[Canada] Canadian Politics Redux

[crazy canuck]

I'm not saying it's not worth a discussion. Nor did I say people who are against immigration are necessarily racist. There is a time when lowering immigration levels is a good thing. But I still think this is a populist move on Trudeaus part and one that is short sighted.

As an immigrant myself, I have strong feelings about this.

Being critical of immigration is in.

The NDP are blaming it for the election woes here.

"Every change we tried to bring in got overwhelmed by the overwhelming immigration," said Mr. Bains, 72, who had represented Surrey-Newton.

[viper37]

So Liberals must be running scared - they have announced a cut in immigration levels, from 485k this year to 398k next year, down to 365k by 2026.

But a couple of things:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/economic-impact-immigration-cuts-1.7362448

So Canada's population actually increased by 1.3 million last year - 97.6% of which was from immigration.  So I'm guessing the number of permanent resident doesn't include the large number of TFWs or international students, so a cut of 100k is actually pretty small.  Government has announced plans to reduce the number of those other categories, but I'm not sure numbers have been attached.

But here's the key:

Population growth 'kept the economy afloat'
But some economists note that higher immigration had economic benefits for Canada, and there could be negative consequences from cutting back.

"If it was not for the population growth that we had last year, the Canadian economy would have been in a recession at the end of 2023," said Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist with credit union group Alberta Central.

With more people coming to Canada, more money is being spent overall, he said — even if each individual has been spending less as they feel the pressures of a more sluggish economy.

A man in a business suit is pictured with an orange, yellow and red wall in the background.
Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist with credit union group Alberta Central, says without immigration, Canada's economy would have been in a recession at the end of last year. (Justin Pennell/CBC)
"That kept the economy afloat," St-Arnaud said, although he acknowledged it was clear that immigration numbers in Canada need to be adjusted due to strains on the housing market and other public services.

Rebekah Young, an economist at Scotiabank, said even a small decrease in GDP due to slowing population growth — or a shrinking population — could have a big impact on the economy.

"Maybe we're talking about shrinking GDP by, you know, a half per cent or three-quarters of a per cent, but you're still talking about shrinking GDP as opposed to growing GDP," she said.

On a per-capita basis we've been in recession for the past year.  Growing population from immigration has kept the top-line GDP growing, but not on a per-person basis.

I know people's eyes glaze over when economists talk about "productivity" - but this is what a lack of productivity means - a shrinking GDP per capita.

We had massive inflation for the last few years.  We didn't need more consumer spending.

What we needed was productivity investments from corporations - something they didn't bother to do because they had access to cheaper labour.

Wages are down across the board, even for higher paying jobs.  A CPA controller with 10 years of experience used to be offered 125-150k$/year in my are.  Now they offering "up to 100k$".  Without the title, it's even less.  Employers have choice, lots of people on the market now.

It used to be a good thing, but now it's bad.  Really, really bad. 

No, seriously, there's way too many people.  I can't go anywhere without the stupid place being crowded.

[viper37]

I'm not saying it's not worth a discussion. Nor did I say people who are against immigration are necessarily racist. There is a time when lowering immigration levels is a good thing. But I still think this is a populist move on Trudeaus part and one that is short sighted.

As an immigrant myself, I have strong feelings about this.

Being critical of immigration is in.

They've lost control of it, and they realize it now.  Well, Mark Miller does at least.

[viper37]

As an immigrant myself, I have strong feelings about this.

There's a difference between "immigration" and "the immigrant", the newly arrived. 

I admit that difference is often lost on many people though.

There's a limit to how many people we can accommodate at any given time.

[Barrister]

No, seriously, there's way too many people.  I can't go anywhere without the stupid place being crowded.

So a fairly stupid point is often made that Canada is the second largest country in the world and there's lots of room for more people - which ignores the fact that the large majority of Canada's landmass is either the precambrian shield or arctic tundra - neither of which is at all very great for human habitation.

That being said though - if you take the minority of Canada that is good for human habitation we're still wildly unpopulated.  WE have 40 million people - about the same number as (checks) Poland, which is not a very large country.  You could place Poland into a small corner of just Alberta itself - and which has a roughly comparable climate and landscape as well.

The debate over immigration is all about the rate of immigration - not that we're "full".

[crazy canuck]

And the rate needs to correspond with the construction of the infrastructure needed in advance of the people arriving. The Liberals did it in reverse, hoping that if they came it would be built.

[viper37]

No, seriously, there's way too many people.  I can't go anywhere without the stupid place being crowded.

So a fairly stupid point is often made that Canada is the second largest country in the world and there's lots of room for more people - which ignores the fact that the large majority of Canada's landmass is either the precambrian shield or arctic tundra - neither of which is at all very great for human habitation.

That being said though - if you take the minority of Canada that is good for human habitation we're still wildly unpopulated.  WE have 40 million people - about the same number as (checks) Poland, which is not a very large country.  You could place Poland into a small corner of just Alberta itself - and which has a roughly comparable climate and landscape as well.

The debate over immigration is all about the rate of immigration - not that we're "full".

We have the among the highest (if not the highest) immigration rates of all OCDE countries for the last decade.

People can't go out chopping wood to heat themselves like in 1885.  We can't burn coal anymore either.
We need well insulated houses/appartments, we need good heating, we need a lot of food as hunting for everyone is not an option, we need clothes as, again, hunting and foraging to create your own clothes is not an option for 40 million people.

So. yes, we are full. For now.

[crazy canuck]

In another example of every vote counts.

The NDP are 5 votes away from a bare majority in B.C.

In the first two hours of counting, the Conservative lead in Surrey-Guildford was cut from 12 to 4 votes.

[viper37]

High speed rail to be announced this week.

Toronto-Quebec city.

En plus de Québec, Montréal et Toronto, il devrait desservir Trois-Rivières, Laval, Ottawa et Peterborough.

Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Trois-Rivières, Laval, Ottawa ad Peterborough.

3hrs for the trip instead of 5h30.  300km/h promised speed.  A tad slower than the latest technology (I think) but I guess a compromise has to be done to give service to so many cities. But Sav is the expert here.

I suppose maglev trains are too expensive for us, or no one outside of China makes them?


edit:
English link:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/high-speed-rail-canada-1.7365835

[Barrister]

So I mean of course - if I could wave a magic wand and build a high-speed train that hits QC-Mtl-Ott-Toronto that would be a good thing.

But here's the problem, kind of buried in the story:

The train would use a newly built, separate electrified track and run frequently.

New track.  Through the most densely populated portion of the country.  That's going to mean buying/expropriating a ton of land, plus going through a nightmare of regulatory and planning permissions (and all the resultant NIMBY protests).

The article suggests an $80 billion cost, although later it suggests it could be as high as $120 billion.

If you could guarantee me that it'll take 10 years and $80 billion and we'd have a high-speed rail line along the QC-Toronto corridor I'd be all for it.

Problem is - I think it'll either A: take way more than 10 years, B: cost way way more than $80 billion, or C: won't actually be high speed.  Or some combination of all three.  The governments ability to procure expensive infrastructure projects has not exactly impressed me. 

Take the Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion.  When first announced, the estimated cost was $6.8 billion.  It was subsequently bought by the Feds.  The final cost wound up being $34 billion.  And that's all for an infrastructure project that was merely doubling/replacing an existing pipeline - so you had none of the issues about securing land rights.

It rings of being a pre-election gambit by the Liberals.

I should say - no specific timeline is mentioned in the article.  I suggested 10 years as something reasonable.  The nightmare scenario though is California's high-speed rail project.  It was first approved in 2008.  In 2024 it is not yet operating.  The parts that are under construction will only operate in California's Central Valley, which isn't heavily populated and does not remotely justify high-speed rail.  There is no current plan to actually connect San Franciso and Los Angeles to the track that's currently under construction.

[Grey Fox]

No matter the money, no matter the time, no matter how hard it is we should do it.

Why would NIMBYs matter in this? The federal government doesn't respect city rules.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah, it needs to happen, should have been built before now, and the longer we wait the more expensive it becomes.

[crazy canuck]

BB, the Transmountain project ran into a number of difficulties obtaining the necessary land right and use licences.  That is ultimately way the original owner signalled they were not going to proceed with the construction and more or less suckered the Feds into purchasing it.

Edit: for just a sample of the difficulties it had, read through the litigation it had with the city of Burnaby.

[viper37]

So I mean of course - if I could wave a magic wand and build a high-speed train that hits QC-Mtl-Ott-Toronto that would be a good thing.

But here's the problem, kind of buried in the story:

The train would use a newly built, separate electrified track and run frequently.

New track.  Through the most densely populated portion of the country.  That's going to mean buying/expropriating a ton of land, plus going through a nightmare of regulatory and planning permissions (and all the resultant NIMBY protests).

The article suggests an $80 billion cost, although later it suggests it could be as high as $120 billion.

If you could guarantee me that it'll take 10 years and $80 billion and we'd have a high-speed rail line along the QC-Toronto corridor I'd be all for it.

Problem is - I think it'll either A: take way more than 10 years, B: cost way way more than $80 billion, or C: won't actually be high speed.  Or some combination of all three.  The governments ability to procure expensive infrastructure projects has not exactly impressed me. 

Take the Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion.  When first announced, the estimated cost was $6.8 billion.  It was subsequently bought by the Feds.  The final cost wound up being $34 billion.  And that's all for an infrastructure project that was merely doubling/replacing an existing pipeline - so you had none of the issues about securing land rights.

It rings of being a pre-election gambit by the Liberals.

I should say - no specific timeline is mentioned in the article.  I suggested 10 years as something reasonable.  The nightmare scenario though is California's high-speed rail project.  It was first approved in 2008.  In 2024 it is not yet operating.  The parts that are under construction will only operate in California's Central Valley, which isn't heavily populated and does not remotely justify high-speed rail.  There is no current plan to actually connect San Franciso and Los Angeles to the track that's currently under construction.

That's the problem with these things, when you wait, it does not become cheaper.

Look. Doug Ford wants to build an undergound highway to increase its road capacity.  It's a stupid idea.  He's going to ask for Federal funding.  Did anyone told him not to do it in the most highly densified region of the areas?  No.  No Federal party did it.

Now, what will happen if we don't build more inter-city transit like that?

People are going to use their cars and the airplanes.

And who are these people?  We just talked about the population increase of the country a few post above.  The cities already densely populated are even more densely populated than before.

Without a rail like that, we will need more highways through highly densely areas, and we will need to increase the size of the airport terminals.

Which means more nimbys everywhere and a lot more money overall.

Train make sense.

As a proud Canadian, you should be jumping of the bandwagon of the new train, no matter the costs, no matter the protests, just like Canada was founded.  We didn't stop for protests, our government waged war on the protesters and expropriated them, killed them in battle, hung the survivors and that was it.  It was Canada's finest moment in history, building a railway from coast to coast, with millions of Chinese workers exploited as cheap labor.

We should make Canada great again.


Joking aside, nothing prevents the rail line to be underground for a part of the distance, to get out of the cities.

While I agree with you that the estimate is likely low on time and $, it's rumored to be a private-public partnership, so the risk is limited.

[Barrister]

So Sask Party handily wins the Saskatchewan general election yesterday.  For those from afar, the Sask Party is the right-wing party in the province.  It doesn't have any direct links but if the inheritor of the old Progressive Conservative Party legacy plus disaffected Liberals.

This makes 5 majorities in a row.  They were first elected in 2007.

It's interesting because Saskatchewan used to be NDP heartland (and before that, the CCF the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation).  The CCF/NDP ruled the province from 1934 to 2007 with only two breaks.

Alberta and Saskatchewan were kind of two weird mirrors.  Alberta of course has gone "right wing" from 1935 through to today with only one exception (albeit switching which right-wing party people voted for mid-way through), whereas Saskatchewan went left-wing as mentioned above - despite being right next door to each other and having very similar demographics.

Except now both provinces are Conservative strongholds.

So what's going on?

Couple of thoughts:

-first of course is just the change in what it means to be "right" or "left" from the 1930s to the 2020s.  Tommy Douglas, the "left-wing" CCF Premier of Saskatchewan, was an ordained Baptist Minister.  Imagine seeing that in 2024.  On the flip side in Alberta, "right wing" Premiers William "Bible Bill" Aberhart and Ernest Manning (I don't think either was ordained, but both did radio Bible sermons) - were also very anti-big-bank.  So really the movements were more similar than you'd think in being very populist.

-relatedly, it goes to show you how much social issues are dominating politics.  Sask Party (and the UCP, and to a lesser extent the Federal CPC) are taking much harder-line social conservative positions.  And on the other side, the NDP takes much harder line socially liberal positions.  And the evidence seems to be pretty strong that the socially liberal positions are definitely not popular - certainly in rural areas.  And Saskatchewan is still a pretty rural area.  Conversely as Alberta urbanizes and comes more dominated by the two big cities we might see the province switch "for good" to being more dominated by the NDP.

-and I can't ignore a totally different explanation - money.  Starting with the discovery of oil in the 1940s Alberta has been pretty rich.  Growing up in Saskatchewan though in the 80s - well it wasn't a rich place.  As you get into the 2000s though with changes in drilling technologies Saskatchewan's oil desposits have been developed - now making Saskatchewan a much richer place.  And the timeline does kind of match when the Sask Party took over.


Forgive me - prairie political history is kind of an interest of mine.