Canada's population reaches 40M | Hacker News Reader

Canada's population reaches 40M

statcan.gc.ca

52 pointssemihsalihoglu104 comments

Congratulations Canada - welcome to the big leagues! I hope they continue to grow and become a meaningful player on the global stage!

Canada is a wonderful country with a lot of places to visit, culture to experience, people to interact with - I visited there 5 years ago and was able to visit only a small part of such a beautiful country.

Now, they can (hopefully) deal with the issues that come along with increasing your population by millions per year, along with a lack of economic planning, though from what I hear and read, it seems like not a lot of headway is being made:

- Unaffordable housing to a large portion of Canadians (Condos sell in the more heavily populated parts of Canada for high 6-figures/millions of dollars)

- Unaffordable rent to a large portion of Canadians (A friend in Canada is paying around $1300 CAD a month for a 700sqft bachelor suite not including all utilities)

- Rampant inflation and opportunistic price-gouging from corporations

- The increased load on the already strained healthcare system, making Canadians wait up to 3-4 weeks to see their family doctor, and months/years for specialists.

- Monopolization and lack of competition in critical industries (Telecoms and Grocery come to mind as of late)

- Multiple allegations of Chinese interference in Canadian politics and foreign influence of active MPs that go seemingly ignored by the current party in power.

Where's your friend? $1300 cad for a 700sqft pad in Toronto is a steal!

I'm unfortunately very serious.

I second this, from Vancouver! My partner pays $1500 for less.

Just learned yesterday that a bachelor in my building is now $1850 (CAD), hydro and water extra. This is not a luxury building.

> luxury building

Fun fact, there are no luxury buildings. There's newer building and older buildings. The term luxury is just slapped onto marketing for new units being sold in new buildings. Why am I being so pedantic? Because people complain that "they only make luxury housing these days, we need affordable housing too!". Guess what, your parents' bungalow in the suburbs was likely marketed as luxury housing 50 years too.

https://marker.medium.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-luxury-housi...

I concur as a Canadian with all of your points but the last one feels like it is in a different territory, nowhere near as relevant systemically as the others. More flavour of the day, gotta fill the news cycle. We Canadians unfortunately focus on this nonsense rather than protest in the streets about the important stuff, namely your other points.

Agreed. This is mostly just geopolitical propaganda because China allied with Russia. And maybe COVID fallout. It's all prep to get the population onboard for more military bullying of China.

$1300/mo is cheap! Try $2300 in Vancouver. Canada's two biggest English speaking cities have rents amongst the highest in the world.

Congrats, Canada!

This has alerted me to the (IMO, pretty surprising) fact that all of Canada holds fewer people than the BosWash corridor.

I am also amused that Ontario, which is the most populous province has the following statistics: Area: 1,076,395 km square Population: 15.3M

Istanbul, which is the biggest city in my home country Turkiye has these: Area: 5,343 (so 200x smaller) Population: 18M (official census is ~16M but even the major cites 18M)

I'm not even comparing the much denser places in the world (e.g., Gaza).

Yet we have massive housing issues...

Name me a major western metro area with jobs and a good standard of living that doesn't. I remember people banging the drums 10 years agho "come to Berlin, there's so much empty houses". Yeah, that changed quickly.

This is a good point. There must be one though that other cities can look up to. I would guess Singapore does a good job on these problems. I would be curious to hear of the best examples of large cities that have done a better job on housing.

Housing problems here are related to pricing, and only tangentially to quantity of construction. The issue is how cheap housing loans have been, how deregulated the real estate sales market, and how stupid the last 20 years of governments have been about a) how they regulate the housing market and b) what kind of housing gets built (mostly either sprawly suburban single family mc-homes way out in e.g. Vaughan or Mississauga etc. or tiny condos in Toronto proper which just get turned into speculative investments or airbnbs).

Mortgages here were too cheap for too long. Really, what people "buy" when they buy a home is a mortgage, not a house.

Chicago

Because the government is importing a massive number of people relative to the country’s population and not building anywhere near enough housing. They ain’t slowing down any time soon so it’s gonna get even worse.

Ontario is culturally 2 provinces, southern and northern Ontario.

The north is what you normally think of Canada: rocks, trees and lakes. The south is similar to the neighbouring US states of Michigan, Ohio, and New York but with a distinct Canadian identity and a French region in the east.

Most of the population (13.4M) lives in the southern part (114,000 km^2)

Still a bit too general.

Southwestern Ontario (Windsor/London) is very culturally and demographically different from Toronto/Golden Horseshoe and Eastern Ontario (Ottawa/Kingston)

Michigan is also culturally different from New York.

The north-south split is the most striking, but yes south can be further divided into the GTA, SW (farm country and a small part of the rust belt, similar to the Midwest) and eastern (Ottawa and the townships: government and farms)

Michigan and Ohio are most similar to SW but upstate NY also bleeds culturally into the region, both around Niagara and the thousand islands.

North-South seems like an arbitrary reduction of Ontario culture.

I don't know that someone Thunder Bay/Sault Ste Marie is that culturally different from Barrie/Sarnia. Windsor to Ottawa is very different.

That 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border seems minimally related to culture differences and more geographic/economic.

You just compared apples to oranges.

~6.954 (as of 2016 so actually higher) million of those 15m people live in 8,244 km^2 in the Greater Toronto Hamilton area, which works out to 843 people per square kilometer (vs 3368 for Istanbul).

Yes, 1/4 the density, yes, but nowhere close to the bizarre comparison you gave, where you used literally uninhabitable/barely-settled areas of the province (Ontario is huge and mostly rock and lakes) and compared to one of the densest cities in the world. At least compare urban area to urban area.

Toronto is the 3rd or 4th most populated city in North America, depending on how you count. Not some quaint arctic getaway. Also sits at the same latitude as e.g. Marseille in the south of France, or Florence in Italy. So not exactly northern at all.

Also if we restrict to just the actual technical city of Toronto proper, the density is higher than what you gave for Istanbul: 2,794,356 people in 630.20km^2 == 4435 people per square kilometer.

So... Check your biases at the door.

I might be wrong in the numbers as I just got them from Wikipedia. But to be clear: Istanbul is the name of both the city and the "province" in Turkiye. And I used the larger area number from Wikipedia, which is for the province: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul

So even when using official numbers, the urban density of Istnabul is > 6000 according to Wikipedia.

ps: I live in Toronto, so I know Toronto is incomparably dense compared to other parts of Ontario. I could have made the same point by comparing Toronto's density to Ontario. Though, I'm curious how much of Ontario is uninhabitable. I thought most of it (say > 50%) seemed habitable.

The right comparison would be with the area and population of southern & maybe eastern Ontario and use that. Northern Ontario is really just something else. Anything north of the line where the Canadian shield begins becomes basically unarable and extremely low population density. And once you get past e.g. Timmins, there's really ... "nothing." (Pretty though.)

I don't have the patience to go look this up, but obv it will clearly be below Istanbul, but likely about equivalent with most of the US atlantic region and maybe even parts of the UK etc.

Istanbul/Constantinople, ... a heavily populated city for like 2000 years, not to mention the region going back to the, uh, paleolithic and it's literally basically the origin of ... farming and settled agriculture. Kinda weird comparison.

> maybe eastern Ontario

What do you mean by "maybe"? Eastern Ontario contains the 4th largest metropolitan area in Canada (Ottawa) which is a very reasonable comparator, the density is 195/km.

IT's just there are large parts of what is classified as "eastern Ontario" that is kinda similar to the near-north ; not arable, shield & cottage country, and sparsely populated. So it doesn't feel fair. But yes, Ottawa clearly a major centre.

The provincial area figure is meaningless for computing density. It’s like calculating the density of beer in a glass that’s been poured with 99% head. The real density is in the quarter inch of beer at the bottom of the glass, not the giant blob of foam above it.

Found the Canadian.

I’ve heard beer is actually pretty pricey in Canada

We (famously) had a politician campaign on “bringing back Buck-a-beer.” I never drank that swill though!

I heard Labatt Blue is not great.

Labatt Blue is a bit like Budweiser (it has 5% alcohol though), but like in the US, there are smaller breweries that make much better beers.

Thanks to the Liquid Cash Barrons of Ontario.

I believe those liquid cash barons are now all international conglomerates. Also, I can tell you that the LCBO is actually quite a bit cheaper than BC Liquor and NSLC. Though compared to Alberta it is way more expensive.

It's worth noting that roughly half of Canada's population lives in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor [0] (the land between Quebec City, QC and Windsor, ON). This region is really the Canadian equivalent of the Boston-Washington corridor in the States, so imagine if nearly 150 million lived in BosWash.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Co...

I'm surprised anyone lives there. I couldn't live that far north.

Mostly kidding but just like land doesn't vote, the size of land doesn't determine how many people live there.

Fun fact: the southern-most point in Canada is further south than the northern-most point in Nevada.

You'd be even more surprised to learn that 50% of Canadians live further south than much of the US ;)

http://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ca...

Totally :) But I decided against living in Seattle after noticing how far north Boulder was compared to Arizona bothered me. Though otherwise I was all set to move to Seattle. I still haven't been there yet. But then later I moved to the northeast for a while so I suppose Toronto would be something I'd try. So yeah, joking :)

Eh, if there’s any kernel of truth to these jokes, that seems fine; nothing wrong with having climate and/or culture preferences.

Only a small portion of Canada is livable (basically along the US border) - so it is quite small in that regard. Also, 50% of them live further south than the US border: http://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ca...

Livable to what standard? I think you mean “developed” and the country could easily be developed to the latitude of Edmonton or Prince George, it just isn’t because the population hasn’t reached a density that has demanded northern expansion. There’s nothing that makes it inherently un-livable.

The parts of Canada that aren't settled (and aren't actually in or near the Arctic Circle) are that way not because of temperature, but because the soil is almost entirely unarable: Either rocky Canadian Shield, or "swallows locomotives overnight" muskeg (plus infinite numbers of mosquitos).

The livable part of the US is pretty much neighbors with the livable part of Canada, in my yankee opinion.

Agreed. An Australia same. In NZ most people live on the Northern Island. Because better soils, less rugged terrain and milder climate.

THIS!!!*!

More Americans than Canadians live north of the southernmost point of Canada. 15% of Americans live north of Windsor, Ontario. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6pgby8/til_th...>

Its kind of crazy that Canada now has the same population as California, and is 25 times bigger physically. Whereas Canada's economy is 50% smaller than California's (3T to 2T).

Yet we still manage to compete on housing prices!

In Vancouver and Toronto. Even then, SF house prices are still much higher when you consider the exchange rate.

Did you know that Canada has land farther south than parts of California?

I'm guessing Windsor (42.3149° N), but CA's northern latitude is almost 42° N exactly, so it turns out to be Middle Island instead (41.40° N).

I was skeptical, but it turns out you're right! According to Wikipedia, the Northernmost point in California is 42 degrees north, and the Southernmost point in Canada is Middle Island, which is 41.7 degrees north [1], or about 0.3 degrees farther south of the Northernmost point in California.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_Cana...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_U.S....

Only a small part of Canada is livable it's quite a small ;) - and over 50% of the population live below the border: http://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ca...

Livable != developed At least 100x more of the country than has been developed is livable, just undeveloped. I’ve driven the length of the country four times in the last three years and I assure you there are vast stretches of perfectly livable land that simply hasn’t been developed because the market demand has been in major cities and expands outward slowly.

Also crazy how California has over 500% more people incarcerated than Canada with the same population and almost double the poverty rate with a larger economy.

Hard to break the law when the nearest person is over the horizon. /s

I've been living in Canada for 8 years and I generally heard people referring to "35M people", which I believe will soon change to "40M" people.

Interesting that there is apparently a population clock that model's Canada's population: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2018005...

See also the Century Initiative: https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ to reach 100M by 2100.

This seems unsustainable. I thought the consensus was that environmental footprint should be reduced [1,2], not deliberately increased?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/science-proves-kids-ar...

Edit: As expected, the Century Initiative is chaired by corporate lobbyists, and closely tied to Blackrock, that has massive investments in Canadian real-estate and would benefit from making housing more expensive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative#Controversi...

The late Hans Rosling has a good presentation on this, "Don't Panic":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

* http://vimeo.com/79878808

This is not Canadians making babies, which they do below the replacement limit as in other developed countries. This is massive levels of immigration. Canadians do have a bigger per capita environment footprint, but still it’s really just moving people around.

Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.

Not just below replacement -- far below.

Canada's TFR in 2020 was 1.4. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/960-fewer-babies-born-c...

And the last time TFR was above replacement was in 1970. Meaning Canada has been at below-replacement fertility for more than 50 years.

Canada's population, however, has doubled since 1970. That represents an extreme amount of immigration.

> Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.

Canadian immigration quotas are simply out of control, about 10x per capita what the US allows.

And it's just the beginning, apparently the current ruling party is planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0]

It creates an interesting dynamic in tech.

Anecdotally, it seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).

Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. Yet it seems the opposite happened. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US. Canada maintains a net brain drain to the US [1]

Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary. The city of Vancouver even bragged about its devs being worth 50K less than their American counterparts! [2]

I witnessed it first hand. Back when we opened a satellite location in Toronto. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry...

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...

[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...

As an immigrant in the US, I don't understand this talk about higher bar for US immigration. The US selects immigrants by luck and persistence rather than by talent. Anyone with a professional job offer is qualified for an H-1B visa, but it usually takes luck to get one. Similarly, anyone with a professional job offer can get a green card, but the process is long, expensive, and unpredictable.

I left Vancouver. The combination of high home prices, high taxes, and low salaries chased me away. I solved the last problem by working remote, but that just really made me think hard about why I was still living in Vancouver.

I was born in Canada, and I would have preferred to stay. The country is a great opportunity for immigrants, but it’s an opportunity cost for me.

> See also the Century Initiative: https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/ to reach 100M by 2100.

Doug Sanders (International-Affairs Columnist, The Globe and Mail) has a good book on this:

* http://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/

> to ensure [..] ecological sustainability, Canada needs to triple its population.

This is beyond farcical.

40% of Federal MPs own rental property. Now you know why boosting the population is big with politicians.

Canada is going to have an absolutely blistering amount of immigration in the next few decades. Enjoy the sparseness while it lasts…

Canada is both dense and sparse. It’s paradoxical. Huge landmass. Almost everyone living in a thin slice near the U.S. border. We have massive housing issues all over the place.

Nobody’s building in the great wilderness above.

It's the second largest country in the world. It has half the population of Germany and ~28x the land mass. Their problem will be actually building houses and making them affordable, not "sparseness"

Yeah pump the brakes, there’s pllllleeeeeeeentyyyyy of physical space available in Canada for settlement still, if you don’t mind the poor weather further north.

You don’t have to go that much farther north and still have similar weather. Look at the interior of BC from Vernon to Prince George - huge amount of undeveloped land with moderate winters. Same with Calgary to Edmonton (both have crappy weather IMO but tons of space to develop and fill with people who would otherwise accept Calgary / Edmonton winters), etc etc etc.

Canada currently has about 8M people (20%) born in other countries. If you add another 2 million immigrants then you need to build 5% more houses, need 5% more cars, need 5% more electricity, need 5% more infrastructure,

Capitalistically I would be interested to backtest the returns for a global macro fund that invested in countries with high immigration.

I live in New Zealand where ~30% of our population is people that were not born here (New Zealand is quite picky about who gets to come here, so we have less structural problems than some European countries that accept large numbers of refugees with little opportunity to filter for the most suitable people). New Zealand has been building housing at a fast pace to keep up with the ~50% increase in population over the “native” population.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...

I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future. Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming.

The shield would need to turn into farmland

I think our Canadian cabal is doing everything it can to speed up global warming. We have the dirtiest oil in the world (Alberta Oil Sands) and we essentially based our economy on extraction.

It's making me wonder about those recent "accidental" forest fires up there..

I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that eco-terrorists set them, but I would 100% endorse this kind of behaviour if that’s what it takes to shake our society from complacency. It’s totally wild that we are slouching toward ecosystem collapse and it hasn’t become the key talking point in every human interaction the way COVID was.

We have the forth largest oil reserves in the world and they are coming out of the ground at some point because the need for it is unlikely to go away. We should be investing in becoming the best at oil extraction and doing it as safely and cleanly as possible. Hamstringing the industry is bad for our country.

>I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future.

Unlikely. The parts of Canada that aren't settled (and aren't actually in or near the Arctic Circle) are that way not because of temperature, but because the soil is almost entirely unsuitable for farming: Either rocky Canadian Shield, or "swallows locomotives overnight" muskeg (plus infinite numbers of mosquitos).

>Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming.

Canada will net benefit from global warming, yes, because the Northwest Passage will become navigable. But it is not true that temperature is the only thing keeping Canada from being able to support as many people as the US, which has almost identically sized geography.

Congratulations Canada!

Australia has dramatically increased its immigration intake.

750,000 this year and next, with 1.5 million in total coming in the next 5 years.

This huge number of people are being brought in during Australias worst ever housing crisis. The ALP government doesn’t care in the slightest. In fact it’s greatly to the advantage of the politicians, most of whom own 1/2/3/4/5/6 or more houses.

1.5 million over 5 years are a rookie numbers. We did 1 million just last year. And our housing minister of housing in Canada just bought his second rental property.

Australia’s “Minister for Homelessness” owns 4 houses.

Should they be homeless too?

Obviously not, but you can hardly understand the issue when you have more homes than anyone can have in a lifetime.

What’s the limit on the amount of real estate you own before you become unable to understand or empathize with the homeless?

Does this work with other vocations? Should spinsters not be allowed to teach or care for children? If you don’t own a car you can’t become a car mechanic?

Housing speculation in Canada is a national industry. The assholes in both the major parties will never lift a finger to do anything about it because either they, or their baby boomer voters, are all hyper invested in making sure Number Goes Up for housing.

Look at the way Poilievre foams all apoplectic at the mouth about the BoC raising its rate (as if it's Trudeau's choice what that # is... but whatever) while at the same time blaming Trudeau for inflation. His boomer bosses need their mortgages to stay cheap and their housing prices to stay high, no matter what.

Canada is corrupt and eats its young.

Real estate is something absurd like 20% of Canada’s GDP, isn’t it? What may have started as greed has evolved into something vital to the country’s existence. You can’t just crash Canadian real estate without having a major negative impact on the country.

When you're up to your neck in quicksand ... why struggle?

Government spending by Trudeau has packed on insane debt levels making inflation worse. It took Canada 150 years to reach a level of debt that Trudeau managed to double. 1.2 Trillion and 151 billion a year debt payments. Given up plans to ever stop spending more than taking in.

Inflation make that 1.2 trillion worth less (and everyone elses money). It's a strategy. Trudeau doesn't control the rate directly but he is still sending out larger and larger cheques for votes and keeps spending on social programs and military spending like the money supply is unlimited. Having a second house means little when there are bigger paydays

> We did 1 million just last year.

I'd note that this number gets thrown around a lot, but it was <500k permanent residents, the 1 million figure includes >600k temporary work/study permits and asylum claims.

Does it really matter what status folks come over with? That's still net +1 million folks that need to be housed and fed in a calendar year.

Well it doesn't matter for this year, but it makes for a very different trajectory - there's no reasonable way that we net +600k temporary residents every year.

> Does it really matter what status folks come over with?

Yes, because it also matters if we're talking about residencies (shelter) or residents (people).

Numbers are arbitrary to keep things simple:

start, 100 population, 40 residencies.

2018: Add 10, of which 2 are temp

2019: Add 10, of which 9 are temp

Assume no population losses. What's your current (2019) population? It COULD be 120, but not necessarily. We know it's at least 109 (100+8+1 permanent) so lets look at what happened to the 11 temps specifically.

Keep in mind temporarily granted residency typically needs to be renewed yearly if not more frequently. If one is in country for Jan-Apr and a second in July-November, then you had a net population gain of 0, a gross gain of 2, and a median gain of 1, and could have required 1 or 2 residences to accommodate them. 0 - 2 technically but lets assume we're doing our best to shelter people.

Then the question is, until you know what the 2019's 9 temp residents are going to do, you can't really call them a net gain for the purposes of talking trends of population. You can however use them when talking housing supply, as regardless of how long they're staying, they will be there at SOME point, and while there, yeah, they need a place to stay.

TL;DR: For this threads context, probably better to think of temps as "pending" residents.

> And our housing minister of housing in Canada just bought his second rental property.

I'm not saying this isn't true but I'm having difficulties finding a reliable source for this.

It's like there is a global plan by government for some hidden agenda

No, it's actually not.

Multiple leaders on the left. In Australia, Canada, US large increases in immigration (undocumented in the US). All of these countries have large targets increasing population at levels never seen before. It's like they are acting from the same agenda.

They are not building housing or preparing for any increases. Are they expecting a population decline?

You don't even know what "left" means if you think that's what Trudeau is.

And to be afraid of mysterious "government agendas", when the real power is clearly corporate, even less accountable or transparent...

... judging from your comments, you've stepped over the threshold. I'm afraid reason won't reach you.

In your worldview Trudeau is on the right? This kind of reasoning won't reach anyone.

Better than giving up on reason altogether and just trumpeting Q-adjacent nonsense.

Britain is currently governed by the UK Conservatives and elsewhere this was already taking place under previous centre-right governments (enormous increasing in housing costs took place under Trump in the US and under Harper in Canada)

Canada and Australia are following the UK. Allow massive immigration, drive up housing costs, angering the citizens to the point where they’ll vote against their own interests if it means hurting the immigrants more. Watch the rise of far right politicians campaigning and winning on blatantly racist platforms about returning to a former glory.

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