Quote:
Originally Posted by belsarius
So.. more immigration?
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Is anyone in this thread actually arguing against immigration? I'm all for immigration. In fact, Canada has a naturally shrinking population, immigration is the only way for Canada to survive. With increased immigration, however, you also need a plan actually house all those people.
Canada is a massive country geographically, yet there's only very small areas we're actually allowed to build in. So if Canada is going to let 400k immigrants in per year, there has to be some effort to meet that demand in housing. A combination of looser zoning, increased residential land supply, and concerted effort to deal with building and labour shortages.
We also need to start training people to actually build the houses. Instead of graduating millions of C students with humanities degrees, perhaps we could actually encourage people to get jobs in fields where there are shortages.
I've spoken on this before, but Canada is one of the few countries in the world with heavily subsidized post-secondary education and no centralized control of that education. Canada is just letting kids take whatever degrees they want and hoping for the best that it somehow matches up with our labour demands. Other countries, like Sweden and Germany, provide even more funding for post-secondary education, but they also strictly control how many students are in each field of study.
Canada has some major problems. We're looking at generations of people where starting a family may not be feasible and the middle class is rapidly being eroded. Our leaders on both sides are obsessed with left vs. right squabbling instead of actually fixing problems.