this correct ?

Under these new laws a foreigner can still purchase farm, or ranch land or, for instance, a ski chalet in Golden ?

Asking for a friend ...

There's an exception for "any residential property found outside of a Census Metropolitan Area or Census Agglomeration as identified in Statistics Canada’s Standard Geographical Classification 2021."

I've not looked at a map to see how much area that covers, but it sounds like foreign buyers could still purchase rural properties.

https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/media-newsroom/notices/2022/e...

Instead of being critical of the decisions of others, what do you suggest?

Arm chair critics are a dime a dozen, what are your ideas on how to address the housing problems?

Zone every inch of currently settled land to allow 6 story mixed use buildings, by right. Don’t require anything to build besides engineering and safety checks - no chance for NIMBY input. Do this federally.

Not sure if I'd do it federally... maybe start with a few trial cities or areas where the idea has a lot of support... But I'd be all for trying something like this!

Up the stories to 85 and then we are talking.

> allow 6 story mixed use buildings

Why stop at 6? Why limit it at all?

I agree with this in totality. Preserving undeveloped wetlands is a way more important than preserving some boomers stake in a low density suburb.

A vacancy tax is the non-racist approach, which attacks the problem directly.

However it is politically challenging because it also affects local monied interests, who under Canada's anti-foreigner law are able to continue exacerbating the housing problem without check.

As a Canadian, Canada needs way more people for how much habitable land we have.

I 100% concur. Canada would benefit by having a population 2-3x current. I am always amazed how in the US there are so many cities with vibrant cultures in the 50-80k range whereas in Canada you can drive vast distances and only find tiny settlements of a few thousand people and no services or culture to speak of.

Meanwhile a substantial number of Americans are envious of Canadian life and how much safer Canadian cities are. The grass is always greener.

> Canada would benefit by having a population 2-3x current

What a coincidence, this is exactly what the Century Initiative wants. Toronto would go from 8.8 to 33.5 million people. Vancouver from 3.3 to 11.9 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative

Well… I would distribute it differently! I’d look for dozens of more cities in the 75-300k range like the US rather than pushing the growth to 2-3 mega cities.

We don't have 'much habitable land'. Most of the 'land' is literally a rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

Hmm, that does look habitable to me. Moreover, it looks quite nice compared to a lot of places people live in.

Mars, Moon, and some places on Earth defnitely are not habitable (unless very supported), but calling most of the Canada "unhabitable" is more than a stretch.

That land is not suitable for agriculture. There is no way to build anything sustainable there, nor there is any point in that.

Most of the food I eat comes from hundreds of thousands of miles away. I'd imagine a bigger issue with inhabiting that area is lack of logistics.

> Most of the food I eat comes from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

And that's precisely the problem! Carbon footprint per capital is very high in Canada and for remote and colder locations it would be even higher!

I live in Europe but that's still the case, and apparently it doesn't really affect the carbon footprint because the majority of emissions are last mile.

That remote part of Canada would still be an issue though because it doesn't look like there are any train lines, major rivers or sea access.

Very little of the carbon emissions of food come from its transportation.[0] People living in cities have a lower carbon footprint than those living in more suburban areas.[1] We should be allowing more people to live in economically vibrant, low emission cities.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food?ins...

[1] https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-the-worst-for-ca...

Don't forget muskeg!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskeg

Need and "can accommodate" are two different things.

Can you explain why you feel this way? I'm not understanding why there needs to be more people simply because there's a lot of habitable land.

There's not really that much habitable land in Canada that's not already being used imo.

BC for example is pretty much all mountain and has dammed and flooded many of its habitable river valleys.

In the Prairies the land is already valuably used to export food across the world.

In other parts of Canada it's muskeg and inhospitably cold.

The other thing that everyone always forgets about is that all this "free" land out there is not at all free for the taking: it is under land claims by First Nations. These longstanding unresolved issues will need to be resolved before people can start cutting down forests somewhere and laying out a new main street.

There's plenty of room for more Canadians in the parts of Canada that are already developed, but not a terribly compelling reason for expansion beyond that.

In the Prairies you could put a lot of people on farmland and it wouldn't subtract very much productive capacity and would accommodate a lot of people. A square mile is roughly 800mt of grain give or take most years on prime farmland.. the economic value of that vs the sheer number of people you can house on that space with reasonable density, the tradeoff is a non-issue. (That's why developable land on the edge of Winnipeg trades at $25k/ac and the same land 10 miles away is worth 5-6k/ac.)

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