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.
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!
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 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.
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.
The absolutely insane part is how local the recent growth has become to essentially one subregion of Ontario.