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Comment by ThrowawayTestr | Hacker News Reader

The Canadian government's plan is import people by the boatload and hope everything from housing to public services just sort of works itself out.

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"The Century Initiative (originally the Laurier Project Foundation)[2] is a Canadian lobby group and charity that aims to increase Canada's population to 100 million by 2100."

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

Why would they want the population to grow so large?

Population is power

More consumers to consume

https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/dv...

Every country with social security has to make sure there's enough young people to pay for old people.

Sounds a bit like a ponzi scheme to me. Unless immigrants don't age?

I'm probably missing something but yeah I'm assuming it is to some degree. I don't understand how it would work unless we increase the retirement age (indefinitely) or remove old folks from the pool.

At this point I'm wondering WHAT IS a sustainable policy? Is there a country this all doesn't apply to that has figured things out somehow?

We're cattle to be farmed. More heads of cattle = bigger farm. Quality of life, national identity, indigenous populations, etc all take second place to that except in lip service and politician platitudes.

> Growing our population to 100 million by 2100 would reduce the burden on government revenues to fund health care, old age security, and other services. It would also mean more skilled workers, innovation, and dynamism in the Canadian economy. 100 million by 2100 is not just a number. It’s a vision for the Canada we want to build for future generations.

https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/why-100m

Not that I agree...

Money, power. Canada has a lot of space and natural resource, with proper development it could support a much larger population. Politicians seem to have an outsized view of the significance of Canada on the international stage (e.g. trying for and failing to get a seat on the UN security council), when in reality we are small and not that important. Maybe they believe with a larger population, and thus economy, there would be more weight to throw around in international politics.

Just speculating but Canada has large land mass and potentially much more livable area given climate change. With a much larger population driving a ramped up economy, you could imagine Canada being a global player... Lots of ifs though.

There are a few groups pursing this goal: - People who imagine Canada as a global player. 100 million puts you in the big leagues. - People who fear our current demographics. Given our birth rate, our pension system is bankrupt without multiple 100k new arrivals every year. An aging population does similarly bad things to our health systems. - People who worship GDP over GDP per capita. - Our ownership aristocrats (aka the new Family Compact, a subset of the GDP group). If you own big tracts of land, or control national chains in protected industries, then your income tends to a stable fraction of total GDP. Every new arrival is a forced customer of your monopolistic supply.

Nobody pushing more immigration also supports pro-natal policies to encourage higher native birth rates.

That is trivially refuted by the website.

https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/our-work#focus-4-early-chil...

And all governments of the last 30 years have been spending money on children: Harper had sports credits, and the Universal Canada Child Benefit. Trudeau replaced it with Canada Child Benefit and has added daycare subsidies, dental and drug cover for minors.

The bigger problem is that nobody in the world has figured out what effective "pro-natal" policies look like. You can't push on a string.

The family compact doesn't have strong feelings about where their customers come from. But Canada's TFR fell below 2 in the 80s, and hasn't really changed since. If you have a magic wand, don't hold back.

Given how old our demographics are, even if our 20-year-olds all started having 3 kids each, TFR wouldn't even climb much. Demographic decline is baked in the cake without immigration.

Healthcare for children is the baseline for a civilized country. It’s not a pro-natal policy. Obviously none of these token gestures towards the idea of pro-natalism have had any effect, and yet immigration has only accelerated.

The CCB is ~6k/year cash. That's not healthcare. It's means tested, but bigger than the $50/mo baby bonus my mom got in the 70s. And 1 full year (combined) for maternity and paternity is much more than the US.

I would say it in reverse: BECAUSE 40 years of trying to raise TFR has absolutely failed in every advanced nation on the planet, Canada has chosen immigration as the only practical path.

Or you tell me - is there somewhere you think we should copy? Or are you just blaming 40 years of Canadian government for a global phenomenon?

The ex-Soviet states have had some recent gains, but those look more like a rebound from the total collapse of the 80s. And they are all stabilizing around the new-normal 1.8. I don't think there are any lessons there. Hungary has struggled to recover from the post-Soviet low of 1.3, and has almost reached the might peak of 1.6!

https://ifstudies.org/blog/a-new-normal-an-updated-look-at-f...

> Hungary has struggled to recover from the post-Soviet low of 1.3, and has almost reached the might peak of 1.6!

Dead cat bounce. Will be below 1.0 within a decade or two.

Little girls who grow up watching all the adult women around them have few or no children don't suddenly get it in their heads that they want a large family. The rate of decline will only accelerate.

Until the government bans birth control.

Yeh, that'll do it. It's totally impossible to avoid having children if the condoms are pulled off the shelf at the local gas station.

>is fully exhausted at $25,921 of earned income

Almost nobody except really poor people get this credit and its only $6000 in an entire year. Do you expect that to increase birth rates across the whole population?

I don't expect anything to change birth rates across the whole population. I'm asserting that nobody on the planet has that one figured out. The last 40 years are a long tale of repeated global failure to push on a string, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Canada. I'm hoping you have a counter example.

So because no major country has solved this problem (except hungry which doesnt count because... reasons) then you oppose doing anything more than what has already been tried? Could that argument be used to oppose climate change action? Or literally any problem? You’re argument is logically invalid.

I oppose nothing, except your sloppy claim that "nothing" has been tried. Lots of things have been tried, and they failed. 40 years of failure from Seoul to San Francisco. That's not the same as not trying. Please, enlighten me on your plan to raise birth rates.

A sad truth is that it's likely impossible to be (effectively) pro-natalist outside of totalitarianism. For instance, China had no trouble lowering their fertility rate to nearly 1, but they've since found it difficult to raise it back up. And they're not exactly a gentle government. Even Best Korea has Glorious leader crying and begging for people to have more children.

On 4chan, they have some laughably bad conspiracy theories about it, and while I don't subscribe to those, we clearly have some very effective (accidental) propaganda that discourages people from procreating. But banning that propaganda isn't compatible with free speech, and so I think that it's virtually impossible for anyone to do anything about this in the West. What surprises me is that even China and North Korea apparently can't handle it either.

It's not even easy to talk about. Any attempt is seen as (at best) thinly veiled racism. I think that even if you didn't care about natalism, that you still might not want your population to triple. Isn't the housing crisis already absurd in the Toronto region as it is? This can't be in the interest of any Canadian, no matter their skin color.

Completely agree that this is a global thing. The Anglosphere housing crisis does seem special to a particular kind of colonial development pattern. But TFR is below replacement anywhere that has developed past poverty. Woke Canada and manly-manly Hungary are in the same boat.

But I'll push back on one thing: who is this mysterious "you" people keep talking to? There is no single "Canadian" whose interests represent the whole.

There are LOTS of people who are doing well from the current housing crisis -- landlords, real estate agents, homeowners, construction trades, the Family Compact, etc. Landlords have perfected the rennoviction sneak past rent-control. They love the crisis. Our mayor in 2000 was a (small-time crooked) furniture dealer. Immigrants buy furniture. Our last mayor worked for a monopoly cable company - every new immigrant needs a phone/tv/internet package. The Westons (grocery barons) basically make money from every new body in Canada. All of them know that more immigration = more money in their pocket.

It's been hell on young people, but you might notice they aren't running the show.

> But I'll push back on one thing: who is this mysterious "you" people keep talking to? There is no single "Canadian" whose interests represent the whole.

I think in this case there is. Whether your ancestors have been there for 200 years, or you just naturalized last week... it's not in your interest for Canada to import another 70 million people so they can "be a player on the world stage".

> There are LOTS of people who are doing well from the current housing crisis

There are some who do relatively well in it, but it's doubtful to me that their (self-)perceived wealth is actually higher in these conditions than it would be in a country with a strong economy, low inflation, and an engaged workforce. Their 1%er income might be twice as high, but buys less than half as much. Most of the people you point out are lusting after a larger piece of a smaller pie. And the few that truly to gain advantage from this, they number in the low thousands or even hundreds, not the tens of millions.

I'm not in Canada myself, but the country I am a citizen of is suffering the same exact problem. If mine is too dumb to fix it, it might be nice to at least see you guys succeed. Doesn't look like that's in the cards either.

That's just silly. The realistic alternative isn't a strong Canada with a strong economy, low inflation, and engaged workforce. The likely alternative is Canada facing demographic collapse! We'd have a shrinking workforce as the boomers retire, persistent wage inflation as we allocate more and more of the youth into elder-care, rising taxes, and flight to the USA by the talented and ambitions. CPP is bankrupt in 15 years without substantial immigration.

Canada is currently having a spirited debate about levels. It's pretty obvious that 500k/a is higher than we can currently absorb. But 0 is just a recipe for a different disaster.

I gave you a concrete list of people (real estate agents, furniture sales, monopoly owners, retiring home owners) that make tons of money off mass immigration. Your answer is "no they don't".

If you can point to single country in the world that has defeated the stagnation of an aging population, I'm all ears.

But if you are going to give me unrealistic counterfactuals, I might as well wish for a pony too.

Here's Canada's dependency ratios over time:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-229-x/2009001/demo/de...

And here's the global context:

https://data.oecd.org/pop/old-age-dependency-ratio.htm

We're in better shape that Italy and Japan. But absent immigration, we're in exactly the same boat. The baby boom has turned to baby bust.

Just look at the crater where our 15-20 year-olds might be. Who exactly is going have babies in 10 years if not immigrants? We literally don't have the numbers to produce the next generation otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada#/media/...

> Multiple founders and affiliates of the organization have been employed by McKinsey & Company, a multinational consulting firm. Due to this, the Century Initiative has been connected to a scandal over McKinsey consulting expenses by Justin Trudeau's government, in which whistleblowers have highlighted McKinsey's large and growing influence over Canadian immigration policy.

McKinsey's influence on government policy around the world seems unhealthy.

I'm Canadian, immigrated as a child from Taiwan.

It's pretty scary that the powers that be want more immigration yet don't actually have a real implementation for it. This goes against everything engineers value, obviously for many of us here. The likely consequence is a lot of harm and disruption to people in the future.

I mean, I guess the real plan is the Canadian 1% exploiting a booming immigrant society.

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