Canada will reach 40M population by the end of this year
www150.statcan.gc.ca
www150.statcan.gc.ca
We're so out of sync and lacking a sense of urgency on this matter, I fully expect the province of BC to make sweeping changes to regulation that will be a serious shock to everyone.
If we don't keep up with demand and dramatically change our perspective and priorities, the social impacts will be dire. I think we've been too comfortable for too long to see it, but... We're on the precipice of a real crisis. The societal impacts of not having housing while people are losing social mobility are very, very severe and likely unprecedented in the lifetimes of most British Columbians.
I really hope we can get it together. The mayor asking for a pause on development is concerned (rightfully) about ensuring infrastructure meets housing demands. While I fully appreciate the need for that to happen, it seems to me that 1) we should have been addressing that a decade ago, and 2) his job is to address that now in a manner that doesn't neglect to address the more pressing issue that we don't have enough housing.
We need to clean up as we go; we don't have the luxury of planning. We lost that convenience a long, long time ago, and we have to do this "scared" as they say.
I don't mean to sound like a doomer here, but I have the distinct sense that many Canadians (likely especially true among those who aren't facing lack of food, housing, or income) are dangerously unaware of the hill we're currently sliding down. We're still near the top, but there's a long way to slide down and it's very slippery. We don't have our hiking boots on, and it's going to be a struggle to scramble back up. In order to get there, we're going to need to just do something. No 6 month pauses. No perfect community planning.
Pardon my Canadian here, but we really fucked the dog on this one.
View Royal mayor was going to do that regardless, if you look at his track record this is what he stands for. Provincial Govt will hopefully make an example out of them.
They already had an updated community plan which he purposely kiboshed so that he could institute this pause.
This is a person who we can give the benefit of the doubt that they want to do the right thing for their community. To them, community planning and maintaining a certain status quo is genuinely important and meaningful, and no doubt, their community is asking for it to varying degrees.
But we don't have that kind of agency. We don't have the wealth in communities like View Royal to insulate ourselves from the consequences of inaction. We're fooling ourselves, but I suspect it's quite easy to do so because we've never known any different.
Yet we no longer have the boom of various resource extraction as we had when we initially scaled out these communities. We no longer have the space and freedom to sprawl so effortlessly. We have inherited something from a time that is economically, politically, and geographically unrecognizable. It's a monolith of ideals we can't sustain.
I suppose a major issue is the complexity involved and frankly, our broader inability (including my own, to be clear) to fully understand where we're coming from and where we're going.
Frankly though I would say we're coming from an era of opportunity and entering one of relative scarcity with necessitated resourcefulness that we evidently don't yet possess.
And yes, I'm extremely hopeful that the Province will actually execute on making an example of them. It's yet to be seen that they're aware and ready to take action in a manner that will actually foment meaningful results. The fact that they imposed the timeline for action in the first place gives me some hope, though.
Context for others: An amazingly high portion of Canadians don't have a family doctor <https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/despite-more-doctors-many-cana...>. In Atlantic Canada (the four easternmost provinces) it is impossible, repeat impossible, to get a family doctor if you don't have one <https://web.archive.org/web/20190226051406/https://www.thete...>. It's one thing to have shortages in rural areas—that happens in the US too—but Halifax?!? I've heard the same occurs in Vancouver too.
All of this convinces me that we need more diversity in city and town councils. For better or for worse, many city councils have been largely composed of realtors. However, we have reached a point where we need software developers, anti poverty activists, environmental activists and the like on councils. More diverse opinions can only help us achieve sustainable growth and avoid a far greater housing crisis.
Can you share a link? I'd like to read more
By artificially limiting housing, the house owners get to charge whatever they want. Housing is the biggest 1 time expense of any person's life & the biggest contributor to their wealth.
By making housing expensive, homeowning Canadian residents (Silent Gen, Boomers & elder GenX) have been able to facilitate a massive transfer of wealth from non-house owners (Millenials, Poor people & Recent immigrants)
I'll preemptively counter those who think that "Its an investment, so I deserve to make money on it." Well, you don't get to choke the market by limiting supply, if you also want to make money on the resulting supply. That is a Cartel, a Mafia, a Gang. And that's exactly what housing is like on the west coast. A gang of old people are here for their payday, and they'll have it even if it means putting a gun to your head.
This is very much a generational problem. Of the majority (homeowners are more than 50% of the population) is aggressively suppressing the minority (significant minority, but still) with very clear demographic lines.
It's a sad reality but Canada is an endless web of special interests.
They can't get on a bus to the US for more than 6 months at a stretch, and gun ownership is heavily curtailed.
Until Ottawa makes some systemic changes -- and that sure as hell ain't gonna happen -- you're gonna participate, or freeze. They will then import a bunch of Temporary Foreign Workers to replace you.
No need to aspire to buy a new car or house or pay huge taxes.
Also, plenty of homesteading all the way up into Yukon (I lived there for four years). It's not hard to grow the majority of the food you need and hunt the rest.
If it requires going to work for more than your entire life to pay for a house, people will stop buying houses, etc.
In my family I'm the lucky one, I can pretty much live in any way that I want. But the rule is that the job cycle pretty much dictates how much freedom you've got. The financial stakes are balanced in such a way that you're likely in the tredmill for life unless you get very lucky. The big problem is that there are so many little races to the bottom that if you're not very careful you will end up participating in one or more of these effectively reducing the negotiation power of others and time shifted with yourself. Unionization is one way to solve some aspects of this (though not all and some unions have their own issues that then become dominant). Alternatively you can go it alone but that kind of risk taking isn't for everybody either.
I don't think homesteading or opting out is going to be a big driver, it would be nice if it were but I just don't see it happening. What you will see is an increase in mental issues, homelessness, personal bankruptcies and more like that. Those are the indicators that things are really not going well. But many people don't care about these things until it hits them personally.
I disagree there isn't a whole lot you can do, and I'm saying I know plenty of people doing it.
I have multiple friends that used to be Engineers and Doctors and Architects, and now just ski 100+ days in the winter and mountain bike 100+ days in the summer. These people are in their 30s. They don't want to work much anymore, so they just live cheaply and don't play the rigged game.
When a new citizen is born, there’s roughly 20 years before that person needs individual housing to be made available for them. Plenty of time to build new housing. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing _today_. And Canada is importing massive numbers of people relative to the country’s population.
People forget that construction projects aren't like AWS, you can't just spin them up and down in and instant and "poof", 500K houses, ready in a week. There's a significant amount of spin up time for this sort of stuff, nevermind the money required.
The rates have been extraordinarily greater than today.
AND of course, birth rates were significantly higher, which is what drove a lot of growth. Which can be accommodated much easier from a housing stock perspective, as mentioned earlier. The situation today isn't exactly the same.
"Foreign born" percent of population was higher in the 1800s as well.
Ultimately everything is a matter of willingness, but the world has also changed. More regulations, more bureaucracy, more money involved, more planning. It's the reason why we could definitely build the Hoover Dam again today, but definitely not in five years or for as little as we originally spent.
So, Toronto is wisely adding new transit lines. For example, the new Eglinton LRT. Unfortunately, it is already years overdue, with no definitive plan to finish it. They started construction in 2015. When will it finish? Who knows. Maybe a decade after starting?
This, of course, ties into the extremely difficult climate change situation. Transportation is a key emissions source, and without the ability to construct new subway lines, the transition away from carbon emissions gets that much more difficult
Another key problem: They keep building towers in Toronto, but not adding services. For example, the Yonge/Eglinton area has exploded in growth. Every new building has a sign that says "there's no plan to accommodate elementary students here." No new parks either. Most of the development is very anti-family, with tiny units and as many 1 bedrooms/studios as possible. Plus, these towers are usually all glass, which is a terrible from an emissions perspective.
Another example: They tried to start building "affordable" housing, funded by the government years ago. They still haven't broken ground. Anywhere. [1]
Bad planning, short term thinking, etc. It all adds up to a huge mess, and very little progress on the real problems that should have long been solved.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2023/06/05/housing-eventual...
What kind of numbers are we talking here? Is their population increasing by 1.x% every year, with most of the population growth occurring in a fairly small geographic area, like in Canada?
The average Canadian house price is over $700,000 [1], and over $1.2 million in Vancouver, $1.1 million in Toronto. Rentals are also extremely expensive in metro areas, with 1 BR apartments over $2,700 in Vancouver and $2,500 in Toronto. [2]
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-housing-data-1.6843592 [2] https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report
Anyway UK population will overtake Germany in the next decade or two if immigration to UK continues like it has past 12 months and Germany doesn't open for mass immigration.
the stated reasons are usually that building more housing outside of existing urban areas is bad for the environment, and building more housing within existing urban areas is bad for the "neighbourhood character". but the reality is just that a housing shortage is good for a lot of people's bank accounts.
Locals that have been here 20-30 years are selling and moving into remote areas because the only way to use your home equity is to abandon the area. More houses are not built here because our infrastructure has been poorly planned for 40 years. We are also surrounded tightly by mountains and water, every new build is condos to jam in as many people as possible.
But also: yes, Canada is big. Canada will also kill you real good and hard in most places. There’s a tremendous amount of land, and a lot of it is very very cold, and you really, really don’t want to live there.
Yakutsk pop. 311,760
Omsk pop. 1,172,070
Harbin pop. 6,976,136
The maritimes are sparsely populated and have even milder weather.
If the will were there to build the necessary road and rail infrastructure, Canada could support a much, much larger population.
bollocks, it's plenty cold
> accessibility
...is a function of, among other things, weather. much of geography is also very problematic; huge portions of the country are marshes that are dicey to build on, while other parts are mountains, and often in rain-shadows
> maritimes
...don't have any jobs. the fisheries are dying and climate change is driving that, on top of excess demand collapsing fish populations. the offshore oil platforms are dead too; those guys became Alberta roughnecks.
What service companies there are in CAN have followed suit with the US and demanded all of their workers go back to the office.
Yeah it's sparse but there are no jobs and no ability to move there -- non-starter of an idea. And "milder" weather is still quite cold by most of the world standards.
There's a strong but slowly diminishing opposition to medium-/high-density housing because neighborhoods of detached single family homes have defined the character of these cities for decades.
It's been years since I lived near Toronto but the city is ringed in on all sides by the lake and what's called the Green Belt, which is a protected swathe of farmland and nature preserves. Toronto's doing a better job than Vancouver in terms of managing the density and growth, but every city has problems growing and we Canadians lack the culture of collectivism that makes Tokyo work.
The absolutely insane part is how local the recent growth has become to essentially one subregion of Ontario.
We also face a big infrastructure problem which is exacerbated by some odd urban planning decisions. As small as my city is, it’s still possible to get caught in a logjam of traffic. Add in subpar transit and the city is extremely car centric, but despite all the wide open space around us it is still relatively hard to get from point A to B at certain times of day. (Not hard compared to cities like Toronto or Vancouver but harder than people are used to).
Canada also suffers from some very difficult social issues that should be part of a grand housing solution. Unfortunately, in practice there just isn’t much political will to truly solve these issues.
First off, Canadian colonialism was a complete disaster. Between the Indian Act and its manifestations (ie - residential schools), a portion of our population has been really kicked down. In my province, for example, the last time they did a decent statistical analysis, an Indigenous man was statistically more likely to have served time in a Federal prison than to have completed an undergraduate degree. As part of treaties, Canada is responsible to provide housing on reservations. Unfortunately, the housing is so substandard that people often move to cities and then fall through various cracks in our system.
Drug abuse is a major issue in Canada. I'm not from Vancouver but spend quite a bit of time there for work/family reasons. Entire neighbourhoods are very good anti-drug commercials.
My province has been underfunding education for a very long time. That has created some really interesting side effects. For example, many professionals have chosen to leave the province behind. It's hard to get a family doctor and many people are stuck using emergency rooms for primary care. Add in covid and our once vaunted health system has become a real shit show.
Canada also has a really interesting issue with welcoming newcomers. It's odd how a country that's mostly composed of immigrants can do such a shit job of welcoming immigrants. The best way I've ever heard of to describe immigration to this country is that you'll take the absolute best and brightest, give them points for amazing professional degrees and long careers....then make them drive cabs because we don't recognize any of their experience or education. This has created a really difficult world where on one hand, people who are from here blame the immigrants for driving up the price of house. While on the other hand, many of the people who chose to come here really aren't thriving - they're barely surviving on a hodge podge of minimum wage positions.
I'm sure that you'll find a number of other people with many different views on this. But I hope that I helped a little bit!
The problem is that being better is not good enough since our immigration and growth rate is so much higher than the US. IIRC the Vancouver metro area builds about 50,000 housing units per year which is way more than a typical American metro. But that's about half of demand, so the demand/supply imbalance grows faster in Vancouver that it does in an American city.
But that's not how it works in our current reality. In the real world housing is a speculative asset, so every free home doesn't go to the homeless person who needs it, but to the financial institution who has bigger piles of money that that person, like BlackRock, who will added to their ever increasing portfolio and you will continue to be homeless because their piles of money will be bigger than yours and they can make more money renting that house to you.
Aint that great? /s
The Liberal Minister of Housing, who is responsible for making housing affordable (and has failed at virtually every portfolio he's ever been given), has been buying more rentals.[1]
One in three Liberal Ministers owns rentals. These are the politicians bringing in more people into a housing crisis. They are not here to serve the public. Like Trudeau, they are here to get rich, and housing is the way to do it in Canada.
The US investor may want to "trade like Pelosi", but the Canadian investor should want to "buy housing like a Liberal". It's literally a government-backed investment and they will do anything it takes to keep it from going down.
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[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/comments/13az7qt/...
We've had conservative and liberal governments here, our government has failed us, doesn't matter which direction you want to point and blame for our current unsustainable housing.
It's a cacophony of poor planning and people who are stuck in the past—or at least what they imagine the past to be.
People gravitate toward cities because edu/$/oppy, but can't afford to live there comfortably until they're established in a career that would allow it ... and not all careers are on that kind of pay scale, so service workers get pushed into suburbs, then exurbs, then satellite cities. We haven't gotten beyond that stage yet, but suffice to say everyone is recognizing that it's unsustainable to allow cities to be comfortable only for the wealthy.
This is conflating a real problem with an artificial problem.
Sprawling Anglo-phone cities (NA, Australia, NZ, etc) have very different problems from truly dense cities in places like China, Brazil or even NYC, the one exception.
Sao Paolo and Shanghai have people packed like sardines. On the other hand, all 3 of SF, Vancouver and LA collapse into sprawl the second you leave the city core. This sounds like a guy who worries about suddenly becoming too jacked on their first day at the gym.
> Temporary immigration is the leading contributor to Canada's growth > The estimated gains in non-permanent residents recorded for 2022 are the highest for a single calendar year for which comparable data are available. Furthermore, it is the first time these gains are superior to those from immigrants over the same period.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230322/dq230...
Well, if all the forests burn this year, they can't burn again next year...right?
I get that the strategy is to make it a technologically enabled new-world planned society and economy using stakeholder capitalism, (where the stakeholders appear to be represented mainly by the WEF, but whatever), and you essentially need to make sure people with obsolete values and ensconced interests don't stand in the way of it to be able to implement that - but I think this rapid population rise is a harbinger for harder times in the near term. In the long term we're all dead, so it's hard to be enthusiastic about it.
For the uninitiated, there are 13 months in Canada