10 ms·

Canada's population reaches 40M

semihsalihoglu 3y ago
I've been living in Canada for 8 years and I generally heard people referring to "35M people", which I believe will soon change to "40M" people. Interesting that there is apparently a population clock that model's Canada's population: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2018005-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2018005... See also the Century Initiative: https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ to reach 100M by 2100.
- NoRelToEmber 3y ago
  This seems unsustainable. I thought the consensus was that environmental footprint should be reduced [1,2], not deliberately increased? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/science-proves-kids-are-bad-earth-morality-suggests-we-stop-ncna820781 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/science-proves-kids-ar... Edit: As expected, the Century Initiative is chaired by corporate lobbyists, and closely tied to Blackrock, that has massive investments in Canadian real-estate and would benefit from making housing more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative#Controversies_and_critiques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative#Controversi...
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    The late Hans Rosling has a good presentation on this, "Don't Panic": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E * http://vimeo.com/79878808 http://vimeo.com/79878808
  - slashdev 3y ago
    This is not Canadians making babies, which they do below the replacement limit as in other developed countries. This is massive levels of immigration. Canadians do have a bigger per capita environment footprint, but still it’s really just moving people around. Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.
    - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
      Not just below replacement -- far below. Canada's TFR in 2020 was 1.4. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/960-fewer-babies-born-canadas-fertility-rate-hits-record-low-2020 https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/960-fewer-babies-born-c... And the last time TFR was above replacement was in 1970. Meaning Canada has been at below-replacement fertility for more than 50 years. Canada's population, however, has doubled since 1970. That represents an extreme amount of immigration.
    - 908B64B197 3y ago
      > Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high. Canadian immigration quotas are simply out of control, about 10x per capita what the US allows. And it's just the beginning, apparently the current ruling party is planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0] It creates an interesting dynamic in tech. Anecdotally, it seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?). Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. Yet it seems the opposite happened. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US. Canada maintains a net brain drain to the US [1] Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary. The city of Vancouver even bragged about its devs being worth 50K less than their American counterparts! [2] I witnessed it first hand. Back when we opened a satellite location in Toronto. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry-regularization-program-1.6609144 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry... [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trad http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra... [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-workers-pay/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > See also the Century Initiative: https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ to reach 100M by 2100. Doug Sanders (International-Affairs Columnist, The Globe and Mail) has a good book on this: * http://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/ http://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/
  - NoRelToEmber 3y ago
    > to ensure [..] ecological sustainability, Canada needs to triple its population. This is beyond farcical.
  - theironhammer 3y ago
    40% of Federal MPs own rental property. Now you know why boosting the population is big with politicians.
- nickpeterson 3y ago
  Canada is going to have an absolutely blistering amount of immigration in the next few decades. Enjoy the sparseness while it lasts…
  - chongli 3y ago
    Canada is both dense and sparse. It’s paradoxical. Huge landmass. Almost everyone living in a thin slice near the U.S. border. We have massive housing issues all over the place. Nobody’s building in the great wilderness above.
  - smcl 3y ago
    It's the second largest country in the world. It has half the population of Germany and ~28x the land mass. Their problem will be actually building houses and making them affordable, not "sparseness"
  - yuppie_scum 3y ago
    Yeah pump the brakes, there’s pllllleeeeeeeentyyyyy of physical space available in Canada for settlement still, if you don’t mind the poor weather further north.
    - voisin 3y ago
      You don’t have to go that much farther north and still have similar weather. Look at the interior of BC from Vernon to Prince George - huge amount of undeveloped land with moderate winters. Same with Calgary to Edmonton (both have crappy weather IMO but tons of space to develop and fill with people who would otherwise accept Calgary / Edmonton winters), etc etc etc.
  - robocat 3y ago
    Canada currently has about 8M people (20%) born in other countries. If you add another 2 million immigrants then you need to build 5% more houses, need 5% more cars, need 5% more electricity, need 5% more infrastructure, Capitalistically I would be interested to backtest the returns for a global macro fund that invested in countries with high immigration. I live in New Zealand where ~30% of our population is people that were not born here (New Zealand is quite picky about who gets to come here, so we have less structural problems than some European countries that accept large numbers of refugees with little opportunity to filter for the most suitable people). New Zealand has been building housing at a fast pace to keep up with the ~50% increase in population over the “native” population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...
- bostonsre 3y ago
  I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future. Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    The shield would need to turn into farmland
  - voisin 3y ago
    I think our Canadian cabal is doing everything it can to speed up global warming. We have the dirtiest oil in the world (Alberta Oil Sands) and we essentially based our economy on extraction.
    - bostonsre 3y ago
      It's making me wonder about those recent "accidental" forest fires up there..
      - voisin 3y ago
        I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that eco-terrorists set them, but I would 100% endorse this kind of behaviour if that’s what it takes to shake our society from complacency. It’s totally wild that we are slouching toward ecosystem collapse and it hasn’t become the key talking point in every human interaction the way COVID was.
    - justinhj 3y ago
      We have the forth largest oil reserves in the world and they are coming out of the ground at some point because the need for it is unlikely to go away. We should be investing in becoming the best at oil extraction and doing it as safely and cleanly as possible. Hamstringing the industry is bad for our country.
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    >I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future. Unlikely. The parts of Canada that aren't settled (and aren't actually in or near the Arctic Circle) are that way not because of temperature, but because the soil is almost entirely unsuitable for farming: Either rocky Canadian Shield, or "swallows locomotives overnight" muskeg (plus infinite numbers of mosquitos). >Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming. Canada will net benefit from global warming, yes, because the Northwest Passage will become navigable. But it is not true that temperature is the only thing keeping Canada from being able to support as many people as the US, which has almost identically sized geography.
bee_rider 3y ago
Congrats, Canada! This has alerted me to the (IMO, pretty surprising) fact that all of Canada holds fewer people than the BosWash corridor.
- semihsalihoglu 3y ago
  I am also amused that Ontario, which is the most populous province has the following statistics: Area: 1,076,395 km square Population: 15.3M Istanbul, which is the biggest city in my home country Turkiye has these: Area: 5,343 (so 200x smaller) Population: 18M (official census is ~16M but even the major cites 18M) I'm not even comparing the much denser places in the world (e.g., Gaza).
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    Yet we have massive housing issues...
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      Name me a major western metro area with jobs and a good standard of living that doesn't. I remember people banging the drums 10 years agho "come to Berlin, there's so much empty houses". Yeah, that changed quickly.
      - semihsalihoglu 3y ago
        This is a good point. There must be one though that other cities can look up to. I would guess Singapore does a good job on these problems. I would be curious to hear of the best examples of large cities that have done a better job on housing.
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Housing problems here are related to pricing, and only tangentially to quantity of construction. The issue is how cheap housing loans have been, how deregulated the real estate sales market, and how stupid the last 20 years of governments have been about a) how they regulate the housing market and b) what kind of housing gets built (mostly either sprawly suburban single family mc-homes way out in e.g. Vaughan or Mississauga etc. or tiny condos in Toronto proper which just get turned into speculative investments or airbnbs). Mortgages here were too cheap for too long. Really, what people "buy" when they buy a home is a mortgage, not a house.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Australia has dramatically increased its immigration intake. 750,000 this year and next, with 1.5 million in total coming in the next 5 years. This huge number of people are being brought in during Australias worst ever housing crisis. The ALP government doesn’t care in the slightest. In fact it’s greatly to the advantage of the politicians, most of whom own 1/2/3/4/5/6 or more houses.
- faluzure 3y ago
  1.5 million over 5 years are a rookie numbers. We did 1 million just last year. And our housing minister of housing in Canada just bought his second rental property.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    Australia’s “Minister for Homelessness” owns 4 houses.
    - cycrutchfield 3y ago
      Should they be homeless too?
      - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
        Obviously not, but you can hardly understand the issue when you have more homes than anyone can have in a lifetime.
        cycrutchfield 3y ago
        What’s the limit on the amount of real estate you own before you become unable to understand or empathize with the homeless? Does this work with other vocations? Should spinsters not be allowed to teach or care for children? If you don’t own a car you can’t become a car mechanic?
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
Its kind of crazy that Canada now has the same population as California, and is 25 times bigger physically. Whereas Canada's economy is 50% smaller than California's (3T to 2T).
- hbn 3y ago
  Yet we still manage to compete on housing prices!
  - jonny_eh 3y ago
    In Vancouver and Toronto. Even then, SF house prices are still much higher when you consider the exchange rate.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  Did you know that Canada has land farther south than parts of California?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    I'm guessing Windsor (42.3149° N), but CA's northern latitude is almost 42° N exactly, so it turns out to be Middle Island instead (41.40° N).
  - bmc7505 3y ago
    I was skeptical, but it turns out you're right! According to Wikipedia, the Northernmost point in California is 42 degrees north, and the Southernmost point in Canada is Middle Island, which is 41.7 degrees north [1], or about 0.3 degrees farther south of the Northernmost point in California. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_Cana... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_U.S._states_and_territories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_U.S....
lom 3y ago
Congratulations Canada!
scohesc 3y ago
Congratulations Canada - welcome to the big leagues! I hope they continue to grow and become a meaningful player on the global stage! Canada is a wonderful country with a lot of places to visit, culture to experience, people to interact with - I visited there 5 years ago and was able to visit only a small part of such a beautiful country. Now, they can (hopefully) deal with the issues that come along with increasing your population by millions per year, along with a lack of economic planning, though from what I hear and read, it seems like not a lot of headway is being made: - Unaffordable housing to a large portion of Canadians (Condos sell in the more heavily populated parts of Canada for high 6-figures/millions of dollars) - Unaffordable rent to a large portion of Canadians (A friend in Canada is paying around $1300 CAD a month for a 700sqft bachelor suite not including all utilities) - Rampant inflation and opportunistic price-gouging from corporations - The increased load on the already strained healthcare system, making Canadians wait up to 3-4 weeks to see their family doctor, and months/years for specialists. - Monopolization and lack of competition in critical industries (Telecoms and Grocery come to mind as of late) - Multiple allegations of Chinese interference in Canadian politics and foreign influence of active MPs that go seemingly ignored by the current party in power.
- pxue 3y ago
  Where's your friend? $1300 cad for a 700sqft pad in Toronto is a steal! I'm unfortunately very serious.
  - ufish235 3y ago
    I second this, from Vancouver! My partner pays $1500 for less.
  - stanski 3y ago
    Just learned yesterday that a bachelor in my building is now $1850 (CAD), hydro and water extra. This is not a luxury building.
    - jonny_eh 3y ago
      > luxury building Fun fact, there are no luxury buildings. There's newer building and older buildings. The term luxury is just slapped onto marketing for new units being sold in new buildings. Why am I being so pedantic? Because people complain that "they only make luxury housing these days, we need affordable housing too!". Guess what, your parents' bungalow in the suburbs was likely marketed as luxury housing 50 years too. https://marker.medium.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-luxury-housing-8df526dfb556 https://marker.medium.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-luxury-housi...

I've been living in Canada for 8 years and I generally heard people referring to "35M people", which I believe will soon change to "40M" people. Interesting that there is apparently a population clock that model's Canada's population: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2018005-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2018005... See also the Century Initiative: https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ to reach 100M by 2100.

NoRelToEmber 3y ago
This seems unsustainable. I thought the consensus was that environmental footprint should be reduced [1,2], not deliberately increased? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/science-proves-kids-are-bad-earth-morality-suggests-we-stop-ncna820781 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/science-proves-kids-ar... Edit: As expected, the Century Initiative is chaired by corporate lobbyists, and closely tied to Blackrock, that has massive investments in Canadian real-estate and would benefit from making housing more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative#Controversies_and_critiques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative#Controversi...
- throw0101b 3y ago
  The late Hans Rosling has a good presentation on this, "Don't Panic": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E * http://vimeo.com/79878808 http://vimeo.com/79878808
- slashdev 3y ago
  This is not Canadians making babies, which they do below the replacement limit as in other developed countries. This is massive levels of immigration. Canadians do have a bigger per capita environment footprint, but still it’s really just moving people around. Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.
  - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    Not just below replacement -- far below. Canada's TFR in 2020 was 1.4. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/960-fewer-babies-born-canadas-fertility-rate-hits-record-low-2020 https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/960-fewer-babies-born-c... And the last time TFR was above replacement was in 1970. Meaning Canada has been at below-replacement fertility for more than 50 years. Canada's population, however, has doubled since 1970. That represents an extreme amount of immigration.
  - 908B64B197 3y ago
    > Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high. Canadian immigration quotas are simply out of control, about 10x per capita what the US allows. And it's just the beginning, apparently the current ruling party is planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0] It creates an interesting dynamic in tech. Anecdotally, it seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?). Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. Yet it seems the opposite happened. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US. Canada maintains a net brain drain to the US [1] Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary. The city of Vancouver even bragged about its devs being worth 50K less than their American counterparts! [2] I witnessed it first hand. Back when we opened a satellite location in Toronto. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry-regularization-program-1.6609144 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry... [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trad http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra... [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-workers-pay/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...
throw0101b 3y ago
> See also the Century Initiative: https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ to reach 100M by 2100. Doug Sanders (International-Affairs Columnist, The Globe and Mail) has a good book on this: * http://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/ http://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/
- NoRelToEmber 3y ago
  > to ensure [..] ecological sustainability, Canada needs to triple its population. This is beyond farcical.
- theironhammer 3y ago
  40% of Federal MPs own rental property. Now you know why boosting the population is big with politicians.
nickpeterson 3y ago
Canada is going to have an absolutely blistering amount of immigration in the next few decades. Enjoy the sparseness while it lasts…
- chongli 3y ago
  Canada is both dense and sparse. It’s paradoxical. Huge landmass. Almost everyone living in a thin slice near the U.S. border. We have massive housing issues all over the place. Nobody’s building in the great wilderness above.
- smcl 3y ago
  It's the second largest country in the world. It has half the population of Germany and ~28x the land mass. Their problem will be actually building houses and making them affordable, not "sparseness"
- yuppie_scum 3y ago
  Yeah pump the brakes, there’s pllllleeeeeeeentyyyyy of physical space available in Canada for settlement still, if you don’t mind the poor weather further north.
  - voisin 3y ago
    You don’t have to go that much farther north and still have similar weather. Look at the interior of BC from Vernon to Prince George - huge amount of undeveloped land with moderate winters. Same with Calgary to Edmonton (both have crappy weather IMO but tons of space to develop and fill with people who would otherwise accept Calgary / Edmonton winters), etc etc etc.
- robocat 3y ago
  Canada currently has about 8M people (20%) born in other countries. If you add another 2 million immigrants then you need to build 5% more houses, need 5% more cars, need 5% more electricity, need 5% more infrastructure, Capitalistically I would be interested to backtest the returns for a global macro fund that invested in countries with high immigration. I live in New Zealand where ~30% of our population is people that were not born here (New Zealand is quite picky about who gets to come here, so we have less structural problems than some European countries that accept large numbers of refugees with little opportunity to filter for the most suitable people). New Zealand has been building housing at a fast pace to keep up with the ~50% increase in population over the “native” population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...
bostonsre 3y ago
I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future. Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  The shield would need to turn into farmland
- voisin 3y ago
  I think our Canadian cabal is doing everything it can to speed up global warming. We have the dirtiest oil in the world (Alberta Oil Sands) and we essentially based our economy on extraction.
  - bostonsre 3y ago
    It's making me wonder about those recent "accidental" forest fires up there..
    - voisin 3y ago
      I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that eco-terrorists set them, but I would 100% endorse this kind of behaviour if that’s what it takes to shake our society from complacency. It’s totally wild that we are slouching toward ecosystem collapse and it hasn’t become the key talking point in every human interaction the way COVID was.
  - justinhj 3y ago
    We have the forth largest oil reserves in the world and they are coming out of the ground at some point because the need for it is unlikely to go away. We should be investing in becoming the best at oil extraction and doing it as safely and cleanly as possible. Hamstringing the industry is bad for our country.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future. Unlikely. The parts of Canada that aren't settled (and aren't actually in or near the Arctic Circle) are that way not because of temperature, but because the soil is almost entirely unsuitable for farming: Either rocky Canadian Shield, or "swallows locomotives overnight" muskeg (plus infinite numbers of mosquitos). >Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming. Canada will net benefit from global warming, yes, because the Northwest Passage will become navigable. But it is not true that temperature is the only thing keeping Canada from being able to support as many people as the US, which has almost identically sized geography.

bee_rider 3y ago

Congrats, Canada! This has alerted me to the (IMO, pretty surprising) fact that all of Canada holds fewer people than the BosWash corridor.

semihsalihoglu 3y ago
I am also amused that Ontario, which is the most populous province has the following statistics: Area: 1,076,395 km square Population: 15.3M Istanbul, which is the biggest city in my home country Turkiye has these: Area: 5,343 (so 200x smaller) Population: 18M (official census is ~16M but even the major cites 18M) I'm not even comparing the much denser places in the world (e.g., Gaza).
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  Yet we have massive housing issues...
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    Name me a major western metro area with jobs and a good standard of living that doesn't. I remember people banging the drums 10 years agho "come to Berlin, there's so much empty houses". Yeah, that changed quickly.
    - semihsalihoglu 3y ago
      This is a good point. There must be one though that other cities can look up to. I would guess Singapore does a good job on these problems. I would be curious to hear of the best examples of large cities that have done a better job on housing.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Housing problems here are related to pricing, and only tangentially to quantity of construction. The issue is how cheap housing loans have been, how deregulated the real estate sales market, and how stupid the last 20 years of governments have been about a) how they regulate the housing market and b) what kind of housing gets built (mostly either sprawly suburban single family mc-homes way out in e.g. Vaughan or Mississauga etc. or tiny condos in Toronto proper which just get turned into speculative investments or airbnbs). Mortgages here were too cheap for too long. Really, what people "buy" when they buy a home is a mortgage, not a house.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Australia has dramatically increased its immigration intake. 750,000 this year and next, with 1.5 million in total coming in the next 5 years. This huge number of people are being brought in during Australias worst ever housing crisis. The ALP government doesn’t care in the slightest. In fact it’s greatly to the advantage of the politicians, most of whom own 1/2/3/4/5/6 or more houses.

faluzure 3y ago
1.5 million over 5 years are a rookie numbers. We did 1 million just last year. And our housing minister of housing in Canada just bought his second rental property.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  Australia’s “Minister for Homelessness” owns 4 houses.
  - cycrutchfield 3y ago
    Should they be homeless too?
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      Obviously not, but you can hardly understand the issue when you have more homes than anyone can have in a lifetime.
      - cycrutchfield 3y ago
        What’s the limit on the amount of real estate you own before you become unable to understand or empathize with the homeless? Does this work with other vocations? Should spinsters not be allowed to teach or care for children? If you don’t own a car you can’t become a car mechanic?
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago

TheMagicHorsey 3y ago

Its kind of crazy that Canada now has the same population as California, and is 25 times bigger physically. Whereas Canada's economy is 50% smaller than California's (3T to 2T).

hbn 3y ago
Yet we still manage to compete on housing prices!
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  In Vancouver and Toronto. Even then, SF house prices are still much higher when you consider the exchange rate.
jonny_eh 3y ago
Did you know that Canada has land farther south than parts of California?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  I'm guessing Windsor (42.3149° N), but CA's northern latitude is almost 42° N exactly, so it turns out to be Middle Island instead (41.40° N).
- bmc7505 3y ago
  I was skeptical, but it turns out you're right! According to Wikipedia, the Northernmost point in California is 42 degrees north, and the Southernmost point in Canada is Middle Island, which is 41.7 degrees north [1], or about 0.3 degrees farther south of the Northernmost point in California. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_Cana... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_U.S._states_and_territories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_U.S....

lom 3y ago

Congratulations Canada!

scohesc 3y ago

Congratulations Canada - welcome to the big leagues! I hope they continue to grow and become a meaningful player on the global stage! Canada is a wonderful country with a lot of places to visit, culture to experience, people to interact with - I visited there 5 years ago and was able to visit only a small part of such a beautiful country. Now, they can (hopefully) deal with the issues that come along with increasing your population by millions per year, along with a lack of economic planning, though from what I hear and read, it seems like not a lot of headway is being made: - Unaffordable housing to a large portion of Canadians (Condos sell in the more heavily populated parts of Canada for high 6-figures/millions of dollars) - Unaffordable rent to a large portion of Canadians (A friend in Canada is paying around $1300 CAD a month for a 700sqft bachelor suite not including all utilities) - Rampant inflation and opportunistic price-gouging from corporations - The increased load on the already strained healthcare system, making Canadians wait up to 3-4 weeks to see their family doctor, and months/years for specialists. - Monopolization and lack of competition in critical industries (Telecoms and Grocery come to mind as of late) - Multiple allegations of Chinese interference in Canadian politics and foreign influence of active MPs that go seemingly ignored by the current party in power.

pxue 3y ago
Where's your friend? $1300 cad for a 700sqft pad in Toronto is a steal! I'm unfortunately very serious.
- ufish235 3y ago
  I second this, from Vancouver! My partner pays $1500 for less.
- stanski 3y ago
  Just learned yesterday that a bachelor in my building is now $1850 (CAD), hydro and water extra. This is not a luxury building.
  - jonny_eh 3y ago
    > luxury building Fun fact, there are no luxury buildings. There's newer building and older buildings. The term luxury is just slapped onto marketing for new units being sold in new buildings. Why am I being so pedantic? Because people complain that "they only make luxury housing these days, we need affordable housing too!". Guess what, your parents' bungalow in the suburbs was likely marketed as luxury housing 50 years too. https://marker.medium.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-luxury-housing-8df526dfb556 https://marker.medium.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-luxury-housi...