Canada needs houses, not people.
Someone living alone in a cabin is (economically) poor. Someone in a small town may have customers, but not many, and it's going to be hard to expand. What you need is more people - more people buying, more people to work for you.
Nobody is willing to go “long” on housing when the government can go “short” on supply at any time.
So you have to normalize that somehow, and since the government controls immigration levels, it should subsidize housing construction to match, somehow.
In what sense is the government controlling immigration levels? If they could, it would be much different.
> Nobody is willing to go “long” on housing when the government can go “short” on supply at any time.
How does the government go short on supply?
In my experience, local policy and law changes much faster than federal, especially with GOP opposing everything on the federal level. The GOP shot down the immigration deal they negotiated last summer. Locally is where I see solutions happen (and then state GOP parties, where they have power, will sometimes undermine that).
> Know what changes quickly because it's done at the very top level? Immigration rate.
How is immigration rate "done" at the federal level? With federal inaction, it's mostly an organic outcome of economics and politics in other countries.
But also, for all practical purposes, the migration rate to all rich Western countries is limited only by their respective laws and regulations governing immigration. For all of them, there are more people who want to get in than the quota allows (whether explicit or implicit via point systems etc). Any country that would fully open its borders would see millions coming in from Asia and Africa. People generally want to move where the life is better when they can.
If those laws and regulations were that powerful, the US and Europe wouldn't have so many illegal migration problems.
> People generally want to move where the life is better when they can.
I wouldn't say 'generally'. The vast majority of people want to stay where they are.
Assuming policy and law at higher levels are more responsive, if there is a broader problem due to common and inflexible municipal policy, this can be resolved by changing the policy at the higher level to change the scope of municipal options and/or the applicable process so as to either steer it in the desired direction or make it more responsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
This is overstated. The alarm was sounded on this 2 decades ago for several east Asian countries, but they're not on fire. They're fine. Old people die.
If the fertility rate mattered that much, they'd have scrambled to make any number of policy changes including better work-life balance (see: Japan, SK, China), or plain ol' immigration, but they don't because it simply does not matter. All the efforts have been completely half-assed (like tax benefits, cash).
Japan enacted new immigration policies last year to allow more migrants as well as improved parental leave.
South Korea has been in political turmoil for last year but lots of work is being done on immigration.
A wad of cash isn't going to help you of bed. Yeah they are going to die, but if you're not careful it's going to be a lot quicker and a lot more painful than you had hoped.