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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 th

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.

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.