Half of all Canadians say there are too many immigrants: poll
Half of all Canadians say there are too many immigrants: poll
Concerns over immigration are mostly about the economy rather than fears about immigrants changing Canada's social fabric, the poll suggests
From a housing perspective, yeah, there are currently too many. That's a policy failure not related to immigration itself though. The housing problem could be easily solved and then this level of immigration would make sense.
I mean depends on how you define easily.
Even assuming infinite money, Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s. This means we have roughly the same number of skilled and experienced carpenters, roofers, plumbers, etc that work in new builds.
This means that if tomorrow we passed legislation eliminating every single bureaucratic red tape AND convinced developers to build everywhere they have land to do so, we would take years to catch up with the point where our houses:population ratio is back among the rest of the western world.
Just limiting how many properties a person/corporation can own would solve the problem alone. Tax should exponentially increase after 2+ properties.
Make coop housing viable, currently it's almost impossible to start one.
Gov should be building housing too, just like the ww2 houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_box_houses
In addition, feds should be building housing to house every single person, unconditionally. On the topic of homelessness it's the only way to reintegrate folks into society. Even if, say, 80% do nothing but shoot up in their free housing, it's still cheaper for taxpayers when you consider the cost of taking care of folks on the street and the problems that causes. And just by building housing stock you're making good entry level jobs that don't require university education.
And this may be controversial, but non-Canadians should pay a higher mortgage rate. Finland does this and they have probably the best housing situation on the planet. They are actually the ones who pioneered the idea of unconditionally housing everyone, IIRC.
Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s.
Yes but we also weren't taking 1 million newcomers per year in the 90s. If you want these immigration numbers you need to have a plan to make it work.
It's worth noting that government housing programs started scaling back in the 80s. Funny how that works, isn't it?
We don't have too many immigrants, we have too many houses being wasted as "InVeStMeNtS" and too many rich fucks not paying taxes choking out the economy and social services.
They only polled people that have such investments
We don’t have too many investment properties (we do but that’s not the issue)
We aren’t building up non-traditional cities
We are relying on private sector for housing
Road based civil planning
Thanks, municipalities, by trying to persevere the character of your neighbourhoods, you've managed to destroy the character of Canada.
People are upset about immigrants because of housing. Housing is a problem because cities made it de jure illegal.
The real story:
Just 10 per cent of Canadians who think there is too much immigration say their concern is that Canadians will become “a minority” in their own country. Only eight per cent say new immigrants don’t adhere to Canadian values and just four per cent believe that immigration is bringing criminals to the country. Eighteen per cent worry that immigrants are taking jobs from Canadians.
Yeah, but if we said "Half of Canadians are sick of late-stage capitalism's worst feature" it wouldn't go down as well with the people who buy and sell advertising.
It has nothing to do with capitalism. The housing crisis is created by ignorant or lazy stakeholders looking at short term gains instead of long term prosperity.
Costco plays the same capitalist game as Loblaws. Why is it that the former is so appreciated while the latter is hated by many?
We can look at housing the same way. Why isn't anyone providing high quality housing for a low price, focusing on accessibility and efficient use of funds instead of building expensive luxury apartments. Sure that'd drive down prices for existing homeowners, but the revenue would be much higher since they can now sell to a much broader group that can afford to take a smaller mortgage. They could build in low density area (e.g. Milton is 1/10th of Toronto), and bet on the growth that would go with creating self-contained areas easily accessible to Toronto via the Go train.
Instead, we get the Weston's of developers: price gouging, expensive developments, low appeal to newcomers/younger folks.
Woah those are some healthy looking numbers, ty
Most Canadians are not anti immigrants, they are anti housing crisis and anti healthcare strain. The former is the results of capitalist decision making/lobbying, latter is the results of cuts in government budget for healthcare (a favorite policy of libertarian/conservative parties) and extreme bureaucracy and aversion to innovative healthcare management designed for efficiency (this is a problem in many parts of the world, and we all know Canadian governments, provincial or federal, are not known for their efficiency).
The lack of technocrats in government is a massive issue. Holland (fed) and Dubé (QC) both worked in financial services before going into politics. Dix (BC) worked as a journalist, and it's unclear what Jones (ON) was doing before politics. Why aren't doctors, nurses, healthcare management experts (i.e., people who actually ran hospitals and worked with doctors) getting elected and taking those positions?
And the other half arrived this year
Canada needs more people. It also needs more infrastructure.
Unfortunately Canada is doing a good job tackling #1, but a bad job tackling #2 because the financials work out to be just fine to do so.
Tell that half to go back to where they came from. LOL
Concerns over immigration are mostly about the economy
https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/new-immig.pdf
It is incorrect to think of economic activity as a limited resource that must be defended against the rapacious outsider. Economic activity is not only consumed by people, but also created by them. Value is a product of human labour. In fact, Canada should be looking to increase it's population rapidly so that the market that exists here can develop enough of a gravity of its own that we aren't so reliant on the US market.
Outsourcing and automation have been far, far more impactful with regards to wages. NAFTA (now CUSMA) as well has hollowed out a lot of our economy so that the only real growth sectors are resource extraction which feeds the US market, and real estate. Protectionism is a bit of a dirty word however I think it's necessary to develop industries where we can create value-added products out of our own natural resources, and ultimately build a much more varied and healthy economy. And we need far more people than we are birthing locally to do that.
The new economic activity created by human labor requires resources from nature. More metal for cars, more hair spray for hairdos. More concrete for buildings and more corn for cinemas. Economic activity can expand under conditions of no significant resource constraints. Unfortunately we've hit a resource constraint in the most in-demand locations - housing - due to all the known causes like zoning, etc. Regardless of the causes, it's a constraint that increases the costs across the economy and swallows value, but it is felt the most by the lower parts of the wage scale. It may be wise to balance that while solving the resource constraint in order to avoid destabilization. People will vote against the precarity of their housing situation whether it negatively affects other priorities or not and for a good reason. Keeping the roof over ones head in a country with non-functional safety nets against homelessness is top priority. And so the results of the survey sounds pretty rational to me. I think this sentiment would go away if we build a shit ton of non-market plattenbautens in the major metropolitan areas.
It's insane to me that anyone in Canada would hold this opinion given that our economy is on the verge of ruin due to the lack of available labour and the massive amount of retirees we have. Where do they think this money will come from?
We don't have a lack of labour. That's a myth the neoliberals are pushing to keep wages low. There's a lack of businesses who are willing to raise their wages to the point that people would be willing to work for them.
I agree with the sentiment that wages need to be rise to provide a better quality of life.
I do have some questions however, if we did not have a larger working class than retired how could we sustainably fund their retirement?
It's a well-known fact that our population demographics are only getting older. He only way I could see this being sustainable is if you restructured our economic system.
We are also in the middle of a housing crisis that has been developing for years. Canada is in a tough spot to agressively grow from immigration and many people feel like their quality of life is threatened by the economic conditions, housing crisis and healthcare crisis. It is understandable to be worried more people without the housing to support them could stress these systems further.
They've been told it's the fault of the others, the immigrants. And they believed that.
It's the same crew who supported the Karen Convoy of Needle-weenie Arsonists, those who flew the racist flags and blocked parliament and held up trade. Guns? Yep. Bigotry? Yep. Supported by the Conservative Party members? Yep.
Economics Explained recently did a video reviewing Canada's immigration policies. Most advanced economies have low birthrates and make up for it with immigration. Accepting an immigrant is (economically) much better than someone having a baby. A baby needs decades before it contributes to the economy. An immigrant is often educated and skilled in a desired field and will immediately contribute to the economy.
However, Canada might be the first country to stumble upon some downsides to immigration. Mainly, student visas might not contribute as much to the economy as once thought, Canadian immigrants leave to work in the US at incredibly high rates, and Canadian metropolitan cities are some of the most expensive to live in worldwide and immigration is exacerbating the issue (the issue isn't immigration though, it's a focus on building single detached family homes over high density housing).
Just don't scroll down into the comment section. It's mostly just people being racist. I sincerely hope those comments aren't coming from Canadians. (The channel also did a video on why African countries struggle economically a few days later and the comment section was even worse)
I don't disagree with the general claims you made, and I'm not commenting on the veracity of the specific linked video, but in general EE isn't a reputable source for economics knowledge or analysis. If that's news, check Money & Macro's critique on a couple of EEs videos. It's a clown show.
Unfortunately we have what is basically a MAGA crowd too. In fact, some of them are dumb enough to actually use the term and wear stuff with MAGA on it. Yes, technically Canada is part of America, but I bet if you ask them if it covers Mexico or South America, they would either have not even thought of that or be unsure how to answer, as it wasn't part of the videos they watched that made them mad.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
a video reviewing Canada's immigration policies
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Since 1 in 4 Canadians is a first generation immigrant themselves, I'm wondering if this 50% figure represents 2/3 of all Canadian-born Canadians.
Or maybe some leopards eating faces is going on?
lol the irony
Fucking idiots.
Count me in that number. Its factually true from my perspective.
Its factually true from my perspective.
That's an interesting sentence
Think of how stupid the average person is and now remember that half of them are stupider than that.
I don't know what worries me more, that I might be in the lower half or the upper 😐
40K nets around 32K in Ontario. 1 bedroom rent in Toronto's suburbs is over 2K. That's 24K per year. 24K / 40K = 60% of gross income to housing. 24K / 32K = 8K leftover after housing. 8K / 12 = $666 per month for all else. This number falls to $333 on minimum wage. Monthly transit pass is $156. If you live outside TO proper, you often pay for two passes. Mississauga's is $131. A cheap phone bill with data that could somewhat replace Internet is $35. Internet connection is $50+. Have you gone to a grocery store recently? Better not have any unplanned expenses.
Ah yes. Where you say "no immigrants" and people go "you're racist" and the fact is that it's as it was said: too many immigrants. Nothing racist about it. We can't sustain this size of population.
Edit: Lol more down votes than up vote. Ok people, give me your reasoning how inviting kre people where we already don't have enough places for them to live solves this housing crisis. Is it a race trigger? Ok pretend it's your preferred race being invited to the country. Are you still ok with that? I'm not. We need less people. Not more. It has nothing to do with racism.