"Obviously, Canada needs better housing and immigration policy, but I’d call those pretty minor and resolvable problems for a country that is doing so well."
And your solutions are...?
And your solutions are...?
You don’t even have to make the policy from scratch, you can just copy what Tokyo does.
(Tokyo has had completely flat housing pricing adjusted for inflation despite urban growth over the past few decades).
The first step is to stop pretty much all immigration into Canada for the time being. This puts a halt to the unsupportable increases in demand for housing and other resources.
The second step is to have all of the "temporary foreign workers", the foreign "students", and the "refugees" promptly return home. This frees up some of the existing supply of such resources.
Some people will claim that doing such things would be economically-disruptive. It will be, and that's necessary at this point.
That leads to the third step: remove the various government-imposed restrictions and controls on rentals, wages, and so forth. After the severe economic distortions that have been introduced by awful government policies over the past several decades, the economy will need to readjust to a natural balance again.
There may be some short-term pain, but it would put Canada into a far healthier position economically and socially over the long run.
Kick out the foreigners is not something I would expect to hear on HN.
At the current time, there's generally no legitimate reason for people from those places to be seeking asylum in Canada.
Legitimate refugees will be seeking immediate safety far closer their points of origin, rather than ending up in Canada, of all places.
Sri Lanka, to use your example, is over 12000 km (7500 miles) away from Canada, in either direction. At the time of the incident you mention, there were numerous safer countries that were much, much, much closer to Sri Lanka than Canada was. Those are the countries where those people should have ended up, if they were truly seeking immediate safety as legitimate refugees.
>there were numerous safer countries that were much, much, much closer
>Those are the countries where those people should have ended up
>legitimate refugees
Yeah, I expect to hear these talking points a lot more in the future. Not that I'm one of those open-borders wingnuts, just pointing out the inevitable slide towards populism in the face of crushing economic and ecological realities.
What happens when the prices of homes (where most people's entire retirement savings are held) stop increasing, or heaven forbid, fall? What happens to the real estate and construction sector (which is a massive portion of our economy)? How do we support our social services with no population growth? We're in a catch 22, that's the issue.
There's no inherent, natural, or real economic basis to them. They're examples of inefficiently-allocated resources.
Artificially propping up existing economic distortions and inefficiencies just makes the situation even worse in the long run, by creating even more distortions and inefficiency.
If a home's nominal value does not match its real value, we should expect the price to drop. This may not be good for the homeowner(s) involved, of course, but it shouldn't be considered any different than any other poor investment.
Industries that exist primarily due to artificial economic distortions shouldn't be expected to survive, at least not in their present form. They're a burden on the real economy.
Social services also shouldn't be so necessary in a healthy economy. They're a brute-force (and ultimately unsuccessful) way that government tries to counteract some of the economic distortions and inefficiencies that government itself has introduced, typically through earlier market interference.
I don't see there being a "catch 22" here. It's simple what will have to happen at some point: the economic distortions and inefficiency will need to be undone, and those who made poor investment decisions will feel it the most.
Isn't doing this introducing more economic distortions?
The solution is to build more and more quickly.