How bad is it? Way worse than Poilievre is letting on.
In the Post I mention in passing the Gallup organization’s
World Happiness report, which ranks Canadians under the age of 30 in 58th place among the nations of the world, between Malta and Ecuador.
As recently as 2010, Canada’s under-30 set was as happy as the happiest cohort, the over-60 crowd. The happiness deficit among young people in Canada is particularly pronounced among young women, who report a third more negative emotions than young men.
This up and coming generation isn’t expected to get any happier, any time soon, and that RCMP analysis I mentioned, the “secret” report that details trends that are expected to shape the next decade or so, is chilling. Especially the observation that “many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live.”
The RCMP’s “whole of government” forecast notes that the RCMP needs to be capable of responding to “new and unexpected crises,” and quite a few are on the horizon. Here’s just one: "Law enforcement should expect continuing social and political polarization fueled by misinformation campaigns and an increasing mistrust for all democratic institutions." You can read the report for yourself after you’re done here.
Just click.
It’ll take radical, invasive intervention just to get to ‘normal’ again
Poilieve’s enemies are quite right in this one respect: there are going to be big, scary changes if his Conservatives get elected. Let me put that another way. They’d be right if they were saying there
should be big scary changes if Poilievre’s Conservatives get elected.
Housing is the “domestic” issue at the top of everyone’s minds in Canada, even though it’s not merely “domestic” and anyway it’s really a crisis in housing availability and affordability, and it’s not so much a political crisis as a full-blown generational catastrophe.
Until very recently, Poilievre’s remedy has been an articulation of variations on the theme of this snappy slogan: “Fire Gatekeepers. Build Homes. Fast.” This was always just pissing in the wind, as the facts show, which we’ll come to.
And the public has been catching on.
Our friends over at Blacklocks’ Reporter have got a hold of an $814,741 contract the Privy Council entered into with the Strategic Counsel firm in Toronto that shows that Poilievre’s idea of witholding federal funds from municipalities that fail to raise building-permit numbers by 15 percent a year has landed with a bit of a “mixed views” thud.
Canada’s construction industry is building as fast as it can - about 250,000 homes a year. Hiking municipal building permits by 15 percent a year wouldn’t put a dent in the target the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reckons would have to be met - 741,000 housing starts, every year, for the next six years, just to reach a dubious “affordability” target.
Quite sensibly most people in the Strategic Counsel survey said: Hey, Ottawa,
you’ve really got to do something about immigration.
Lately, Poilievre has been pulled reluctantly into being
more specific about his intentions: “We need to make a link between the number of homes built and the number of people we invite as new Canadians.” No kidding. He says a Conservative government with him in the wheelhouse would return Canada to a policy that “invites a number of people that we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.” Now we’re getting somewhere.
But we need to stop kidding ourselves about the enormity of the changes that need to be put into effect to fix the mess, and the radical surgery required to do it Poilievre’s way.
But what about Canada’s “low-fertility” and “aging” population?
Like the “labour shortage,” these things are mostly works of fiction.
Canada’s population isn’t aging faster than any other G7 country. And it’s not as if those distinctly unhappy Canadians under the age of 30 stubbornly refuse to have kids. It’s that they can’t afford to, and they can’t afford homes to raise the kids in, so actual houses - single-detached homes - are being built less and less, and because they cost so much they’re available to a shrinking and increasingly wealthy fraction of the population.
The most commonly occurring Canadian household, until 1976, was two parents and three kids. After 1976, two-person households - roomates, a couple, a single parent with a child -took top spot. By 1981, people living alone (one on five households) surpassed the two-parent, three-kids household (one on six). The gap keeps widening. By 2011, less than a tenth of Canadian households coinsisted of a couple with three or more kids.
Reverse-engineering the Liberals’ Great Leap Forward
Everything the Trudeau government has done since 2015, whether by incompetence or on purpose, has ended up putting Canada at the mercy of what is probably
the biggest housing bubble of all time.
The number of “temporary” work-permit holders in Canada has doubled over the past three years to at least 2.5 million, including foreign students, many if not most of whom have also been granted work permits, or are working without them. That’s six percent of the population of Canada.
Scotiabank reckons t
he real number would amount to eight percent of the Canadian population if you go by Ottawa’s own guesstimate of “undocumented’ residents. It’s actually more like 16 percent of Canada’s workforce, which was put at 16.5 million people as of last month.
And they all need a place to live.
Add to that about 1.2 million permanent residents admitted to Canada over the past three years, and another 866,000 who became citizens over the past three years and the final figure is. . . nobody knows.
It was
only last month that Immigration Minister Mark Miller was pleading the case of the big box stores. They were getting spooked about Ottawa’s hints that it would have to do something about the public uproar over foreign students making up an increasingly huge component of the big retailers’ payrolls. “Labour shortages” and all that, old boy.
Now we’re expected to believe that Miller has seen the light, and by golly,
by 2027 we’ll have brought those numbers down a bit. I’m not so sure.
There were
1,040,985 foreign students studying and working in Canada last year. Ottawa now says that this year we’ll be going into the first year of a “temporary” two-year “cap” on new foreign-student admissions. It will mean “only” 364,000 students will be admitted in 2024 (next year’s number is still up in the air) which, conveniently, is the same number of students whose study permits are set to expire this year.
Last year alone, the number of work-permit holders in Canada officially grew by 502,835 people. According to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, the Canadian economy grew only 417,500 jobs in 2023, as my old chum
Rohana Razel points out.
Also last year, 203,300 Canadians ended up unemployed. And the tent cities across the country keep getting bigger and more numerous.
Here’s the thing.
Even if federal government was controlled by totally insane people who believed that the entire point of the Canadian economy was simply to provide jobs for people emigrating to Canada to work, we’d have 85,335 unemployed foreign work-permit holders to take care of, just from last year’s arrivals, on top of everyone else.
What the hell are we going to do?
So, good, Pierre Poilievre says he’s going to match up the number of new arrivals every year (last year Canada brought in 1.2 million newcomers, officially) with the number of new people we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.
What do you reckon that new number would be? Say, 300,000 newcomers, give or take?
Poilievre’s formula wouldn’t require simply blocking 800,000 people on Canada’s immigration flightpath starting in 2024, and turning away all those prospective citizens, permanent residents and people arrriving via the dizzying array of temporary work-permit categories on the books.
It would mean telling perhaps two million people already here that their work-permits are being cancelled. It would mean telling more than a million foreign-students: Sorry, but once you’ve graduated or earned your diploma or whatever it is, you’re going to have to go, because we Canadians need to get ourselves sorted.
And even then, would we have managed to stabilize rents at some affordable level and bring house prices back down from the monthly-mortgage heights that only one in four Canadian households can afford to pay?
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