The population of Canada is expected to hit 40 million within the next day or two, according to StatCan’s modelling.

  • grte@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I am very pro-immigration with the caveat that I absolutely don’t think Canada is matching it’s housing strategy with it’s immigration strategy. We live in one of the largest, emptiest countries in the world and can absolutely find room to bring many people in. And bringing many people in would allow us to create a productive capacity that would allow us to decouple from the US economy and control our own fate in a way we don’t right now.

    That said, all that space means nothing without housing for people to live in, so the government needs to get back into the business of building public housing. We can look to the example of Vienna, Austria on how to create high quality, desirable public housing that people want to live in. Simply providing incentives to private industry hoping they will solve the problem has failed again and again. This is a problem where we need to make and execute a plan.

    • EhForumUser@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      We live in one of the largest, emptiest countries in the world and can absolutely find room to bring many people in.

      The Canadian government has crown land that is offered for free to those willing to settle those empty spaces. It is not that we can’t find room, but that people don’t want to occupy the space.

      • monkeedude1212@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        That’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario; people don’t want to live out in the boonies in the middle of nowhere, they like amenities like “restaurants” and “clothing stores”. Maybe even a super market that can stock a few international ingredients from home.

        Who is going to build all that infrastructure to prop up a new town before the residents move in?

        Free crown land costs you nothing because just trying to live there means you’ll be doing some of the developing.

        Affordable housing isn’t even an immigration problem, it also gets tied to birth rates as a population spike.

        This is just a failure of the free market to address the needs of the populace, and is evidence that housing either needs to be provided by the government like any other see public service, or a public competitor needs to exist to drive prices down.

        • EhForumUser@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          This is just a failure of the free market to address the needs of the populace

          Yes, the failure of the free market to exist is understandably a problem. For example:

          • Municipal planning and zoning severely restricts where and what types of housing can be built.
          • Controls on immigration keeps out the immigrants who would actually see establishing new communities as a better life. In modern Canada, for all practical purposes we only let in rich immigrants who feel like they have better things to do.
          • Controls on immigration in other countries means it is difficult for us to leave.
          • Market manipulation (e.g. copyright) directs resources in bizarre ways, often away from people who need housing.

          The list goes on and on.

          I don’t know if I consider myself a free market type. I think smart regulation can be useful. But our specific attempt to avoid a free market is certainly broken, at least when optimizing for allowing housing for all. No doubt a free market would bring improvement over what we currently have for those in need of somewhere to live.

    • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      We need more housing density in cities, but that’s never happening with municipal governments getting stuck in NIMBY hell while the people who actually want dense housing to be built do nothing to petition the government

      • grte@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Well, the cities are ultimately subject to the provinces, so if we can get enough support for this kind of stuff on the provincial level it can be used to overrule the NIMBYism that tends to dominate municipal politics. Of course, the problem with that is that most of the current slate of provincial governments would most definitely not be on board with this sort of thing. But hope springs eternal, I suppose.

        • EhForumUser@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          The people the municipalities are beholden to are the very same people the province is beholden to. The only way the province would seek to overrule a municipality is if sufficient people in other municipalities recognize a benefit that a single municipality is overlooking. However, your comment suggests that said NIMBYism is present across all of the municipalities, so there is no such divergence here.

        • festus@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          BC is making progress here! The provincial government is planning on introducing legislation that effectively rezones all single family lots to allow for duplexes, triplexes, and if space permits, quadplexes. If the land is next to transit then some higher level of density is also permitted. Finally, they’re threatening cities that don’t build enough housing that they might take away their ability to control building permits, zoning, etc.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      From an Indigenous Canadian that was born and raised here … I wish you all the luck in the world.

      Ahow doodem … it means ‘greetings, my friend’

      Neenaskoomin keena ochee … ‘all my hopes are for you’

      I speak my Ojibway Cree dialect … it was the first language I learned as a child

      I don’t know you but I would be more than happy to know you became a citizen of this country.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    It isn’t the millions of people that are causing the problems

    It’s about a dozen billionaires that are plugging up our economy and freedoms of millions of people

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        “Governments don’t want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.” ― George Carlin

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Well, the millions of people don’t help the housing issue when there are less houses than people already.

      • Falken@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        There’s plenty of housing. Just not affordable housing. Each of these McMansions in the suburbs can probably host 3 families.

    • Tigbitties@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It sucks. I know it’s not the only reason we’re in this mess but I think it would give us a big break is we banned Airbnb.

      • Airbnb hosts with over 100,500 listings in Canada.
      • Only 17% of total Airbnb revenues in Canada is generated by true home sharing, where the owner is present during the guest’s stay. This means that in 2016/17, entire-home rentals comprised 83% of total Airbnb revenues in Canada.
      • Approximately 7-in-every-10 units on the Airbnb distribution platform are entire-home rentals, with guests having complete and sole access of the entire unit during their stay.
      • 1 in every 3 units in Canada is rented out for more than 90 days per year and generates 71% of total Airbnb revenues in the past 12-month period.

      That’s a lot of empty homes.

    • socialjusticewizard@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Is the housing supply thin, or just availability? My city keeps claiming it needs to open new suburbs, while half the houses in my quiet downtown area are empty and up for sale at prices that are just unreasonable, because they were bought up by speculators.

      • dandb@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure why cities keep wanting to build suburban single family development, we know it costs a tonne to support in the long-term. If we would build medium density instead on a large scale it would go a long way to fixing the housing crisis.