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Comment by dpc050505 | Hacker News Reader

Our banking regulations kept the bubble from popping in 2008 and international capital figured out canadian real estate was a very safe bet. Housing prices never corrected and they kept growing at the same-ish rate as american housing. Add demographic (we increased our population by 3% this year, 1.2 million extra people while building 200k new houses) and geographic (most of our land is barely livable frozen rock where you can't just go park a camper) factors and you get the perfect storm.

An enormous chunk of our GDP growth comes from real estate transactions, we don't have much productive endeavours other than natural resource extraction. Canada is still very much a colony.

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> most of our land is barely livable frozen rock where you can't just go park a camper

Come on now. Yes by total land mass you are correct, but if you’ve driven from southwestern Ontario to Halifax or Winnipeg to Calgary, you’d seen thousands of kilometres and millions upon millions of acres that could be developed. Practically developable land is 100% not our limiting factor. We artificially restrict both density in existing cities and expansion of cities due to zoning but this has nothing to do with being “barely livable frozen rock”.

I've crossed the country from Montréal to British Columbia on wheels three times.

The farmland you're speaking of is still relatively expensive, there isn't much economic activity other than industrial farming (do you have access to several million $ for machinery and land?) in those areas to sustain a life, and it's still frozen 6 months a year. It's also owned by someone and developing it into endless suburban sprawl hurts our already limited food production (which is strategically essential when we consider the geopolitical instability our world is facing). Crown land is for the most part either Tundra, Canadian shield or west coast mountains that is even more difficult to live on than the farm land near the US border.

I recently had a random observation.

My folks own a cottage 1.5h away from smack middle of Toronto (I drive it often)

We call it a cottage because it has no running water, no broadband, overhead electricity lines that literally gets knocked out during bad storms.

All of our neighbors are in the same boat. Thousands of southern rural Ontarians live like this.

The difference is that they live this way full year round.

We are so behind as a country in infrastructure that it's not even funny.

To be developing those rural land you talk about will probably cost $100B over three decades at the rate we build things.

I'm not hopeful.

Yeah my anecdote is similar. My parents lived 25 minute drive from Kanata (Ottawa suburb), a proper tech hub. The drive was over rural roads, not highways . And they had no infra. Internet was a terrible satellite. Water pump. Septic tank. It wasn’t wilderness or anything. Just farmlands, mostly occupied by non-farming owners at that point.

word for word true for australia too, except hot/dry instead of frozen. :(

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