Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
Unfortunately, we live in an era where all net growth goes to cities, and the bigger the city, the more it attracts people. If you turn on the taps and get 500,000 people to move to British Columbia, 400,000 of them will settle in the Lower Mainland, even if the Lower Mainland is 50% of BC by population.
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People used to say all immigrants went to Toronto and Vancouver, but then the federal government adjusted the provincial nomination system and now we see much broader growth. There's the old canard about how we cannot oppress immigrants by telling them how to live but closed work and study permits have existed for a long time. They could be issued for Red Deer and not Calgary or whatever.
You could write a novel about this stuff but I think part of what's happening is we have no economic or infrastructure strategy either, so it's hard for new areas to really develop.
In the Maritimes the rising immigration rate has been hugely positive and is creating a golden opportunity to fix public finances and infrastructure there. To put things into perspective, NS says their income tax revenues went up by about 20% YoY. Hopefully they will make good decisions about what to do with that (pay off debt, aim to lower taxes). Regardless of what they do though the immigration is causing a structural shift toward the more economically productive areas. Federal policy here used to be perverse with lots of funding aimed at keeping people in the least productive areas with generous EI benefits and white elephants.
In the Maritimes there's also a lot of basic stuff the population isn't big enough to support, so adding a bit more population does concretely tend to help make things viable that positively impact people in their day to day. I don't think this is as true in the GTA or GVRD. The GVRD is also a (difficult to develop) border region and integration would probably add more meaningfully to what's available here than growing the population.