Quote:
Originally Posted by Nancy
At some point, our immigration system switched from one where a growing economy required immigration, to one where growing the economy required immigration.
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That’s a good way to put it. However, our public spending on services like education, health care, and pensions have always been a pyramid scheme. Ever since these programs were introduced in the 50s, the typical Canadian has received more in benefits in their lifetime than they paid in taxes.
As lifespans have gotten longer, that gap has widened. Public spending on health care and pensions eat up a larger and larger share of the budget, while the ratio of tax-paying workers to tax-taking retirees gets smaller and smaller. We could have rationalized this decades ago with reforms to taxes and pensions (increasing income taxes on boomers, increasing age of eligibility for pensions, etc). But those sorts of measures are extremely unpopular with voters.
So we either keep the immigration train going, or impose even more painful and unpopular measures on voters.
I’m not a fan of this kind growth either - I don’t see how Calgary will be a better place for me to live at 2 million people than it was at 1 million. It will certainly be worse in a lot of ways. The part I struggle with is how almost all growth happens in a handful of major cities. I don’t think most people actually want to live in cities of 1million+. But for reasons I don’t really understand - especially with the technology we have - economic activity in the 21st century is extremely concentrated geographically.