Hacker News Reader

One major change that happened with immigration is that the provinces (particularly - but not exclusively - Ontario) slashed funding for schools and encouraged them to make up for it by profiting off of a near infinite supply of foreign students.

Education is a provincial responsibility; the feds basically rubber stamped student visas, under the assumption that provinces were to be trusted for only accrediting responsible schools; schools that would import the best and brightest from around the world and train them to be valuable contributors to the country. That assumption faltered - instead, private strip-mall colleges began bringing in absolutely anybody with a pulse who could pay sky-high foreign tuition fees. Conestoga College in Kitchener-Waterloo, most notoriously, increased their foreign student enrollment by ~1500% - to nearly 30,000 students, 3/4 of the student population - putting enormous pressure on the city (which is not a very big city).

I think it's fair to blame the Libs for being asleep at the wheel while this happened, but I wish more ire was directed towards the provinces for this.

Isn’t the housing crisis caused at the local level? City officials control the permits/zoning.

> In 2020, Canada ranked 37 out of 38 for municipal approval process timeline in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We're 3 times slower than the United States. This is due to restrictive zoning practices, excessive red tape, and outdated processes.

https://housing-infrastructure.canada.ca/housing-logement/ho...

Absolutely, though the feds do have a significant impact via the tax code. The last period of time when lots of apartments were built in the 1960s-70s was a period of time when there was oodles of tax giveaways to apartment builders.

Additionally in that period the federal government was deeply involved in funding the development of publicly owned housing and coops. That ended in the late 80s and by the time of the main austerity budget of the Chretien Liberals in '93 the Feds were completely uninvolved in funding social housing.

So yeah a long period of nil social housing funding and few incentives to build housing and no real surprise that the country got to a point where it was severely underbuilding.

> On immigration the government only made remarkable changes in the last two years, and as if they touched a hot stove, they already realized their mistake and have already scaled back immigration numbers so much that Canada will effectively have nil immigration for the near future.

From government of Canada[1]:

> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025

> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 380,000 in 2026

> setting a target of 365,000 permanent residents in 2027

I don't know how that's "nil". The reduced numbers are still about 1% of Canada's population per year. Compare that to the us which had ~2.5 million immigrants or 0.7% of its population in 2022[2]. And most American seem to think that this is already too much.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

[2] https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/immigration/

There are a huge number of temporary residents in Canada, either as students, or on a post-graduation work permit, or as temporary foreign workers. By cutting back on these programs bringing in temporary residents, and also slashing the permanent resident intake, many of these temporary residents will need to leave. As such, the government is projecting a net decrease in population over the next two years.

ah yeah I see where I confused myself. From the links you posted, immigration still exists, but the numbers will be so low that population growth is nil. In fact the document asserts that Canada will see a decrease in population. Unless "marginal" population is some specific variant of phrase that means something beyond the ~41M population number?

> The 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan is expected to result in a marginal population decline of 0.2% in both 2025 and 2026, before returning to a population growth of 0.8% in 2027.

The more relevant thing beyond the permanent resident numbers is the temporary numbers which are also being severely cut. Often a PR is someone who has already been in the country for quite some time whereas a temporary resident would be a new immigrant.

canada got to the point that they can't turn off the immigration faucet, they need it for their economy to survive, but people have come to hate it so much that they can't maintain it, they're in for a collapse because of it

> people have come to hate it so much that they can't maintain it, they're in for a collapse because of it

Considering how post-Brexit Britain panned out, the people in charge of policy will be pragmatic and allow immigration to resume just to prevent immediate collapse under their watch, even if re-opening the immigration gates is unpopular.

Non-immigrant Canadians will have to change their living expectations and use housing more effectively (density). Or perish.

When I was university-aged, all of my asian and indian international student friends were living like 11-14 people to an apartment.

I thought immigrants were here to save the economy. Why does everyone need to scale back to living like college students then?

Well, they are.

By scaling back and "living like college students" (living like families in most of the world except the US & Canada), they're going to be the only groups of people who have any buying power to buy new homes when they finally get constructed. Meanwhile y'all will continue bitching and moaning about how fucked you are while the immigrant generation laughs their way to comfortable retirement and a better future for their children in your country.